The Guardian
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Airstrikes on a refugee camp housing Syrians uprooted by war killed 28 people near the Turkish border on Thursday, a UK-based monitoring group said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the dead included women and children, and that the toll from the strikes, which hit a camp for internally displaced people near the town of Sarmada, was likely to rise.
Sarmada lies about 20 miles (30km) west of of Aleppo, where a cessation of hostilities brokered by Russia and the US brought a measure of relief on Thursday. But fighting continued nearby and President Bashar al-Assad said he still sought total victory over rebels in Syria.
Syrian state media said the army would abide by a “regime of calm” in the city that came into effect at 1am (2200 GMT on Wednesday) for 48 hours, after two weeks of death and destruction.
The army blamed Islamist insurgents for violating the agreement overnight by what it called indiscriminate shelling of some government-held residential areas of divided Aleppo. Residents said the violence had eased by morning and more shops had opened up.
Heavy fighting was reported in the southern Aleppo countryside near the town of Khan Touman, where al-Qaida’s Syrian branch, Nusra Front, is dug in close to a stronghold of Iranian-backed militias, a rebel source said.
Government forces carried out air attacks on the area and rebels were attacking government positions around the town, pro-Syrian government television channel al-Mayadeen and the Observatory said.
Pro-opposition media said an Islamist insurgent carried out a suicide bomb attack against government positions in Khan Touman.
A TV station controlled by the Lebanese group Hezbollah, which is fighting alongside the Syrian army, said the army used a guided missile to destroy a suicide car bomb before it reached its target in that area.
Elsewhere in Syria, fighting persisted. Isis militants captured the Shaer gas field in the east of the country, the first gain for the jihadists in the Palmyra desert area since they lost the ancient city in March, according to rebel sources and a monitor.
Amaq, an Isis-affiliated news agency, said militants killed at least 30 Syrian troops stationed at Shaer and seized heavy weapons, tanks and missiles.
Russian war jets were also reported to have struck militant hideouts in the town of Sukhna in the same Palmyra desert area.
Russian war jets were also reported to have struck militant hideouts in the town of Sukhna in the same Palmyra desert area.
Assad said he would accept nothing less than an outright victory in the five-year-old conflict against rebels across Syria, state media reported. In a telegram to Vladimir Putin thanking Moscow for its military support, Assad said the army was set on “attaining final victory” and “crushing the aggression”.
The Observatory said at least one person was killed overnight in rebel shelling of the Midan neighbourhood on the government-held side of Aleppo, which was Syria’s commercial hub and largest city before the war. Twenty rockets fell on government-held parts of Aleppo on Thursday, state media said.
But a resident of the rebel-held eastern part of the city said that although warplanes flew overnight, there was no sign of the intense raids seen during the past 10 days of airstrikes.
People in several districts ventured on to the streets where more shops than normal had opened, the resident of al-Shaar neighbourhood said.
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