Twenty-five soldiers were among 36 people killed in violence in Syria on Thursday as the army met mounting armed resistance to its crackdown on dissent, a human rights group said.

Of the civilians killed, one died in the flashpoint central city of Homs while 10 were killed, one of them a child, in Banash, a town in Idlib province in the northwest, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.

Among the security personnel force personnel, 15 soldiers, some of them officers, were killed in Banash, the London-based watchdog said.

A security service agent was killed in Quseir, near Homs, while nine troops were killed in Daraa, another flashpoint city south of Damascus, it added.