BEIRUT // Air srikes killed at least 28 civilians, including women and children, at a refugee camp in northern Syria on Thursday as a 48-hour truce brokered by the United States and Russia took effect in Aleppo city.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the strikes also injured 50 civilians at the camp near Sarmada in Idlib province, which is controlled by Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra and rebel allies.
Mamun Al Khatib, director of the Aleppo-based pro-rebel Shahba Press news agency, accused the regime of carrying out the attacks.
“Two regime aircraft fired four missiles on the camp in the village of Al Kammouna,” he said.
“Two missiles fell near the the camp causing people to panic and two more fell inside where a dozen tents caught fire.”
Images shared online by activists showed emergency workers putting out fires among damaged blue and white tents.
Mr Al Khatib said the people in the camp had fled fighting in the north of Aleppo province.
The strikes were swiftly condemned by Washington.
“There is no justifiable excuse for carrying out an air strike against innocent civilians who have already once fled their homes to escape violence,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
A 48-hour ceasefire took hold in Aleppo on Thursday after Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s regime and rebel forces gave in to mounting diplomatic pressure.
Relieved residents returned to the streets after two weeks of heavy fighting in the divided city, a key battleground in Syria’s five-year civil war.
The Syrian army said late on Wednesday it had agreed to calls from Russia and the United States for a two-day truce in Aleppo that would begin at 1am on Thursday.
The agreement followed an intense diplomatic push by the two countries to salvage peace efforts after a February 27 truce agreement began to fall apart. The truce excludes Al Nusra, ISIL and allied groups.
Renewed fighting in recent days, especially in and around Aleppo, had threatened the full collapse of the so-called cessation of hostilities, a landmark in attempts to resolve a conflict that has left more than 270,000 dead.
More than 280 civilians were reported killed in Aleppo since April 22, with regime air strikes pounding the opposition-held east of the city while rebels fired a barrage of rockets into the government-controlled west.
The Observatory confirmed there had been no bombing in the city on Thursday, but said a civilian had died in a western district from rebel shelling that came minutes after the truce took effect.
However, fierce clashes between rebels and regime forces were reported in the government-held village of Khan Touman, six kilometres from the outskirts of Aleppo.
Al Mayadeen, a Lebanese TV station embedded with the Syrian army, said armed groups launched their assault on Khan Touman earlier in the afternoon.
The station said government jets were bombing rebel positions outside the village.
Also on Thursday, twin bombings in central Syria killed at least 12 civilians including two women, the Britain-based Observatory and state television said.
The suicide attack and car bombing in a square in Mukharram Al Fawqani in Homs province came amid recent fighting in the area between ISIL fighters and regime troops.
The area, controlled by the regime, is located between the cities of Homs and Palmyra, which the Syrian army recaptured from the extremist group in late March.
The blasts came just days after ISIL seized the nearby Shaer gasfield, one of the biggest in Homs, in an attack that killed at least 16 regime troops.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Thursday’s attacks but suicide and car bombings are a favoured tactic of ISIL.
Western powers are hoping that ending the fighting in other parts of Syria will help focus efforts against ISIL, which a US-led coalition has been targeting with air strikes in Syria and Iraq since mid-2014.
* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press