An air strike Saturday by key Damascus ally Russia killed six civilians including a child in the embattled opposition bastion of Idlib in northwestern Syria, a war monitor.
The strike hit the village of Jabala in the south of the Idlib region, taking the lives of all six from the same family, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Britain-based monitor, which relies on sources inside Syria, says it determines who carries out an air strike according to flight patterns, as well as aircraft and ammunition involved.
An AFP correspondent at the site of the strike saw rescue workers searching a mound of concrete rubble near a surviving olive tree.
Grasping the edges of a thick blanket, six men carried out a victim.
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said it was the bloodiest such Russian air raid in two months since Moscow announced a truce for the surrounding area on August 31.
Since then, eight other civilians have been killed in Russian air strikes on different dates in the region, he said.
The Idlib region, which is home to some three million people including many displaced by the eight-year war, is controlled by Syria's former Al-Qaeda affiliate.
Bashar al-Assad's forces launched a devastating military campaign against Idlib in April, killing around 1,000 civilians and forcing more than 400,000 people to flee their homes.
But a ceasefire announced by the regime's major backer Moscow has largely held since late August, though the Observatory says skirmishes persist.
Al-Assad, who now controls around 60 percent of the country, has vowed to reclaim the rest, including Idlib.
On Friday, 23 regime fighters, as well as 11 jihadists and allied rebels, were killed in clashes on the western edges of the Idlib region.
Assad last week said Idlib was the main front remaining to end the civil war, as he made his first trip since 2011 to visit troops in the region.
He spoke as his forces were deploying in Kurdish-majority areas to the east of Idlib to help stave off a deadly Turkish offensive.
The de-escalation zone is currently home to some four million civilians, including hundreds of thousands displaced in recent years by regime forces from throughout the war-weary country.
Most of Idlib province and parts of neighbouring Aleppo and Latakia provinces are controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist group led by Syria's former Al-Qaeda affiliate.
Eight years of war in Syria have killed 560,000 people and driven half the pre-war population of 22 million from their homes, including more than 6 million as refugees to neighbouring countries. Agencies
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