Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said at least 45 people died. They maintain that Russia’s airstrikes mostly target rebel forces fighting the Syrian government rather than bombing Islamic State fighters.
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Russian air strikes have killed dozens of people in a Syrian coastal province, including a rebel commander who formerly served in President Bashar Assad’s army, activists said Tuesday.
CNN, which first reported the incident Tuesday, also said a Russian plane had flown within 500 feet (150 meters) of a United States jet in another encounter.
The Syrian American Medical Society, which has volunteer medical personnel treating victims and reporting on attacks in Syria, said Russian airstrikes in the area over the weekend targeted the only two hospitals in southern Aleppo, forcing both facilities to shut down and evacuate patients.
Russian Federation insists its air campaign is meant to target the Daesh group and others it describes as “terrorists”.
As per the another monitoring group fueled by local activists, the Local Coordination Committees had put the Monday’s death toll at 57 in Latakia province majority rebels.
A senior Iranian official in London said that “Tehran and Moscow have specific unified policy” in the Syrian civil war.
Turkey wants a transitional government in Syria without Bashar al-Assad, Turkey’s Justice and Development (AK) Party Deputy Chairman Omer Celik told reporters in Ankara on Thursday.
Aleppo, once Syria’s economic hub, has been a key focus of the fighting. The city has been ravaged by war and divided between government forces in the west and rebels in the east since shortly after fighting there began in mid-2012.
The Observatory said regime forces had seized five villages in the area since the offensive began.
Aleppo is about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the border with Turkey.
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Joined by fighters from Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah movement and Iran’s elite Quds force, Syria’s army has in the last two weeks launched ground assaults in Aleppo in the north, Hama and Homs in the center, Latakia along the coast and outside Damascus. At a Pentagon news conference, Cook gave a broad description of the document but said the US had accepted a Russian request that the text be kept secret. Seventy Canadian special forces troops will remain in northern Iraq to train Kurds.
