More than 270,000 people have been killed in Syria's nearly five-year conflict, a monitor said Tuesday in a new toll released just a day after a ceasefire deal was announced.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a total of 271,138 people have lost their lives in the war which broke out on March 2011.

The revered Sayyida Zeinab shrine near Damascus has become a symbol of the bloody sectarian fault line in Syria's war, targeted by Sunni jihadists and used as a rallying call by Shiite groups.

For years, thousands of Shiite Muslims have visited the sacred site each day, circling the courtyard and chanting religious hymns.

The Islamic State group and other jihadists on Monday cut a vital supply route linking the west of Syria's second city Aleppo with other government-held territory, a monitoring group said.

The road between Aleppo and the town of Khanasser to the southeast was the only way regime forces and civilians living in government-controlled neighborhoods of the city could travel to surrounding provinces.

President Bashar Assad says he wants to be remembered 10 years from now as the person who saved Syria, according to an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais published on Saturday.

Assad, whose fate has been a key sticking point in efforts to end Syria's bloody civil war as it enters its sixth year, left open the question of whether he would still be president by then.

The U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting on Friday at Russia's request to discuss the crisis in Syria, diplomats said.

The meeting scheduled for 2000 GMT was called to address Turkey's proposal for ground forces to be deployed in Syria, the Russian foreign ministry said in Moscow.

Russia is accusing Turkey of helping jihadists recruit fighters from the Caucasus and Central Asia to fight in Syria, according to a letter sent to the U.N. Security Council.

Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said in the letter dated February 10 that recruiters from the Islamic State group had reportedly established a network in the Turkish city of Antalya for foreign fighters from the former Soviet Union.

The United Nations should be able to deliver aid to all of Syria's 18 besieged areas within a week, a senior U.N. official said Thursday, after life-saving supplies reached five locations.

Jan Egeland, who is the special advisor to the U.N.'s Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, made the comments after a meeting of representatives from the 17-nation International Syria Support Group (ISSG).

Strikes by a U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State group killed at least 15 civilians, including three children, in northeastern Syria on Thursday, a monitor said.

The strikes hit four IS-controlled villages in Hasakeh province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, saying the toll could rise.

An intensification of fighting between pro-government forces and rebels in southern Syria has left nearly 50,000 civilians homeless in the heart of winter, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

The displacement comes with international attention largely focused on the north of Syria, where a government offensive backed by Russian air strikes has triggered an exodus of refugees towards the Turkish border.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday described the humanitarian situation in Syria as "intolerable" and reiterated her call for a no-fly zone to protect civilians.

The current situation in Syria remains intolerable," she said about the conflict in which Russian-backed regime forces have launched a major offensive against rebels in and around Aleppo