International
Msallam Abd Albaset / Reuters
A Syrian military airstrike killed more than 40 people in a rebel-held area near Damascus on Friday, a monitoring group and opposition activists said.
The Local Coordination Committees, a grassroots opposition group, reported on its Facebook page that the strike hit a public square in Hamoria where people were leaving a mosque after Friday prayers.
The Shaam News Network, a government opposition group, published a video on its Facebook page that appeared to corroborate the claim. The footage showed what the group said was the aftermath of a blast in an open square. Bodies lay on the road and buildings were damaged.
A similar video uploaded to YouTube by the Syrian Media Organization, another opposition group, showed several bodies lying on a bloodstained floor, some of them children, with blast wounds.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitoring group that works with a network of sources across Syria, said 42 people had been killed, including six children, in the attack.
Syrian government officials were not immediately available to comment on the reported attack. Al Jazeera could not independently verify the authenticity of the reports or videos.
Syria's air force has launched daily airstrikes against rebel-held civilian areas throughout the country’s devastating civil war, which started after security forces cracked down on peaceful pro-democracy protests in 2011.
Russia, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has offered to host peace talks later this month, but most key opposition groups have said they do not trust Russia's intentions and will likely not attend.
On Tuesday, a Syrian military airstrike on a cattle market in territory controlled by the hardline Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group killed 43 people, according to the observatory. Nasir Haj Mansour, an official in the Kurdish administration that controls nearby areas, said the death toll was much higher, around 70.
"The strike, according to our information, was painful for Daesh, in addition to civilians," he told Reuters by Skype, using an Arabic acronym for ISIL, which is fighting the governments of Syria and neighboring Iraq.
An estimated 200,000 people have been killed in more than three years of fighting in Syria, according to the United Nations.
Al Jazeera and Reuters
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