Several killed in attack launched by Syrian regime forces on...

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At least 14 civilians, including 4 children were killed with several others wounded in a raid launched by the Syrian regime forces on the town of Maliha, southwest Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Friday.

The British based Observatory added that children who were killed were all under the age of 16, adding that among the dead were women and elderly folk.
Meanwhile, a UN mission to investigate alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria's civil war tentatively plans to enter the country on Sunday, officials said on Friday.

The team, consisting of weapons experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, plans to look into claims of use of Sarin gas and other toxic nerve agents.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday details of the trip had been worked out with the Syrian government and that the team's departure was imminent.

An official told Reuters on Friday the team would cross into Syria on Sunday, assuming security conditions permitted. A diplomat in the region confirmed the timetable.

One site to be visited by the UN experts is Khan al-Assal in Aleppo, where the Syrian government says rebels used chemical weapons in March.

Two other locations have not yet been identified and may be too dangerous for the team to visit, the official said.

This as the U.N. refugee agency said an unusually large wave of Syrian families has been pouring into Iraq's Kurdistan region this week.

Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, says thousands of Syrians mainly from Syria's largest city, Aleppo, and several poor northeastern Syrian regions were part of a "sudden, massive movement" into northern Iraq.

He told reporters in Geneva on Friday that up to 7,750 Syrian refugees a day had crossed a Tigris River bridge over the border, but said the reasons for the surge were unclear.

Edwards says UNHCR staff saw "scores of buses" dropping people off on the Syria side. Iraq is already home to more than 150,000 refugees from Syria, where Kurds are the largest ethnic minority.


LBCI/AP

Several killed in attack launched by Syrian regime forces on southwest Damascus