Foreign Affairs

DetlefK

(16,423 posts) Thu Sep 22, 2016, 07:54 AM Sep 2016

Open-source evidence: Russia bombed the Red Crescent aid-convoy near Aleppo

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/21/this-is-how-russia-bombed-the-un-convoy.html

Let’s start with the witness statements.

Mahmoud Abu Zaid, a relief worker, told the BBC’s Newsnight program:

“What happened was—almost two hours before the bombing we heard and saw a drone, as soon as the regime announced the end of the ceasefire. I had concerns that it would start bombing, because it flew over us for a long time. After two hours the helicopter came and dropped the first barrel bomb. After half a minute it dropped two barrel bombs together, afterwards there were six air strikes by the military jets. Then the jets with guns launched an attack. Afterwards the helicopters came back dropping barrel bombs, and then the jet with guns came back and started firing.”

Hussein Badawi, head of the Urem al-Kubra branch of Syrian Civil Defense (known as the White Helmets), told the Associated Press that he could hear helicopters, fighter jets, and ballistic missiles overhead.

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In another video, recorded in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a White Helmet volunteer shows the cameraman parts he said came from a barrel bomb dropped by a helicopter.

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In these images we can clearly see the crushed tail fin of a Russian-made OFAB 250-270 high explosive fragmentation bomb in a crater in the SARC warehouse.

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U.S. officials have told both Reuters and the BBC that two Russian Sukhoi Su-24 bomber jets were tracked over the area at the exact time of the attacks.

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“These interagency humanitarian convoys, they’re not just something that just go out on an ad-hoc basis, they’re extremely well planned. Now each one of these particular convoys, OK, is duly applied for with the Syrian government. All parties to the conflict are informed of that and the convoys are duly marked as humanitarian. The contents of the convoy are actually approved. Everything, every effort is made that everyone is on the same page. So it’s really unbelievable that you could have an attack take place like this and people say, ‘Oh, it was an accident.’”

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While the Russian MOD acknowledged that a Russian drone had been tracking the convoy on Monday, official spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov claimed that the Russian drone had stopped monitoring the trucks at around 13:40 that day, over five hours before the attack.

This is demonstrably false.

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Using SunCalc, an open source tool that allows users to plot the location of the sun relative to a location at any given time, it can be demonstrated that the video was filmed between 18:00 and 18:30 local time. Comparison of the footage with Google Earth satellite imagery verifies that the convoy was indeed filmed nearby—less than four kilometers to the east in Khan al-Asal.

The video was clearly filmed by a second drone, given that the footage does not appear at the corresponding time in the RT live stream. Therefore the convoy was being tracked after 13:40 by at least two Russian aircraft.

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