Russia Rejects Claim Its Air Strikes Have Killed Almost 10,000 In Syria

A Syrian man carries the body of an infant retrieved from under the rubble of a building following a reported air strike on the Al-Muasalat area in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on September 23.

Russia has rejected a claim by a Syria monitoring group that its air strikes killed nearly 10,000 people in the war-torn country in the past year.

"We do not consider information about what happens in Syria from an organization based in Britain to be reliable," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on September 30.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that more than 9,364 people were killed by Russian air strikes, including 3,804 civilians and 906 children, in addition to rebel fighters seeking to topple the Moscow-backed Syrian regime.

The group added that the strikes killed 2,746 members of the Islamic State extremist movement and 2,814 fighters from other rebel Islamist groups.

On September 30, 2015, Russia began an air campaign backing forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Opposition activists have blamed Russia for the recent air campaign against rebel-held neighborhoods of Aleppo that has killed more than 200 civilians in the past two weeks.

Based on reporting by AP and dpa