Syrian regime rocket strikes left dozens of people killed and wounded in a rebel-held neighborhood of Aleppo on Monday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group, which reported that at least 18 people were killed in the city’s Al-Shaar neighborhood. Citing unnamed sources, Al Jazeera reported that the attack killed as many as 32 civilians.
The Syrian government’s National Defense Forces posted a message on Facebook that said a missile strike had killed a “large number of insurgents” in the area.
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“A surface-to-surface missile hit the Al-Shaar neighborhood,” a spokesman for the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Al Jazeera. “People started gathering, and that’s when the army fired more missiles at the same area.”
Monday’s strikes came after a night of clashes between between various militias and regime forces, said the Observatory. Video taken by a local activist group shows the aftermath of the strikes in Al-Shaar.
Because many people remain missing and trapped under rubble in the aftermath of the attack, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights expects the death toll to rise. Another video shows rescue workers attempting to recover the body of a person hit in the strike.
Aleppo, once a bustling metropolis of a million people, has been ravaged by the past four years of the country’s civil war and now has an estimated population of about 40,000 people.
