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UN Starts Aid Airlift to Syria from Iraq


The United Nations has started to deliver humanitarian aid by air into Syria from northern Iraq.

After weather delays, a cargo plane carrying food took off Sunday from the city of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan for a one-hour flight into northeastern Syria.

The U.N. World Food Program says food being sent during the next 12 days should be enough to feed more than 6,000 Syrian families for the rest of December. The aid flights will also carry blankets, medicine and clothing.

The airlift was delayed from last week because of winter storms sweeping the region. The governments of Syria and Iraq approved the flights.

Syria's civil war has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

In some of the latest fighting, a Britain-based activist group, the Syrian Observatory for Human rights, says government air strikes Sunday killed at least 22 people, including 14 children, in the northern city of Aleppo.

The observatory also reports the killing of at least 28 people in Adra, northeast of Damascus, since an al-Qaida-linked rebel faction attacked there on Wednesday.
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