70 Syrians killed in Russian strikes on Daesh-held town

By Saber Ghanem Ibrahim Eid

DEIR EZ-ZOUR, Syria

The number of civilians killed in Russian airstrikes on a Daesh-held town in eastern Syria rose to 70, local sources said late Sunday.

A written statement by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood said the victims were killed Saturday when Russian warplanes struck a mosque and its surroundings in the town of al-Quriya.

Russian fighter jets pounded the area again with cluster bombs as civilians attempted to rescue the victims, the statement said.

Al-Quriya fell to the Daesh terrorist group in 2014.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the regime of Bashar al-Assad cracked down with unexpected ferocity and disproportionate force on pro-democracy protests that erupted as part of the Arab Spring uprisings.

More than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced throughout the war-battered country, according to the UN.

The Syrian Center for Policy Research, an NGO, however, has places the death toll from the five-year conflict as high as 470,000.