BEIRUT: Air strikes by the regime and its Russian ally on Sunday killed nine civilians in the last major opposition bastion of Idlib in northwestern Syria, a Britain-based war monitor said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said seven of those killed were all members of one family in the town of Sarmeen, where a correspondent saw a man weeping as rescue workers pulled bodies from a crumpled two-storey building.
Meanwhile, Syrian insurgents carried out two suicide car bomb attacks in an assault on pro-government forces in Aleppo on Saturday and opened a new front northeast of the city, an attempted fightback after territorial gains for President Bashar al Assad.
Backed by Russian air power, Syrian government forces had made a significant advance into the rebel-held northwest this week, seizing the town of Maarat al Numan, part of an offensive to secure the main highway between Damascus and Aleppo.
The attacks were carried out by Hayat Tahrir al Sham and targeted the Jamiyat al Zahraa area on the western edge of Aleppo. A third car bomb was set off by remote control, a source with the group said.
A news outlet linked to the group, Ebaa, published a video which it said showed elite Tahrir al Sham fighters pledging “allegiance to death” before the attack on Jamiyat al Zahraa, watched by the group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al Jolani.
The northwestern corner of Syria including Idlib province and adjoining areas of Aleppo is the last major rebel foothold in Syria, where Assad has taken back most of the ground once held by his enemies with Russian and Iranian support.
Syrian state news agency SANA said army troops had destroyed four car bombs before they reached their targets. Syrian army forces were firing rockets and artillery at militant groups on the Jamiyat al Zahraa front, it said. Fighters had also fired rockets at residential districts of Aleppo. The two sides gave conflicting accounts of the outcome of the attack.
A news outlet run by Lebanon’s Hizbullah said the Syrian army had thwarted a “fierce attack” by the Nusra Front, as Jolani’s group was known until it broke ties with al Qaeda in 2016.
But the Ebaa news outlet said the attacking forces had captured a group of houses on a hill overlooking Aleppo.
— AFP/Reuters
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