BEIRUT: At least seven people died in rebel shelling of a neighbourhood of the Syrian city of Aleppo held by the Kurdish YPG militia at dawn on Saturday, a monitoring group said, as rebels took territory to the south.
More than 40 people were also wounded in the attack on the Sheikh Maqsoud area, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, a district next to the only way in and out of rebel-held parts of the northern city, the Castello road.
An escalation in air and artillery strikes in recent weeks around the road has made it virtually impassable, putting hundreds of thousands of people in Aleppo under effective siege.
Hundreds of people have been killed in Aleppo since peace talks broke off in April, as Syria's President Bashar al-Assad seeks to regain control of what was Syria's largest pre-war city, now split between rebel and government sectors.
Rebels have said in the past their attacks on Sheikh Maqsoud were in response to YPG attempts to cut the Castello road.
The YPG controls nearly all of Syria's northern frontier with Turkey and has been a close ally of the United States in the campaign against Islamic State in Syria. Many rebels in western Syria do not trust the YPG because they say it cooperates with Damascus rather than fighting it, an accusation the YPG has denied.
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