Air strikes on a camp housing Syrians uprooted by war have killed 28 people near the Turkish border, a monitoring group says, and fighting has raged in parts of northern Syria despite a temporary deal to cease hostilities in the city of Aleppo.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the dead included women and children and the death toll from yesterday's air strikes, which hit a camp for internally displaced people near the town of Sarmada, was likely to rise.
Sarmada lies about 30km west of the city of Aleppo, where a cessation of hostilities brokered by Russia and the US had brought a measure of relief yesterday.
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 on Wednesday for 48 hours.
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.
Heavy fighting was reported in the southern Aleppo countryside near the town of Khan Touman, where al-Qaeda'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 Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Elsewhere in Syria, fighting persisted. Islamic State 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 IS-affiliated news agency, said Islamic State 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.
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 Russian President Vladimir Putin thanking Moscow for its military support, Assad said the army was set on "attaining final victory" and "crushing the aggression".
Twenty rockets fell on government-held parts of Aleppo yesterday, state media said.
But a resident of the rebel-held eastern part of the city said that although warplanes flew overnight, there were none of the intense raids seen during the past 10 days of air strikes.
Reuters
