Child among eight killed in Syria clashes

BEIRUT: Eight civilians, including a child, were killed on Monday during exchanges of fire between the army and rebels in northwestern Syria, with 19 others wounded, a war monitor said.

The fighting pitted the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist group led by al-Qaeda´s former Syria branch.

“An elderly man, a woman and her young daughter were killed and 10 other civilians were wounded in a bombardment by the HTS on the villages of Nubul and Zahraa, in a part of Aleppo province controlled by the Syrian regime,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

HTS and other groups control swathes of Idlib province and parts of neighbouring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.

The Syrian army retaliated by bombing residential areas of Darat Izza town in Aleppo, killing three civilians and wounding nine others, the Observatory said.

The Britain-based war monitor, which has a network of sources inside Syria, said the bombardments struck a bakery, a mosque, a power plant and a popular market.

Army artillery fire killed two other civilians in the Aleppo village of Burj Haidar, the Observatory said.

A brutal Syrian government crackdown on Arab Spring-inspired protests that erupted in 2011 spiralled into a devastating war involving foreign armies, militias and jihadists.