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Syrian government helicopters on Saturday dropped TNT-packed barrels on a vegetable market in an opposition-held neighborhood in the country’s second-largest city of Aleppo, killing at least 20 civilians including two children, the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.
The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists on the ground, said that dozens of others were wounded in the strike.
Saturday's airstrike slammed into a marketplace in the Tariq al-Bab neighborhood, Aleppo-based activist Hassoun Abu Faisal and SOHR told The Associated Press.
For nearly two weeks, President Bashar al-Assad's warplanes and helicopters have pounded opposition-controlled areas in the divided city. Activists said the aerial assault has killed more than 400 people since it began on Dec. 15.
Abu Faisal, who is an activist with the Aleppo Media Center, put the death toll at more than 20, but said medical officials were still tallying the exact figure. He said the air raid took place at about 10 a.m. local time, when the market was packed with shoppers.
"Cars were damaged, debris and rubble are everywhere," he told the AP. "Many of the wounded have lost limbs."
Both Abu Faisal and the Observatory reported airstrikes in other opposition-held areas of Aleppo, including Myassar, although there was no immediate word on casualties.
Meanwhile, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the removal of deadly toxins from Syria under the international effort to rid the nation of its chemical arsenal will likely miss a Dec. 31 deadline.
"A delay will probably occur," Franz Krawinkler, the OPCW's logistics head, told Austrian ORF state television on Saturday.
"Because of various external influences, including the weather ... certain logistical supplies that are needed for this transport could not be delivered in time."
Syria has agreed to abandon its chemical weapons by next June under a deal proposed by Russia and hashed out with the United States, after an Aug. 21 sarin gas attack that Western nations blamed on Assad's government.
Damascus agreed to transport the "most critical" chemicals, including around 20 tons of mustard nerve agent, out of the northern port of Latakia by Dec. 31 to be safely destroyed abroad, away from the war zone.
Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov was also quoted by Russia's RIA news agency as saying on Friday that the deadline would be missed because the toxins that can be used to make sarin, VX gas and other agents still faced a potentially hazardous trip to the port of Latakia.
"The removal has not yet begun," Ulyanov said after an international meeting on the chemical arms removal effort.
Russia, which has given Assad crucial support during the nearly three-year-old civil conflict in Syria, airlifted 75 armored vehicles and trucks to the nation last week to carry chemicals to Latakia.
Syrian government forces took control of a key highway connecting Damascus to the coast earlier this month, but Ulyanov said the trip could still be treacherous.
"They will have to be taken on dangerous roads, there are several dangerous stretches," RIA quoted Ulyanov, head of the Foreign Ministry's disarmament department, as saying.
He also said experts from several countries, the United Nations and OPCW had reached a "common understanding of the main points" of a plan to get the toxins from the port into international waters, but gave no details.
Wire services
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