At least 50 killed in deadly terrorist attacks in Aleppo

Syrian militant groups’ rocket fire on government-controlled areas of Aleppo killed 50 people over the weekend, a monitoring group said on Monday, the eve of an election in which foreign backed militants have warned they will step up attacks on state targets.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the death toll from the attacks by extremist militants included nine children.
The bombardments killed 23 people on Saturday and another 27 on Sunday.
The Britain-based monitoring group said the casualties on Saturday and Sunday came after 230 people had been killed in two months of militants’ bombardments of areas of Aleppo controlled by the government.
Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said “Targeting civilians is a war crime.”
Fighting in Aleppo, which was Syria’s commercial hub before the three-year conflict erupted, has escalated in recent weeks after Syrian army consolidated their control in central Syria and the last militants retreated from the center of the city of Homs.
The attacks are the latest ahead of the country’s presidential election on Tuesday, a highly agreeable vote amid a foreign backed civil war that has killed more than 160,000 people.
The Syrian opposition and its Western allies have denounced the balloting as a sham. President Bashar Assad is widely expected to win a third seven-year term.