More Than 100 Dead in Syria as Fierce Clashes Rage in Aleppo

Syrian troops and rebels fought fierce battles on Friday in the city of Aleppo, where several people died when a shell crashed into a bakery as hundreds queued for bread, Agence France Presse reported.

The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said regime forces shot dead 115 civilians and rebels across the country.

Sixty-five people were killed in Aleppo, 22 in Idlib, 12 in Damascus and its countryside, five in Deir Ezzor, four in Daraa, three in Hama, three in Homs and one in Latakia, the LCC said.

Around a dozen people were killed and 20 wounded at the bakery in the increasingly desperate city, AFP reported. At least three children were among the dead in the eastern Tariq al-Bab district of Syria's commercial capital.

And troops repelled a rebel attack on Aleppo's international airport, state news agency SANA reported. "Mercenary terrorists" had tried to attack it but the "army hit back and killed most of them."

Rebels vowed to fight on in Aleppo, a day after being driven out of a key district under heavy shellfire.

In the latest clashes, Aleppo's historic Citadel, part of a UNESCO-listed world heritage site, was heavily damaged by bombing, according to the opposition.

A rebel commander, Hossam Abu Mohammed, said his men were still fighting in parts of Aleppo's southwestern district of Salaheddin after most fled on Thursday in the face of heavy bombing and advancing troops.

"We will not let Salaheddin go," the Free Syrian Army's Abu Mohammed told AFP by telephone on the third day of a government offensive to take the city.

The army again bombed parts of Salaheddin, as well as the Sakhur and Hanano districts in the northeast, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that five civilians were among 56 people killed nationwide.

Before dawn, a MiG 21 fighter jet dropped four bombs on rebel positions in Hanano, an AFP correspondent said. One struck the courtyard of the FSA headquarters in the area and another a nearby house, wounding a number of people.

Angry residents shouted hostile slogans against France and the United States, saying: "No one is helping us."

"We are behind the Free Syrian Army, but it is because of them that all of this is happening," one of them lamented.

The opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) said Aleppo's 13th-century Citadel, part of a complex of sites in the city's historic heart that the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization says is of "outstanding universal value" had been damaged in army shelling.

Regime forces shot dead a 19-year-old protester in New Aleppo, an upscale district of the embattled city, as they opened fire on demonstrators, according to monitors.

The Observatory said the youth died from a gunshot to the head, adding that three other demonstrators were wounded in the army-controlled district.

Britain said on Friday it would give the rebels five million pounds ($7.82 million, 6.3 million euros) in non-lethal assistance, including body armor and communications equipment.

"The people of Syria cannot wait indefinitely, people are dying. In the absence of diplomatic progress the UK will do much more," Foreign Secretary William Hague said.

On the humanitarian front, the International Committee for the Red Cross said the Syrian Red Crescent had suspended most of its work in Aleppo because of the extreme danger, but that dozens of volunteers were still working.

A statement in Geneva said the ICRC had managed on Thursday to deliver food and other essential to cover the needs of at least 12,500 people in the city of some 2.7 million people.