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Rebel fire on a government-held neighborhood in Aleppo killed nine people Monday, including three children, Syria’s state news agency SANA reported. It said they were killed in Hay al-Sirian, in government-controlled west Aleppo, but gave no additional details, The Daily Star reported.

Rebel groups have declared that they are stepping up their attacks on regime-held areas of the country in response to government airstrikes on Douma, a suburb of Damascus.

In the south, where an Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah campaign is in full swing against rebel-held positions, Hezbollah fighters were repulsed as they attacked the Deraa province village of Mashara, close to the border with Qunaitra province, pro-opposition sources said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, said there were confirmed casualties on both sides of the clashes.

Pro-regime social media said clashes also broke out in the city of Deraa, where the regime holds a pocket of territory, and claimed a number of rebel fighters were killed.

Issam Rayyes, spokesman for the Southern Front alliance, aligned with the rebel Free Syrian Army, said that Iranian and Hezbollah losses during the campaign, which began last week, were “much greater” than the two were declaring in public.

However, the spokesman told the Italian news agency AKI that contrary to reports circulating, the rebels were not holding several dozen captured Iranian fighters.

“There are huge losses for Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the regime, and what they’ve acknowledged is a small portion of their dead,” he said.

“There are no Iranian prisoners, just the corpses of two Iranian officers” in the possession of the rebels, he added.