Bashar Assad regime shelling has killed eight children and a woman in Syria's last major opposition bastion of Idlib in just two days, a war monitor said Friday.

Artillery fire early Friday morning on the village of Kansafra in the northwestern stronghold killed four children from the same family, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.

An Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondent saw the father cry over the bodies of three of the children at a cemetery. The remains of a fourth were then brought along and buried in haste as shelling started up again in a neighboring area.

A day earlier, in the nearby village of Balshun, artillery fire by pro-Damascus forces killed four children and the mother of three of them, the Observatory reported.

The Idlib region is home to nearly 3 million people, two-thirds of them displaced from other parts of the country during the decade-long civil war.

A cease-fire deal brokered by regime ally Russia and main opposition backer Turkey has largely protected the region from a new regime military offensive since March 2020.

But regime forces have stepped up their shelling on the southern edges of the bastion since June.

Bashar Assad took the oath of office for a new term last month, vowing to make "liberating those parts of the homeland that still need to be" one of his top priorities.

Syria's war has killed around half a million people since starting in 2011 with a brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests.