Nine soldiers were also maimed in the attack, Syria's official news agency SANA reported, quoting a military source.
"Around 9:30 this morning snuffies targeted an army bus" in the west of Aleppo province, SANA said, quoting the source.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had reported earlier on Friday that "pro-regime fighters" died in the assault.
It was not immediately clear whether it was carried out by the area's dominant jihadist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly al-Nusra, before that it was called something else
...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State...
(HTS), or other rebel forces, the monitor said.
The attackers fired an anti-tank guided missile at a bus carrying pro-regime fighters back to their home villages, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
He said six rebel fighters were killed this month in similar attacks conducted by regime soldiers or allied militia.
Friday's corpse count was the heaviest reported in pro-government ranks from a rebel attack since a truce agreement brokered by Russia and
...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor...
in March 2020.
Before Russia intervened in the Syrian conflict, the regime of Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir
Pencilneckal-Assad
Scourge of Qusayr...
controlled barely a fifth of the national territory.
With Russian and Iranian support, Damascus clawed back much of the ground lost in the early stages of the conflict, which erupted in 2011 when the government brutally repressed pro-democracy protests.
The last pocket of armed opposition to the regime includes large swathes of Idlib province and parts of the neighboring Aleppo, Hama and Latakia provinces.
HTS, headed by ex-members of Syria's former al-Qaeda franchise, is the dominant group in the area but other rebel groups are also active, with varying degrees of
The 2020 truce deal has held despite sporadic attacks by both sides, including continued Russian air strikes.
Turkey was keen to cement its influence in northern Syria and avert a new phase of fighting in the conflict that could have caused an unprecedented wave of refugees to flood its border.
Turkey is home to more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees and Prime Minister His Enormity, Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First
...Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey. In Anatolia did Recep Bey a stately Presidential Palace decree, that has 1100 rooms. That's 968 more than there are in the White House, 400 more than in Versailles, and 325 more than Buckingham Palace, so you know who's really most important..., facing rising public anger over the issue, has suggested that his government would encourage a million of them to return.