New air strikes targeting the Syrian city of Raqqa have killed at least eight people, including five children, according to opposition groups.
The strikes came as French foreign minister Laurent Fabius declared that destroying the Islamic State headquarters and "neutralising and eradicating" the extremist group is the main objective of the international military campaign.
Raqqa, in north-eastern Syria, is the group's de-facto capital and has become the focus of air strikes in the wake of the Paris terror attacks and the bombing of a Russian jetliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for both incidents.
A Raqqa-based activist group that reports on Islamic State, known as Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, said most of Friday’s casualties occurred when warplanes targeted the city’s Heten School.
The school, like others in Raqqa, has been taken over by Islamic State.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll at 12, including the five children.
It was not immediately clear who carried out the latest air strikes.
Meanwhile, Russian president Vladimir Putin has asked France to draw up a map of where groups fighting Islamic State militants operate in Syria in order not to bomb them, France’s foreign minister said on Friday.
French President Francois Hollande and Putin agreed during talks in Moscow on Thursday to exchange intelligence on Islamic State and other rebel groups to improve the effectiveness of their aerial bombing campaigns in Syria.
“He asked us to draw up a map of forces that are not terrorists and are fighting Daesh (Islamic State). He committed to not bombing them once we’ve provided that,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on RTL after accompanying Hollande to Moscow.
The West has accused Moscow of targeting mostly Western-backed rebel groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad instead of Islamic State.
France has stepped up it aerial bombing campaign of Islamic State targets in Syria since the group claimed responsibility for attacks in Paris on November 13th that killed 130 people.
The militants have also claimed the downing of a Russian airliner that broke up over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on October 31st, killing all 224 people on board.
“There is now one point which everyone agrees and that is the objective of destroying Daesh,” Fabius said referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “I think on that we are progressing.”
He added that immediate priorities for both sides in the coming weeks would be to free Raqqa, Islamic State’s Syrian stronghold, as well as targeting oil infrastructure controlled by the group.
“It is the neurological centre of Daesh, where attacks, especially those in France, originated,” he said.