BEIRUT // At least five people were killed in an air strike on a rebel-held town near Aleppo on Saturday after an explosion rocked the east of the city.
The noon air strikes marked a resumption of government military activity after days of calm during the evacuation of tens of thousands of civilians and rebels from eastern Aleppo.
On Thursday, president Bashar Al Assad’s forces took control of the eastern neighbourhoods of Aleppo for the first time since July 2012 in the government’s biggest victory since Syria’s civil war began more than five years ago.
Government forces are expected to now try to secure the western and south-western outskirts of Aleppo where rebels are based.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the air strike on the town of Atareb west of Aleppo killed five people including a man, his daughter and daughter-in-law.
The Aleppo Media Centre, an activist collective, put the death toll at seven, including a woman and two children.
Air strikes on nearby villages the night before killed three rebels, according to the Observatory, a Britain-based monitoring group.
Earlier on Saturday, three people were wounded in the explosion in east Aleppo that state TV said was caused by a device left inside a school by rebels.
A correspondent for Lebanon’s Hizbollah-run Al Manar TV was reporting live from the area when the blast sounded in the background, sending a cloud of dust into the air. The correspondent reported at least three people were killed.
In Damascus, militants blew up the Barada water pipeline in the suburb of Kafr Al Zayt, the state news agency Sana said.
Sana quoted the director of the Syrian capital’s water authority as saying the attack put the pipeline out of service. It had just been repaired and put back in operation on Friday, less than a month after a similar attack.
Pro-government media said the government was forced to cut water supplies coming to the Syrian capital for a few days and use reserves instead after rebels polluted the water with diesel. The Al Fija spring which supplies Damascus with water is in the rebel-held Barada valley north-west of the capital, in a mountainous area near the Lebanese border.
The attack on water supplies comes at a time when government forces and their allies are on the offensive in the Barada Valley area.
In northern Syria, where Turkish troops and Ankara-backed Syrian rebels are besieging the ISIL-held town of Al Bab, 68 extremists were killed in fighting since Friday night.
A total of 141 ISIL targets were hit and one of the group’s headquarters was destroyed, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu agency said, citing the military.
Two of the rebels were killed and one was wounded, it said.
Turkish troops and rebels have been laying siege to Al Bab for weeks as part of the Euphrates Shield operation launched by Turkey nearly four months ago to sweep the extremist militants and Kurdish fighters from its Syrian border.
Fighting around Al Bab escalated this week with 16 Turkish soldiers and 138 extremists killed in clashes on Wednesday.
* Associated Press and Reuters
