New Air Strikes on Aleppo Kill Dozens, Schoolchildren among 8 Dead in Homs

Dozens of people were killed in an eighth day of air strikes on Aleppo in Syria on Sunday, a watchdog said, as a bombing in Homs killed five schoolchildren.

A single airstrike on an Aleppo neighborhood killed at least 42 people, including at least six children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Observatory, a Britain-based group relying on activists and other witnesses inside Syria, said another 17 people were critically wounded when regime aircraft dropped "TNT-packed barrels" on the Hanano neighborhood.

Earlier Sunday, the Syrian air force had dropped TNT-packed barrels on several parts of Aleppo and villages nearby.

The Aleppo Media Center, a network of citizen journalists in the northern city, had singled out the bombing of Hanano as especially deadly, as the barrel bombs had struck a bus, "leaving no survivors."

The Observatory's Rami Abdel Rahman said President Bashar Assad's regime "is trying to turn people in opposition areas against the rebels. It is killing and forcing people to flee in order to secure that goal."

Other air attacks struck the rebel-held Sakhur, Ahmadiyeh, Baideen and Ard al-Hamra neighborhoods of the city, which has been cleaved into regime- and rebel-held enclaves since the summer of 2012.

Elsewhere in Aleppo province, Marea and Atareb villages were also hit Sunday, said the Observatory.

The Syrian Revolution General Commission, a network of grassroots activists, described "panic and mass flight to the countryside, despite the intense cold."

It also said two of the fatalities were ambulance workers, who died in the unrelenting bombardment as they tried to help wounded people.

Meanwhile, Aleppo's opposition Provincial Council announced schools in rebel-held areas would be closed "for a week... because of the systematic, deliberate bombing."

The council also said in a statement that two schools had been hit in Sunday's bombing.

Footage distributed by Shahba Press, another network of citizen journalists, showed a child in his badly damaged school saying that the bombing in Marea village happened while classes were being held.

On Saturday, Human Rights Watch said "government forces had used means and methods of warfare that... could not distinguish between civilians and combatants, making attacks indiscriminate and therefore unlawful."

It also condemned the reported use of the highly destructive barrel bombs, adding that "military commanders should not... order the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas."

In the central province of Homs, a car bombing on Sunday killed eight people, six of them schoolchildren, the official SANA news agency reported.

"Terrorists blew up a car bomb near the primary school in the town of Omm al-Amd in the countryside outside Homs, killing eight people including six children, and wounding 34 others," SANA said.

The Observatory reported a higher death toll of at least 12, including five children.

It said Omm al-Amd is home to a Shiite community close to the Alawite sect of President Bashar Assad, unlike the majority Sunni Muslim rebels fighting to topple him.