9 kids among 15 dead in air raid on Syrian city of Aleppo

BEIRUT — A Syrian government airstrike Saturday on a fought-over neighborhood in the northern city of Aleppo killed at least 15 people, including nine children, while several mortar rounds slammed into a residential district in Damascus, leaving at least one person dead, activists and state media said.

Aleppo and Damascus — Syria’s two largest cities — are key fronts in the civil war between President Bashar Assad’s regime and the rebels trying to overthrow it. Opposition fighters have managed to seize control of several neighborhoods in Aleppo since storming the city last summer, while the regime has largely kept the rebels at bay so far in Damascus, although opposition fighters control several suburbs of the capital and look increasingly capable of threatening the heart of the city — and Assad’s power.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the air raid Saturday hit Aleppo’s Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood, which rebels seized parts of last weekend after days of heavy fighting with regime troops.

The activist group said the death toll from the air raid, near a checkpoint of anti-government Kurdish militiamen known as the Popular Committees, is expected to rise as many others were seriously wounded.

Both sides are eager to control the strategic district, which is predominantly inhabited by minority Kurds. The neighborhood is on a hill on the northern edge of Aleppo and overlooks much of the city, giving those who control it the ability to pound districts held by the opposing side with mortars and artillery.

The rebels control large areas of northern Syria, and captured their first provincial capital — the city of Raqqa — last month. They also have been making gains in recent weeks in the south, seizing military bases and towns in the strategically important region between Damascus and the border with Jordan, about 100 miles from the capital.

In Damascus, mortar rounds hit the residential district of Kafar Souseh on the city’s western outskirts, killing one person and wounding at least 13, the state-run SANA news agency said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said mortar rounds also struck the Damascus suburb of Jaramana. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

It was not immediately clear who fired the shells, but mortar rounds have fallen with increasing regularity in the center of the capital, puncturing the aura of normalcy that the regime has tried to cultivate in the city.

SANA said government troops dealt a major blow to rebels in areas east of the city known as Eastern Ghouta, adding that the armed forces “cleansed” areas near the airport to the south, all the way to the northeastern suburb of Adra. It did not elaborate.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported clashes between government troops and rebels Saturday in the town of Otaybah east of Damascus.

Also Saturday, the newly elected prime minister of the Western-backed opposition umbrella group, Ghassan Hitto, started reviewing candidates for a planned rebel interim government that will comprise 11 ministries and will be based inside Syria, according to a statement by the Syrian National Coalition.

The candidates for ministerial and deputy positions must be Syrian citizens older than 35, the statement said. It added that high-ranking regime officials or “those who have committed crimes against the Syrian people or have unlawfully seized Syrian property or wealth” will be excluded from consideration.

Also on Saturday, an official with an Iraqi Shiite militant group said one of its fighters had been killed in Syria.

Other Shiite militias in Iraq have acknowledged sending members to Syria, but it is the first time that the Iraqi Hezbollah group has hinted that its members are fighting there. Iran and many Iraqi Shiite militants support Assad, while many Iraqi Sunnis back the largely Sunni rebels trying to oust him.

The fighter, Afrad Mohsen al- Hemedawi, was killed while defending a Shiite holy shrine in Syria, according to the official of the Hezbollah Brigades, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue. The official said the man was killed March 30 and buried April 1.

Meanwhile Saturday, Russia said U.N. demands for unlimited access “to all facilities in Syria and to all persons” who experts believe should be interrogated over a purported chemical attack “are beyond the framework of the investigation.”

The Syrian government and the rebels have both demanded an international investigation into a purported chemical-weapons attack March 19 that killed 31 people in the northern village of Khan al-Assal.

In other developments, the Italian Foreign Ministry said four Italian journalists were detained in Syria.

The Foreign Ministry on Saturday said that it was in touch with the families of the journalists but declined to say who had detained them or release further details out of concern for their safety.