At least 17 killed in Syria violence

At least 17 people, two of them children and nine of them government troops, were killed in violence across Syria on Friday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The Britain-based group said a total of nine soldiers were killed in separate clashes with Free Syrian Army rebels in two villages in Daraa province, south of Damascus. The two children were killed in an explosion near a cultural centre in Kfartakharim in the northwestern Idlib region, the Observatory said. The activist group said two civilians were shot dead at dawn on farms in the flashpoint town of Rankus, near Damascus. Two people were killed when security forces opened fire on protesters in Daraya, near the capital. One person was killed during a rally in the central city of Hama and another civilian was killed in Idlib.