Syrian opposition forces have killed at least 18 soldiers in the northwestern town of Saraqeb, in Idlib province, by setting off a car bomb outside a military position and then attacked it, according to a watchdog group.

Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the UK-based rights group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), said on Wednesday the details of the incident were still sketchy, and that he could not say whether the car bombing was a suicide attack.

"There were 70 to 100 soldiers there when the attack occurred" in Saraqeb, he said.

"Twenty soldiers escaped, and clashes are still going on."

Outside Aleppo, Syria's second city, fighting erupted at dawn in the Nayrab area, around 5km from the airport,which remained fully operational.

Over the past several weeks, opposition forces have taken to attacking military airfields in an attempt to prevent them from being used for launching air raids while commercial facilities have been left alone.

However, this is not the first time there has been fighting around Aleppo airport, which serves the country's commercial capital, where the army shelled a string of neighborhoods.

Elsewhere, a boy and a girl were killed and dozens of civilians wounded when the army shelled the village of Latamneh in Hama province, according to the SOHR, which gathers its information from a wide network of activists.

Also in Hama, the SOHR reported that eight bodies had been found in farmlands in Halfaya village, following an assault by government forces. It said the number of dead was expected to rise as many people were reported missing.

Humanitarian crisis

Coupled with the violence is the humanitarian crisis caused by the large number of people fleeing the country or displaced within its borders.

The UN refugee agency says the number of civilians who have fled nearly 18 months of violence has reached more than 250,000. And it says more than 1.2 million civilians, more than half of them children, have been displaced inside Syria.

Angelina Jolie, Hollywood film star and UN special envoy, will travel to Turkey on Thursday to visit Syrian refugee camps near the border.

Jolie visited Syrian refugees in Lebanon on Wednesday as well as a refugee camp in Jordan on Tuesday, where she appealed to the world to "do everything they can to support these refugees" fleeing the escalating unrest.

PHOTO CAPTION

A Syrian opposition fighter sits on the ruins of a Byzantine city in Bab al-Hawa in the province of Idlib last week.

Aljazeera