Month: February 2014

At least 16 Syrian rebels have been killed in a double bomb attack carried out by the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an NGO said.

Another 20 rebels were injured in the attack yesterday, some of them seriously, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The attack took place in the town of al-Ra’ei, not far from the Syrian border with Turkey, the group said.

The Observatory said an ISIS fighter blew himself up at the headquarters of an Islamist rebel brigade in the Aleppo town, near the border with Turkey.

Iranian state TV says a magnitude 5.5 earthquake has jolted a sparsely populated area in the country’s south.

The report said the quake hit yesterday evening in the district of Goharan, about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) southeast of the capital Tehran.

It says many buildings were damaged and that rescue workers were on the scene.

The quake affected cellular phone coverage in the region with a population of 15,000 in nearly 80 villages. No casualties are reported so far.

Iran sits on a series of seismic fault lines and experiences one slight quake a day on average.

At least 36 people have been killed in regime air strikes and aerial attacks with explosive-packed barrels on the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said regime aircraft carried out a series of deadly air strikes for a second day in eastern parts of the city.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP that most of the dead were killed in several raids in which regime helicopters dropped so-called barrel bombs on the Tariq al-Bab district.

Aid agencies have been overwhelmed by demand for food in Syria, with thousands surviving without a regular supply of nourishment for more than a year because of civil war in the Middle Eastern country, a United Nations official said.

UN World Food Program chief executive Ertharin Cousin was in the Australian capital Canberra today for talks with the new Australian government about the financial needs of the world’s largest humanitarian organization which she leads.

At least 121 people died in bombardments using barrels of explosives dropped from helicopters on the weekend by the Syrian army over various sites in northern Aleppo province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Sunday.

Among the fatalities Saturday were 13 children and at least 10 combatants of the Al Nusra Front, which is linked to Al Qaeda, according to a communique issued by the independent group, which has a wide network of activists on the ground in the war-torn Middle Eastern nation.