Opposition activists said intense fighting was still ongoing in Aleppo on Monday.
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The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said the helicopter had come down along the administrative border between Idlib province in the northwest and neighboring Aleppo.
In a bid to quell the prolonged crisis, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad issued a decree on Thursday, offering amnesty to rebels who lay down their arms and surrender to authorities within a three-month deadline starting July 28.
Beirut/Moscow: A Russian military helicopter was shot down in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province on Monday killing all five people on board, in the biggest officially acknowledged loss of life for Russian forces since they started operations in Syria.
This is now Russia’s third helicopter lost in the Syrian operation.
“A Russian Mi-8 military transport helicopter was shot down from the ground after delivering humanitarian aid to Aleppo”, the defence ministry said in a statement quoted by Russian news agencies.
Rebel sources provided video of people receiving treatment who they say were among the victims of a gas attack, but the images were not conclusive and neither of the gas attack claims by the rebels or the government could be independently verified.
Rebels mainly from Jaish al Fatah alliance of Islamist groups pushed from the south of the city while fighters from Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades pounded government-held areas of Syria’s most populous city and commercial hub before the war broke out in 2011. The group, previously called Al Nusra Front, lately severed all ties to al Qaeda.
Rebel groups, meanwhile, have killed at least 30 civilians since Monday in shell attacks on Aleppo’s government-held areas.
Moscow and Damascus should stop their military offensives in Syria, the US Secretary of State has said, only hours after a Russian helicopter was shot down in Aleppo.
The Russian helicopter downed Monday crashed about 15 kilometers from the site of the chemical attacks. In another video, its tail can be seen lying separately from the aircraft’s body in flames.
Jihadists and rebel groups launched a major assault Sunday on the southern edges of the divided city in a bid to break a government siege of eastern opposition-held neighbourhoods.
The rebel fighters had focused their assault on the Ramussa sector of the city, looking to simultaneously cut off government forces and give rebels a new access route to their besieged neighborhoods in east Aleppo. The United Nations said the encirclement of rebel-held areas of deeply divided Aleppo traps almost 300,000 residents, making it the largest besieged area in war-torn Syria.
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But the U.N. envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura said that Moscow should leave it up to the United Nations and its partners to handle humanitarian issues.
