Air strikes by regime and Russian aircraft on rebel positions in the northwestern province of Idlib killed at least 21 civilians, including eight children, a monitor said yesterday.

The strikes carried out on Sunday were the latest against jihadists and rebels in a week-old regime offensive on Idlib, the last province in Syria to escape government control.

The raid left "at least 21 dead, including eight children and 11 members of the same family" west of the town of Sinjar in the southeast of the province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

“Regime and Russian strikes are continuing today on several parts of Idlib province,” Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring organisation, told AFP.

Russian-backed regime forces launched an operation on the edge of Idlib province in the last days of 2017 and have retaken villages every day since.

After the collapse of the Islamic State group in both Syria and Iraq late last year, President Bashar al-Assad's regime is bent on restoring its grip over the country.

Idlib province, which borders Turkey, is almost entirely controlled by anti-government forces that are dominated by a jihadist outfit known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) consisting mostly of fighters from a former al-Qaeda affiliate.

Among the other groups present in the province are thousands of jihadists from Central Asian states and members of the Muslim Uighur ethnic minority of China's Xinjiang province.

An explosion on Sunday in the city of Idlib at a base for the group Ajnad al-Qawqaz, made up of fighters from the Caucasus that operates alongside HTS, left at least 34 dead, including 19 civilians, the Observatory said.

The initial death toll for the attack, the origins of which remain unclear, was 23 but the number went up yesterday when more bodies were found in the wreckage.

GHOUTA FIGHTING

Abdel Rahman said the casualty count could yet rise because more victims were believed to be buried under the rubble and many of the wounded were in critical condition.

"Rescue teams are still sifting through the wreckage," he said.

It was not immediately clear whether the blast was caused by air strikes or was the result of the kind of internal clashes that sometimes break out between jihadist and rebel factions.

After shrinking to barely a sixth of the country at the height of the nearly seven-year-old conflict, the areas under government control now cover more than 50 percent of Syrian territory.