8 children among 9 dead in Syria strikes, says monitor

Artillery fire on the village of Kansafra in the northwestern stronghold kills four children from the same family while another fire claims lives of four kids and the mother of three of them in Balshun

Syria regime shelling has killed eight children and a woman in the country’s last major rebel bastion of Idlib in just two days, a war monitor said on Friday.

Artillery fire early on Friday morning on the village of Kansafra in the northwestern stronghold killed four children from the same family, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

A correspondent saw the father cry over the bodies of three of the children at a cemetery.

The remains of a fourth were then brought along and buried in haste as shelling started up again in a neighbouring area.

A day earlier, in the nearby village of Balshun, artillery fire by pro-Damascus forces killed four children and the mother of three of them, the Observatory reported.

The Idlib region is home to nearly three million people, two-thirds of them displaced from other parts of the country during the decade-long civil war.

It is dominated by Syria’s former Al Qaeda affiliate, but rebels and other militants are also present.