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Aleppo air strike kills 14 members of one family: rescue team
People inspect a site damaged after an airstrike in the rebel held besieged al-Qaterji neighbourhood of Aleppo, Syria, October 16, 2016. PHOTO BY REUTERS/Abdalrhman Ismail
17/10/2016
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Fourteen members of the same family were killed in an air strike in rebel-held eastern Aleppo on Monday, emergency service workers said, as the Syrian government pursued its Russian-backed campaign to capture opposition-held areas of the city.
A list of the dead published by the Civil Defence included several infants, among them two six-week old babies and six other children aged eight or below. The Civil Defence identified the jets as Russian. The attack hit the city's al-Marjeh area.
The Civil Defence is a rescue service operating in rebel-held areas of Syria. Its workers are known as "White Helmets".
The campaign has killed several hundred people since it started last month after the collapse of a truce brokered by Russia and the United States. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it had documented the deaths of 448 people in air strikes in eastern Aleppo since then, including 82 children.
Syrian and Russian militaries say they only target militants.
Since the campaign was announced on Sept. 22, the government has captured territory from rebels to the north of the city, and also reported advances in the city itself which rebels have in turn said they have mostly repelled.
A Syrian military source said the army had targeted terrorists in three areas of Aleppo on Monday, killing seven of them. The government refers to all rebel fighters as terrorists.
The Observatory said 17 more people were killed in attacks by Russian jets on Sunday night in the al-Qarterji district of rebel-held Aleppo. That included five children, it said.
The monitoring group also said it had recorded the deaths of 82 people including 17 children in government-held areas of western Aleppo as a result of rebel shelling.
(Reporting by Tom Perry and Ellen Francis; Editing by Louise Ireland)
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