Fighting rages in Syria, Russia lashes out at opposition

Fighting raged in several Syrian flashpoints on Wednesday as key Damascus ally Moscow lashed out the Syrian opposition for its "obsession" with toppling President Bashar al-Assad. In a related development, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to host an international conference aimed at aiding the more than 650,000 refugees the UN says have fled the 22-month conflict in Syria. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said five members of one family -- a couple and three children -- were killed in a dawn missile attack on the village of Abu Taltal in Aleppo province. In a video released by activists, the bodies of the three children, a boy and two small girls, can be seen lying on blankets on a hospital bed. Their brightly coloured clothes are stained with blood and their faces are turned away from the camera. The Observatory has previously reported more than 3,500 child deaths in Syria's conflict. In Ras al-Ain in the Kurdish northeast, battles raged between Kurdish militia and Islamist rebels, the Observatory said, adding that more than 58 people have been killed in a week of fierce fighting there. The main opposition Syrian National Coalition, which has been recognised by dozens of states and organisations as the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people, said it has contacted rebel leaders in the area, urging them to stop the fighting. Wednesday's violence came a day after at least 123 people were killed, among them 62 civilians including 15 children, said the Observatory. The UN says more than 60,000 people have died since the conflict first erupted in March 2011. In Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticised Syria's opposition for its "obsession" with toppling Assad, and warned of a long conflict. "For now, everything is running up against the opposition's obsession with toppling Bashar Assad's regime," Lavrov told reporters. "As long as this irreconcilable position remains in place, nothing good can happen. Armed actions will continue and people will die." He said that the opposition's insistence on ousting Assad was stymying efforts to find a diplomatic solution backed by the former international peace envoy Kofi Annan and his successor Lakhdar Brahimi. Lavrov took particular aim at the Syria National Coalition -- a broad-based group backed by the West founded in Doha last year -- for making the ouster of Assad one of its fundamental aims. His comments came as New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch warned that rebel groups appeared to have destroyed or allowed the looting of minority religious sites in northern Syria. "The destruction of religious sites is furthering sectarian fears and compounding the tragedies of the country," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at the New York-based HRW. And as the UN said on Wednesday that more than 650,000 people have already fled Syria to neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, President Vladimir Putin of Russia offered to host an international conference in Moscow on the refugee crisis. "If the interested nations agree to this, we will be ready to propose Moscow as the venue," news agencies quoted Putin as saying. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation meanwhile warned that Syrian agriculture has been shattered by the conflict, putting the livelihoods of about half of the country's population at risk. "Twenty-two months of conflict has left Syria's agricultural sector in tatters with cereal, fruit and vegetable production dropping for some by half and massive destruction of irrigation and other infrastructure," the organisation said in a statement. The UN says that about 80 percent of 10 million Syrians -- about 46 percent of the population -- derive their livelihoods from agriculture.