Turkey pledges support for Syrian opposition

In other violence in the city, the official SANA news agency said a former parliament member, his wife and two daughters were killed near the Aleppo airport. The report said "terrorists," the term the Syrian government uses for rebels, fired at Ibrahim Azzouz's car in Sheik Said neighborhood, killing the family.

Rebels captured the strategic Sheik Said neighborhood southeast of Aleppo on Saturday. It was a significant blow to regime forces because the area includes the road the army has used to supply troops.

Troops loyal to Assad and rebels have been locked in a deadly stalemate in Aleppo, Syria's largest urban center and main commercial hub, since an opposition assault last summer. Seven months later, the rebels hold large parts of the city and its outskirts, including several army bases. But they have been unable to overcome the regime's far superior firepower.

The Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which opposes the regime, said government troops bombarded a building in in Aleppo's rebel-held neighborhood of Ansari Sunday and killed at least 16 people, including 10 children and youth.

The Aleppo Media Center, a network of anti-regime activists in the city, said 20 people were killed in the shelling of Ansari. An amateur video released by the group showed a building reduced to a pile of debris with dozens of people digging through the rubble in search for survivors.

"The family of the man over there is still under the rubble," a man could be heard saying, referring to a man standing in the area.

The video appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting on the events depicted.

In Beirut, airport officials said Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faysal Mekdad flew to Dubai. It was not clear whether if Mekdad will continue to another destination.

Mekdad and other Syrian officials have been using Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport in the past months after fighting intensified near the Damascus International Airport, and many regional and international airlines stopped flying to the Syrian capital.

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Associated Press Writers Bassem Mroue in Beirut and Geir Moulson in Munich contributed to this report.