The Syrian regime's military offensive on the outskirts of the northern city of Aleppo has displaced thousands in recent days, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says.

A spokeswoman for the UNOCHA said on Monday that the fighting had displaced 35,000 people from Hader and Zerbeh on the southwestern outskirts of the city in the past few days.

The Aleppo offensive is targeting areas a few kilometers to the south of the city near the highway to Damascus. The Syrian regime army, which is backed by Russian air strikes and on the ground by Iranian fighters and Lebanon's Hezbollah, claimed they have captured several villages.

Syrian regime state TV said the army had captured the town of al-Sabeqiya south of Aleppo on Monday and said the opposition forces had suffered “heavy casualties”.

Rami Abdulrahman, head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which reports on the war using sources on the ground, said at least 41 opposition fighters had been killed.

One Aleppo-based opposition group, the Nour al Din al Zinki Brigades, said its military commander was among the dead.

His group is one of the recipients of military aid, including TOW missiles, by the US and other regional countries opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

But officials from one of the Aleppo-based opposition groups said the supplies were inadequate for the scale of the assault, one of several ground offensives under way with Russian air support.

"A few [TOW missiles] will not do the trick. They need dozens," said one official, declining to be named due to the political sensitivity of the military support program.

Regime troops and their allies are also trying to advance to the east of Aleppo towards Kweires military airport to break a siege of the base by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which controls some parts of Aleppo province, notably to the north of the city.

Since the start of the Russian air strikes, ground offensives by the Syrian regime army and its allies have mostly hit areas controlled by opposition groups other than ISIL in parts of western Syria that are crucial to Assad's survival.

The Observatory reported fresh Russian air strikes on Monday in the southern Aleppo area. Abdulrahman described the fighting as heavy but added that the regime side had not made further strategic gains on Monday.

The Syrian regime state news agency said on Monday the rural Aleppo area was one of 49 sites targeted by Russian warplanes, along with rural Damascus, Latakia and Hama.

PHOTO CAPTION

Video uploaded to a social media website purports to show Russian jets flying over Aleppo and the bombing of an opposition-held area of Damascus by the Syrian regime, according to activists.

Al-Jazeera