BEIRUT: Syrian air raids on rebel positions in the northern Aleppo and southern Daraa provinces killed 30 people on Thursday, including civilians, a monitoring group said.

With the world’s attention trained on Syria’s chemical weapons, set to be destroyed by international experts under a UN resolution, the latest deaths highlighted the lethality of the regime’s conventional arsenal.

Fighting has raged in Syria’s onetime commercial hub of Aleppo, where President Bashar Assad’s regime and rebels have battled street by street for neighborhoods and supply routes.

The raids by planes and helicopters on Thursday killed 16 people, including a woman and two children in the village of Sfire to the east of the city. “The regime has bombarded Sfire for two days in order to relieve pressure on the supply route to Aleppo,” which the army reopened earlier this week, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based group, which relies on a network of activists across the war-torn country.