August 5, 2014 - 17:47 AMT
Air strikes kill at least 64 in Damascus suburbs: monitor

Air strikes by Syrian government forces in the eastern suburbs of the capital Damascus killed at least 64 people at the weekend, a monitoring group said on Tuesday, Aug 5, according to Reuters.

Bombardments, gun battles and executions regularly kill over 150 people a day in Syria's three-year-old conflict, but the toll from the air strikes was especially high.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group that tracks violence through a network of sources in Syria, said the attacks occurred in the areas of Kafr Batna and Douma in the eastern outskirts of the city.

According to the Observatory, over 170,000 people have died in Syria's war, which is increasingly threatening to spill over into Lebanon where four days of clashes have pitted Lebanese soldiers against Sunni militants seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.