A government air strike killed 10 people in a rebel-held
neighborhood of Syria’s main northern city Aleppo on Tuesday, a monitoring
group said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights also reported that some fighters of the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq
and The Levant (ISIL) had refused orders to withdraw from a battle with government
troops to fight against rival rebels.
“An air strike hit the area of a bus
station... in Jisr al-Hajj,” in Aleppo, the Observatory said, with its director
Rami Abdel Rahman telling AFP: “We have documented 10 deaths.”
The Observatory distributed amateur
video footage showing a huge fire in the area, located in the westernmost part
of Aleppo city.
Warplanes also targeted the Ansari
neighborhood farther east, the Observatory said.
Once Syria’s commercial capital,
Aleppo has been wracked by violence since a massive rebel assault in July 2012.
Then on December 15 last year, the
air force unleashed a brutal air offensive that has killed hundreds of people,
mostly civilians, according to the Observatory.
Aleppo-based citizen journalist
Mohammed al-Khatieb told AFP via Skype: “Today’s attack is part of that
assault.
“There has been aerial bombing every
day since December 15, except for the days when visibility was poor because of
the weather.”
Another video distributed by the
Observatory showed a man, reportedly in Ansari district, running with a wounded
child in his arms from a damaged building to a pick-up truck.
The child has a visible head wound,
with blood on his face that is also covered in dust from the rubble.
Elsewhere in Aleppo province, the
Observatory said a group of jihadist fighters had refused to leave a battle
front with the regime after being ordered to fight rival rebels.
ISIS has been locked in fierce
clashes with Islamist and rebel fighters in much of northern Syria for weeks.
The Observatory said a group of ISIL fighters battling the army and allied militia in the village of Blaat refused
to redeploy to Manbij, where rebel-jihadist clashes are underway.
There were no immediate details of
the number of ISIS fighters who refused the orders.
More than 130,000 people have been
killed in Syria’s nearly three-year war, the Observatory estimates. Millions
more have fled their homes. With AFP
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