On 19 August 2022, at around 10:45 a.m., indiscriminate rocket strikes rocked the al-Bab city in Aleppo province. The city is under the control of the Turkish military and the opposition’s Syrian National Army (SNA).
The perpetrators launched six rockets at the city’s eastern parts, which landed in vital spots and relatively close to each other. The attack killed 15 people, among them women and children, and wounded nearly 30 others.
In this brief report, Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) investigates the attack, identifies the type of used rockets, and marks out the targeted locations.
To this end, over the past months, STJ collected open-source visuals about the attack and obtained exclusive footage of the remnants of the fired ammunition. Additionally, STJ interviewed civilian eyewitnesses who happened to be present at the hit sites.
While the visual analyses corroborated that the perpetrators used Russian Grad rockets in at least two strikes, field researchers with STJ identified three of the bombarded sites. The sites are all located in the eastern part of the city, which the locals call the Old Thursday Marketplace. Three rockets dropped in this area, landing on the marketplace, Erzurum school, and a third nearby location.
The digital forensic expert with STJ identified the remaining targeted spots, following leads on the locations appearing in open-source footage of the attack.
The attack killed at least 15 civilians, including eight children, one woman, and seven men, and injured nearly 30 others, among them nine children, two women, and 12 men.
Notably, this is not the first time al-Bab has suffered hostilities of this scale. In a 2022 April report, STJ documented similar Grad rocket attacks on the city that also took a toll on civilians.