The monitoring group also said that said at least 40 civilians were killed in Turkish shelling and air strikes on pro-Kurdish positions in northern Syria.
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The Observatory said the 17 people had been killed in air strikes targeting a road between the town of al-Latamenah and Idlib province, an area of northwestern Syria that is mostly under insurgent control.
A military source told SANA that scores of vehicles, some equipped with machine guns, were destroyed in the air strikes, which hit the gathering of militants in the cities of Mourek and Tibet al-Imam and in the surroundings of al-Buwaida village and Souran town.
“They are about 10 kilometres from the airport” in Hama, Syria’s fourth-largest city, said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman, whose group relies on a broad network of sources inside Syria.
The town that links the coastal areas with the Aleppo-Damascus highway is only a few kilometers from the historic Christian town of Mahrada to the west.
The rebel offensive comes after weeks of heavy Russian and Syrian army bombing of rebel controlled Hama and southern Idlib countryside that rebels say has claimed dozens of civilian lives. If the rebels gained control over Hama province, or the north-south motorway it is situated on, they will most likely cut-off a major government supply line, the BBC reported.
According to preliminary reports from the northern Hama countryside, the jihadist rebels seized half of Helfaya after a violent battle with the government-backed “National Defense Forces” (NDF) and Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP).
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Hama city has a long history of suppressed uprisings, with major demonstrations in 2011 put down by the government and a brutal purge of Muslim Brotherhood supporters there in 1982 that killed thousands.
