Russia enters 3rd day of assault on civilians in Syria

Russia's fighter jets conducted air strikes for a third day on Friday in Syria, mainly hitting areas held by rival insurgent groups rather than the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, militants that Moscow claimed were targeting.

Local activists said Russian planes were bombing residential areas and killing civilians including children.

An amateur video footage published in several social network showed the fighter jets pouring down on residential areas. Another video showed local people rushing to rescue victims caught under damaged buildings they claimed were targeted by Russian jets. Some injured children were crying as elders scurried to save more lives.

Moscow claimed it has carried out 18 attacks in Syria since Thursday night, with 12 of them hitting ISIL targets.

The Russian Defense Ministry said its Sukhoi-34, Sukhoi-24M and Sukhoi-25 warplanes had flown 18 sorties, describing targets in western and northern Syria, including a command post and a communications center in the province of Aleppo, a militant field camp in Idlib and a command post in Hama.

Meanwhile, Russia said, on Friday, its air campaign in Syria will continue for four months.

The Syrian opposition bloc, the U.S., NATO and some rights groups expressed concerned over Moscow's action inside Syria, criticizing civil losses.

According to the Syrian National Coalition, the main Western-backed opposition alliance, the Russian airstrikes resulted in the deaths of 36 civilians, including five children.

The areas targeted by Russia were free of any ISIL or al-Qaeda presence, the group's chief, Khaled Khoja, said in New York on Wednesday.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict with a network of sources on the ground, said the Islamic State had no presence in the western and northern areas that were struck.

The Observatory's head, Rami Abdulrahman, said one of the targets hit in the latest Russian air strikes, the town of Dar Tazzah in the northwestern Aleppo province, was controlled by a number of insurgent groups, including the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.

The UK, the U.S., France, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey criticized Moscow's actions as Russian jets carried out a third day of airstrikes in the war-torn country.

"We express our deep concern with regard to the Russian military build-up in Syria and especially the attacks by the Russian Air Force on Hama, Homs and Idlib since yesterday which led to civilian casualties and did not target Da'esh (ISIL)," the countries said in a joint statement.

President Vladimir Putin's decision this week to launch air strikes on Syria marks a dramatic escalation of foreign involvement in a 4-year-old civil war in which every major country in the region has a stake.

Lebanese sources said that hundreds of Iranian troops have also arrived in recent days in Syria to participate in a major ground offensive alongside government troops and their Lebanese and Iraqi Shi'ite militia allies.

Syria's devastating civil war, now in its fifth year, has claimed more than 250,000 lives, according to UN figures, and made the country the world's single-largest source of refugees and displaced people.