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Updated: Dec 12, 2016 19:06 IST

At least 34 civilians, including 11 children, were killed on Monday in a series of air strikes on villages held by the Islamic State group in central Syria, a monitor said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a barrage of air raids hit Oqayrabat and other nearby villages in the central province of Hama at dawn.

“There are dozens of people wounded, and the toll may rise because some of them are in critical condition and because of the lack of medical capacities,” the Britain-based Observatory said.

Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said he could not confirm if the strikes on the east of Hama province were carried out by Syrian or Russian warplanes.

Read | ‘Where am I? What happened?’ Syrians return to see ravaged homes in Aleppo

He noted cases of suffocation but could not confirm accusations of a chemical attack.

A panel set up by the UN, known as the Joint Investigative Mechanism, has determined during a year-long probe that Syrian government forces carried out three chlorine gas attacks on villages in 2014 and 2015.

The panel consisting of UN and experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) also found that the IS group -- which captured a large swathe of Iraq and Syria in 2014 -- was behind a mustard gas attack in Syria in August 2015.

Oqayrabat lies northwest of Palmyra, the ancient desert city that was recaptured by IS at the weekend.

Syrian government forces, backed by their Russian ally, had driven IS from Palmyra in May.

Read | Another 4,000 Syrians flee fighting against Islamic State in Aleppo

First Published: Dec 12, 2016 19:06 IST </s> Air strikes killed 14 civilians, including six children, on Thursday near Islamic State-held Raqqa city in northern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. 

 

 The Britain-based war monitor said the warplanes were believed to belong to the U.S.-led coalition, which is supporting an alliance of Syrian militias in its campaign against Islamic State's base of operations in Syria. </s> BEIRUT (Reuters) - Air strikes by Syrian or Russian warplanes on Wednesday killed at least 26 people, most of them schoolchildren, in a village in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province, rescue workers and a monitoring group said.

The raids hit a residential area and a school in Haas village, the Syrian Civil Defence rescue workers’ network said on its Facebook account.

Syria’s civil war pits President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, Iran and Shi’ite Muslim militias from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan against an array of mostly Sunni Muslim rebel groups, including some backed by Turkey, Gulf monarchies and the United States.

A report on Syrian state TV quoted a military source as saying a number of militants had been killed when their positions were targeted in Haas, but made no mention of a school.

Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin said: “It’s horrible, I hope we were not involved. It’s the easiest thing for me to say no, but I’m a responsible person, so I need to see what my Ministry of Defence is going to say.”

Anthony Lake, the head of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, said of the attack: “If deliberate, it is a war crime.”

“This latest atrocity may be the deadliest attack on a school since the war began more than five years ago,” Lake said in a statement.

Idlib, which is in northwest Syria near Aleppo, contains the largest populated area controlled by rebels - both nationalist groups under the banner of the Free Syrian Army and Islamist fighters including the former al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Fateh al-Sham.

The Civil Defence network, which operates in rebel-held areas in the country, said 20 of the dead in Wednesday’s attacks were children.

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Photos taken at the scene showed buildings with walls reduced to rubble, including what appeared to be the school with upturned desks and chairs covered in dust.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said the warplanes had struck several locations in Haas including an elementary and middle school, killing at least one teacher as well as children, though it gave a lower toll of 15 children killed.

Western countries and international human rights groups have regularly highlighted the high number of civilian deaths reported after Syrian and Russian air strikes. </s> BEIRUT - Air strikes and government artillery killed at least 20 people, including 10 children, in the largely rebel-held Syrian province of Idlib on Tuesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Observatory, a Britain-based war monitor, said Russian or Syrian government warplanes pounded the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun, killing seven children and two pregnant women.

Warplanes and government artillery also killed 11 people in the village of Baarbo in the southwest of the province, the monitor reported.

"The Russian Defence Ministry has denied information reported in multiple foreign media outlets about alleged strikes by the Russian Air Force in the region of Khan Sheikhoun near the city of Idlib," Russia's TASS news agency quoted a ministry spokesman as saying on Tuesday.

"Russian jets did not fly in the area on Nov. 8 and no missile strikes were carried out."

Syria's war pits President Bashar al-Assad, supported by Russian air power and Iranian-backed militias, against an array of mostly Sunni rebel groups, including some backed by Turkey, Gulf monarchies and the United States.

Idlib contains the largest populated area of Syria controlled by rebels - including nationalist groups under the banner of the Free Syrian Army and Islamist fighters including the former al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. (Reporting by Ellen Francis in Beirut and Jack Stubbs in Moscow; editing by Andrew Roche) </s> Idlib (Syria News) Civilians were either killed or wounded, on Thursday, in air strikes carried out by Russian warplanes on Khan Sheikhon City, in southern Idlib.

Qasioun News reported that Russian warplanes conducted air strikes on the city of Khan Sheikhon, in southern Idlib, killing three civilians and wounding others.

Furthermore, Syrian regime warplanes carried out air strikes and dropped explosive barrels on the villages of Tariya and Tahtaya, in southern Idlib, causing material damage but no casualties were reported.

Syrian and Russian warplanes are intensifying their air strikes for the third day, where more than 140 air strike were conducted on the towns of Idlib and Hama.

Meanwhile, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and other opposition militias are carrying out military operations on the Syrian army locations, in northern Hama, and managed to capture several headquarters near the city of Maan. </s> Beirut: Syrian regime and Russian bombardment have killed 20 civilians including seven children in northwestern Syria, a war monitor said Saturday, in the latest deadly raids on the embattled opposition bastion.

Regime warplanes and helicopters late Friday carried out air strikes on Mahambel village in Idlib province, killing 13 civilians including the seven children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Another seven civilians were killed Saturday, including a woman hit by regime rocket fire on the outskirts of the town of Khan Sheikhun in the south of the province, the Britain-based war

Three members of a family were killed by a Russian air strike on the town of Morek, in neighbouring Hama province, the Observatory reported.

Idlib, a region of some three million people, many of whom fled former rebel-held areas retaken by the government, is the last major bastion of opposition to the Russia-backed Damascus government after eight years of civil war.

The region on Turkey's doorstep is administered by Syria's former Al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, but other jihadist and rebel groups are also present.

Idlib is supposed to be protected from a major regime assault by a September deal between Moscow and Ankara, but Damascus and its Russian ally have ramped up their deadly bombardment of the region since late April.

More than 530 civilians have been killed since then, according to the Observatory.

The United Nations says 25 health facilities in the region have been hit, the latest including the second attack in two months on an underground hospital in the town of Kafranbel on Thursday.

"The attacks happened despite the fact that the coordinates of this hospital had previously been shared with the parties to the conflict in a deliberate, carefully planned effort to prevent

any attacks on it," an UN official said on Friday.

"I am horrified by the ongoing attacks on civilian areas and civilian infrastructure as the conflict in northwest Syria continues," said Mark Cutts, UN deputy regional humanitarian coordinator

Syria's war has killed more than 370,000 people and displaced millions since it started in 2011 with a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests. </s> BEIRUT (AP) — The Latest on developments related to Syria (all times local):

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is condemning the bombing of rebel-held eastern Ghouta and also calling the situation in the northern Syrian district of Afrin unacceptable.

Merkel said in a speech to the German parliament Wednesday that it's important to address the reasons why people flee their countries and pointed to the situation in Syria.

She said that "for all of Turkey's justified security interests, what is going on in Afrin is unacceptable, with thousands of civilians being persecuted, dying or having to flee."

The U.N. children's agency said Tuesday some 100,000 people were trapped in rural areas of Afrin and in need of humanitarian aid after Turkish and allied Syrian forces drove out a Syrian Kurdish militia there

Syrian rescuers and a war monitor say an airstrike in the rebel-held province of Idlib in northwestern Syria has killed at least 13 people, most of them children.

The Syrian Civil Defense in Idlib says the airstrike hit children running from their school in Kfar Bateekh village because of the jets flying overhead, killing 11 of them. The rescuers said Russian jets were behind the attack.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrike killed at least eight children, adding that the number of those killed is likely to rise as rescuers are still looking for survivors under the rubble. The Observatory said it was not immediately clear who was behind the strikes.

Idlib is the largest area still controlled by insurgents in Syria.

Syria state media say the death toll from a rebel mortar assault on a market in Damascus has risen to 38, making it one of the deadliest attacks in the capital since the start of the seven-year civil war.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Wednesday put the death toll from the attack in Kashkol neighborhood even higher, at 43, including 11 pro-government fighters.

The government blamed the attack on rebels in the eastern suburbs, where Syrian troops backed by Russian warplanes have been waging a major offensive over the past month.

Videos of the aftermath of the attack posted online showed scenes of chaos, with people screaming and bodies and mannequins strewn across the ground.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. </s> Shelling by Syrian rebels killed several children at a school in government-held western Aleppo on Thursday, state media and a monitoring group said, just a day after air strikes on a school in a rebel-held village in Idlib, 50km (32 miles) away.

The shells hit two neighborhoods, Syrian state news agency SANA reported: the national school in the Shahaba area, killing three children and wounding more than a dozen others, and the other attack killed three people in Hamdaniya.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the five-year-old war, said six children under the age of 16 had been killed in the two attacks, including a baby.

Syria's largest city before the war, Aleppo has been divided between government and opposition sectors for years.

Wednesday's air strikes hit a school in the Haas village in rebel-held Idlib, killing at least 15 school children, an attack that Western countries have blamed on the Syrian military and Russian air force. Moscow has denied involvement. </s> An air raid on the village of Kafr Batikh in Syria's northwestern opposition-held Idlib province killed 20 people on Wednesday including 16 children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday.

Some 15 of those killed in the strike, in the eastern part of Idlib province, were from one family said the Britain-based war monitor.

The head of the Idlib branch of the rescue team White Helmets, Mustapha al-Haj-Youssef, told dpa that "children were at the school when the first strike took place, they got scared and ran to hide in a nearby cave.

"The second strike hit the cave directly, killing all the children inside, as well as a man and a woman," he added.

Al-Haj-Youssef said the second strike was "probably by a Russian plane."

The Observatory could not identify the identity of the raiding plane.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that suspected Syrian government or Russian warplanes conduct a series of air raids on Oqayrabat and other nearby villages in the Hama Governorate at dawn, killing at least 34 civilians, including 11 children.