Syria truce area hit with airstrikes

BEIRUT — Airstrikes have targeted rural Aleppo in northern Syria on Sunday for the first time in months since a cease-fire took hold in the province, killing one, activists and a war monitoring group said.

Also Sunday, the Central Military Media, affiliated with the Syrian government, reported that Iranian drones successfully struck vehicles of the Islamic State group along the Syria-Iraq border in the south. The report didn’t say when the strike occurred but showed purported footage of it.

Previously, the U.S-led coalition had downed Iranian drones in the area, considering them hostile because they dropped ammunition near a base where U.S. troops operated alongside allied Syrian opposition fighters. Since the two strikes in June, one of two U.S. bases in the area has shut down after Syrian and allied forces essentially cut off access to it.

Meanwhile, Syrian media reported that government and allied troops have seized Maadan, a town northwest of Deir el-Zour city and southeast of Raqqa, which has been scene to intense fighting with Islamic State militants.

Elsewhere, warplanes continued Sunday to pound Syria’s rural Idlib and Hama, where insurgents led by an al-Qaidalinked group began an offensive against government troops in the area. The Syrian Civil Defense said one person was killed in Aleppo bombing, which it said targeted a cow farm.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said more than 40 insurgents were killed in air-strikes Saturday on a village in northern Idlib. Rami Abdurrahman, the head of the Observatory, said the airstrikes targeted a base in Mardkih that belongs to Faylaq al-Sham, a fighting group that had agreed to the cease-fire. The group posted a video a day before the airstrike showing its fighters preparing a mortar attack on government areas north of Hirbnafsah in Hama.

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