Filed on November 17, 2018 | Last updated on November 17, 2018 at 05.52 am

Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev of the Russian Defence Ministry told reporters on Friday that nearly 6,000 people returned to Syria in the last week alone.

The Russian military says nearly 270,000 Syrian refugees have returned home to their country in recent months.

Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev of the Russian Defence Ministry told reporters on Friday that nearly 6,000 people returned to Syria in the last week alone, according to data collected by Russia. He says they are seeing large flows of refugees returning home.

Moscow and the government in Damascus have been encouraging refugees to repatriate, arguing that the violence has subsided. Russia launched military operations to help Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2015, changing the tide of the war in his favour.

Western governments have, however, argued that it's too early to encourage return, fearing that refugees would be facing persecution upon return to the government-controlled areas in absence of a comprehensive political agreement.

Meanwhile, militants on Friday killed nine Syrian regime fighters near a planned buffer zone around the country's last major rebel bastion, a monitor said.

A September deal between government ally Russia and opposition backer Turkey aimed to set up a de-militarised zone around the northwestern region of Idlib to protect it from a regime assault.

But its implementation has been stalled since militants who hold around 70 per cent of the planned buffer area failed to withdraw by mid-October, and sporadic clashes have rocked the area since.

Early on Friday, militant groups attacked government forces in the northwest of Hama province near the planned buffer zone, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. "Nine regime fighters and five assailants were killed" in the attack, causing government forces to respond with artillery fire, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The attackers included the Al Qaeda-linked Hurras Al Deen group, which has publicly rejected the Russian-Turkish deal, he said.

The lion's share of Idlib is held by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, an alliance led by Al Qaeda's former Syrian affiliate.

Under the September 17 deal, all fighters in the zone were supposed to withdraw their heavy weapons and militants including HTS and Hurras Al Deen were supposed to leave.

On Thursday, Russian spokeswoman Maria Zakharova criticised "sporadic clashes", as well as "provocations" by HTS in northwestern Syria.