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The death toll from Syrian government air raids on rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo and its suburbs has risen to 130 — a figure that includes 28 children — with scores of others injured. Residents were still trying to recover bodies from the rubble Monday, a day after helicopters dropped barrels filled with explosives in Syria's second largest city.
The government frequently uses barrel bombs, which contain hundreds of pounds of explosives and shrapnel that cause massive damage on impact.
Footage of the attack's aftermath uploaded by local activists on social media showed a fire in a narrow street covered in debris and dust after one air raid in the Karam el-Beik district. Other videos showed people carrying the injured in blankets and bulldozers removing debris in a destroyed neighborhood.
An opposition activist in the Aleppo suburb of Al-Bab, who asked that his name not be used, told Al Jazeera the bombing was unrelenting and the damage seemingly indiscriminate.
"We can't find any military strategy to it," he said
The Aleppo Media Center, a network of activists on the ground, called the raids on the northern city "unprecedented."
President Bashar al-Assad's air force is his greatest advantage in the country's nearly three-year civil war, and he has successfully exploited it to push back against rebel advances across the country and to target civilian areas sympathetic to the opposition. Human rights groups said Syrian military aircraft have carried out indiscriminate air raids that frequently hit civilian targets, such as hospitals, bakeries and residential areas.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Andrew Tabler, a Syria analyst at the Washington Insititute for Near East Policy, said the latest attack shows the determination of the Assad regime to retake Aleppo.
"The Assad regime has the troops to retake the area," Tabler said. "The question is if they have enough troops to hold it."
The main Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, condemned the air raids, and accused the government of "waging a barbaric campaign on the city of Aleppo through which it seeks revenge and the spread of chaos."
In a statement, the coalition also said it has documented the names of 103 people who were killed and more than 350 who were wounded in Aleppo, in addition to 21 who died in air raids in the Damascus suburb town of Dumeir.
"The Assad regime continues to kill civilians across Syria, blocking aid convoys from reaching stricken areas, and refuses to release prisoners — practically consecrating through all of that, its rejection of a political solution," it said.
Meanwhile, Syrian government warplanes on Monday bombed the southern province of Daraa, hitting the villages of Inkhil and Jassem, acording to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights. There was no immediate information on casualties.
The Observatory, which monitors the conflict through a network of activists inside Syria, also reported additional air raids raids on Aleppo Monday.
In a separate development, the Observatory said that the death toll has risen to 28 people in the town of Adra, northeast of Damascus, after a rebel faction launched an assault there on Wednesday. Observatory director Rami Abdurrahman said the dead were primarily members of Assad's minority Alawite sect, as well as a few Druze and Shia Muslims. All three sects largely support Assad in the fight against the mainly Sunni rebels.
The Syrian government and its opponents are scheduled to meet in Switzerland on Jan. 22 to hold their first face-to-face peace negotiations. The U.N.-brokered talks aim to find a political resolution to the Syrian civil war, a conflict that has killed more than 120,000 people since it began in March 2011.
The United Nations also launched a fresh aid appeal Monday — asking for $6.5 billion in assistance for Syria and neighboring countries affected by the war, the largest request for a single crisis ever.
The U.N. Security Council remains deadlocked over what to do about Syria, with permanent member Russia allied with the Assad regime. Both Russia and China have vetoed three resolutions threatening sanctions on the regime since the contact began.
An Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack raised the stakes for world powers to pressure the regime to alleviate the Syrian peoples' suffering. As Obama pressed for U.S. air strikes on Syria, the Assad government struck a deal with the U.S. and Russia to dispose of its chemical weapons arsenal. U.N. weapons experts did not identify who carried out the chemical weapons attack. But as the chemical weapons deal has progressed, the brutal violence in Syria has continued, and Assad's forces have made gains.
Al Jazeera and wire services
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