JISR ASH SHUGHUR, Syria, July 22, 2022 (BSS/AFP) - A Russian air strike

killed seven people, four of them children, in Syria's rebel-held Idlib
region on Friday, a war monitor said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the deaths "including four
children who are siblings, two men and an unidentified person... as a result
of Russian air strikes", in the Jisr al-Shughur countryside of northern
Syria.

Ayhman Mozan, 31, lost all four of his children in the attack that destroyed
his home.

"My children are gone... the dearest people to my heart are gone," he told
AFP, breaking down in tears as he called out his children's names.

He and his family were sleeping when the first strike hit their home, he
said, lying in a hospital bed in the border city of Darkush.

He helped rescue his wife from under the rubble but when he looked for his
children, he could not find them.

The house has been completely destroyed, an AFP correspondent at the site of
the attack said, with toys, furniture and clothing scattered across the
rubble.

The children killed were all under 10 years old, said Rami Abdel Rahman, who
heads the British-based Observatory.

The monitor said that more people, including women and children, were still
trapped under the rubble.

The victims are mostly displaced Syrians from neighbouring Hama province,
said the monitor, which relies on a wide network of sources inside Syria.

Russia, which did not comment immediately on the raid, is a main backer of
President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

With Russian and Iranian support, Damascus clawed back much of the ground
lost in the early stages of Syria's conflict, which erupted in 2011 when the
government brutally repressed pro-democracy protests.

The last pocket of armed opposition to the regime includes large swathes of
Idlib province and parts of the neighbouring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia
provinces.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, headed by ex-members of Syria's former Al-Qaeda
franchise, is the dominant group in the area but other rebel groups are also
active, with varying degrees of Turkish backing.

Syria's war has killed nearly half a million people and forced around half of
the country's pre-war population from their homes.