DAMASCUS: Russian air strikes on Syria’s last major rebel bastion in the northwestern province of Idlib killed seven people and wounded 15 on Thursday, a war monitoring group said.
At least four of those killed in the strikes that hit a stone quarry and a nearby home west of Idlib city were civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor that relies on an extensive network of sources on the ground.
The observatory said it was seeking to identify the other three casualties.
An AFP correspondent in the area saw ambulances ferrying victims from the site of the strikes, as large plumes of smoke rose overhead.
The house near the stone quarry was left completely destroyed, the correspondent said.
The last pocket of armed opposition to the President Bashar al Assad’s regime includes large swathes of Idlib province and parts of the neighbouring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.
Hayat Tahrir al Sham, headed by ex-members of Syria’s former Al Qaeda franchise, is the dominant group in the area but other rebel groups are also active.
Syria’s war has killed nearly half a million people and forced around half of the country’s pre-war population from their homes.
BUILDING COLLAPSE: 11 DEAD
At least 11 people, among them children, were killed when a five-storey apartment building collapsed in Aleppo, Syrian media and civil defence authorities said on Thursday.
A member of the Aleppo governorate council, Kumait al Sheikh, said the dead were seven women, three children and an elderly man. Rescue operations had ended, he said.
A woman and a child were rescued and taken to hospital after the incident late on Wednesday, the Syrian news agency SANA reported.
A police officer said that the structure had completely collapsed.
“The building… was built illegally without architectural plans and contrary to public safety,” the head of the Aleppo Council, Maad al Jabali, was quoted by SANA as saying.
The collapse happened in Aleppo’s southern neighbourhood of Fardous, which was controlled by Syrian opposition rebels until December 2016 and was frequently bombed by Syrian government troops and their allies.
Aleppo is Syria’s largest city and was once its main commercial hub. — dpa/AFP
