Assad regime kills seven 'HTS fighters' in Aleppo de-escalation zone

Seven alleged Syrian fighters were killed Friday in bombardments by Assad regime forces in the country's north, a war monitor said, amid escalating violence in the country's last opposition stronghold.

"Seven fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) were killed in a double-bombardment by the regime" in Aleppo province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.

HTS controls parts of Idlib province as well as parts of the adjacent provinces of Aleppo, Hama and Latakia.

Assad regime forces initially "targeted a HTS military vehicle" in the west of the province, said the UK-based Observatory, which has a wide network of sources in Syria.

The area under regime bombardment is part of the de-escalation zone negotiated in an agreement between Russia and Turkey in 2020.

Since early 2023, Russia and Assad have repeatedly violated the terns of the agreement, with 23 civilians killed in rebel-held areas amid over 200 aerial or artillery assaults. 

The spike in violence coincides with the outbreak of anti-government protests in regime-held areas in Syria.

The SOHR confirmed that today's attack was a 'double tap', targeting both fighters and those responding to the attack, though none of those who have been killed have been named as civilians.

"When a second car arrived to recover the dead and wounded, the bombing began again," increasing the casualties, the Observatory said. 

The Idlib province has seen an escalation in violence in recent weeks, with an increase in Russian air strikes .  

On Tuesday, three HTS fighters and two civilians were killed in separate Russian strikes in different parts of Idlib province.

A day earlier, Russian air strikes targeted a HTS base on the western outskirts of Idlib city, killing 13 alleged fighters, the Observatory reported at the time.

The rebel-held Idlib region is home to about three million people, around half of them displaced from elsewhere in Syria.

Syria's war broke out in 2011 after Bashar al-Assad's brutal repression of peaceful pro-democracy protests escalated into a deadly conflict that led to Iranian and Russian intervention on his behalf and led to the rise of the Islamic State group.

The war has killed more than half a million people and forced around half of Syria's pre-war population from their homes.