Syrian troops kill 22 rebels

A total of 22 armed rebels were killed Tuesday in a Syrian military offensive against rebel positions in the country's northwestern province of Aleppo, media reported.

"The armed forces have targeted gatherings of terrorist groups in Dar Ezzah area in Aleppo, killing 22 and injuring 10 others," Xinhua reported citing the official SANA news agency, adding that all of the targeted "terrorists" were not Syrians.

Earlier Tuesday, SANA reported that at least five people were killed and 26 injured Tuesday when mortar shells struck the Syrian city of Aleppo.

The mortars were fired by "terrorists" on the Nile and Mokambo streets in Aleppo city, which has been battered by intense battles between the government troops and the armed militants. Some of the wounded are in critical condition, Xinhua reported citing SANA.

The attack came just hours after one woman was killed and five, including two school students, were injured in a rebel mortar attack in the southern districts of al-Qassa and Abbasyeen and the Jawdat al-Hashimi high school in central Damascus.

The rebels have opted for mortar attacks to destabilise government-controlled areas and such mortar shelling has become a daily routine.

Aleppo, Syria's largest city and its economic hub, has emerged as a main battlefield in the country's three-year-old crisis since the rebels vowed to "liberate" the city from the government forces in June 2012.

Since then, the clashes have been incessant and the rebels managed to seize considerable swathes of land in Aleppo, but the government forces have recently launched an offensive to regain control of the city.

The battles in Aleppo are part of a wider war that have swept Syria since the beginning of the crisis in mid-March 2011.

Meanwhile, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Tuesday updated the death toll in Syria, saying more than 150,000 people have been killed since the eruption of the war.