At least 43 civilians died and dozens were injured Tuesday in a Russian air strike on besieged opposition-held districts of Aleppo, a Syrian civil defense official told Anadolu Agency.

Russian forces targeted “opposition-held neighborhoods with more than 30 percussion bombs,” Ansar Najib said.

Najib stated 27 people died in the Bustan al-Qasr neighborhood and 14 lost their lives in the al-Ferdaws district.

Two people were also killed in al-Qaterji, Najib added and said the number of injured had reached 80.

Local civilian defense teams began to pull the dead and wounded from beneath flattened buildings.

"Considerable damage [was] caused by the strike in the targeted areas, which suffer mainly from significant damage due to continuous bombardment over the past four years," Najib added.

In late September, Russia began using “percussion bombs” to hit opposition-controlled areas in Syria.

These weapons are used to strike ground shelters and tunnels in heavily-fortified districts.

Syria has been locked in a vicious war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-torn country, according to the UN.

The Syrian Center for Policy Research, however, put the death toll from the six-year conflict at more than 470,000 people.

PHOTO CAPTION

Syrians inspect the damage at the site of an airstrike staged by Russian army in the opposition-controlled Bustan al-Qasr neighborhood of Aleppo, Syrian on October 11, 2016.

AA