Monitoring Desk
At least 46 people have been killed in suspected Russian air strikes on several areas of Idlib province in northwest Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Britain-based monitor said on Sunday at least three locations were bombed in the northwestern province and most of the casualties were civilians.
At least 26 civilians, including three children, were killed in the town of Kafr Nabal, and another 18 people were killed in the town of Maaret al-Numan.
A witness told AFP news agency “six strikes hit houses and a crowded local market” in the village of Kafr Nabal.
In Maaret al-Numan, an AFP photographer saw local residents and White Helmets rescue workers trying to reach survivors in the rubble at a vegetable market hit in the strike.
The monitor also reported two additional deaths, one in an earlier strike on Maaret al-Numan and another in Al-Naqir, also in Idlib.
And it said six civilians, four of them children, had been killed in a government barrel bomb attack on the town of Al-Tamanah in the south of Idlib.
Russia began a military intervention in support of President Bashar al-Assad in September last year, saying it was carrying out strikes against “terrorists”.
In November, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russian forces had begun a “major operation” targeting Idlib and Homs provinces.
The northern Idlib province is mostly controlled by a powerful rebel alliance known as the Army of Conquest.
Most of Homs province is controlled by the Syrian government, but small parts of the countryside are controlled by a range of rebel groups.
More than 300,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests before spiralling into a bloody civil war.
Meanwhile, government forces continued to advance in the besieged city of Aleppo, pushing opposition forces out of several areas in the latest twist in the six-year-old conflict.
Syrian warplanes, artillery, and mortar rounds pounded opposition-held areas in eastern Aleppo on Saturday, killing at least three people, according to opposition activists.
Syrian state media reported government and allied troops were moving in on new neighbourhoods, pushing a kilometre deeper into the rebel-held enclave.
Syrian army spokesman Brigadier General Samir Suleiman said the military had regained control of 45 to 50 percent of east Aleppo, and he accused rebels of hiding among civilians.
The advances have caused massive displacement. The UN estimated more than 31,000 have already fled their homes, either to government or Kurdish areas, or deeper into the besieged enclave.
“We are told that around 50 percent of the rebel-held eastern Aleppo is now held by the government forces and its allies,” Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Gaziantep on the Turkey-Syria border, said.
“This is the first time that we see this happening in four years. Aleppo has been in a stalemate between the government forces and rebels. Activists say that Aleppo is the heartland of this revolution and if they lose this city, they would lose their civilisation, they would lose everything.”
