ERBIL, Kurdistan Region--Militants belonging to Jabhat al-Nusra continued to fire mortar shells into Aleppo’s Kurdish-majority Sheikh Maqsoud neighbourhood on Friday, killing at least 15 people, the Russian Center for Reconciliation in Syria said. “The mortar shelling of the Kurdish Sheikh Maqsoud neighbourhood in the northern part of Aleppo by Jabhat al-Nusra gunmen has not ended. Terrorists are opening fire on the streets of the district from an area of the Castello shopping center earlier held by the moderate opposition forces,” said a representative of the reconciliation center, based in Russia’s Hmeymim airbase in Syria, cited by Russia’s Tass news. The representative also said that Friday’s shelling had killed a child and injured eight civilians. On Thursday, the Kurdish neighbourhood was shelled for 24 hours and over 15 people were killed and dozens wounded. Approximately 30,000 civilians live in Sheikh Maqsoud. They have been subjected to regular indiscriminate shelling by Islamist groups like Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. The Jaish al-Fatah Islamist coalition has fired projectiles containing chemical weapons into the neighbourhood, according to Amnesty International who carried out an investigation in May. Sheikh Maqsoud is situated in a strategically important area of Aleppo that the Islamist groups want to control in order to use it as a springboard to attack more targets in the city.
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