Russian jets hit Syria's Aleppo, killing 4

At least four civilians were killed and scores injured in a Russian airstrike Tuesday in Syria's northwestern Aleppo province, according to a local civil defense official.

The strike targeted Aleppo's western opposition-held village of Urma al-Kubra, Hussein Beduv said, adding that the fatalities included two children and a woman.

According to Beduv, civil defense teams were struggling to search for survivors under the rubble of collapsed buildings.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-battered country, according to the UN.

However, the Syrian Center for Policy Research, a Beirut-based NGO, puts the death toll from the five-year conflict at more than 470,000.

For the past year, Russia -- citing the need to combat "terrorism" and support for the embattled Assad regime -- has carried out numerous airstrikes in opposition-held parts of Aleppo, which have led to the death and injury of hundreds of the city's civilian inhabitants.