DAMASCUS: A series of explosions killed at least 12 people and wounded more than 100 at a weapons depot in northwestern Syria on Thursday, rescuers and monitors said.
There was no official statement as to what has caused the blast in Idlib province. A war monitor said the explosion took place at an ammunition depot.
The Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, also said the blast in Idlib, in the town of Maarat Misrin, struck an ammunition depot.
“Our teams are working to recover the bodies of the dead, treat the injured, and extinguish fires at the site of the massive explosion of an ammunition depot,” the White Helmets said in a statement.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SPHR) said the explosion happened at a weapons and ammunition warehouse belonging to the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP),an group active in the Idlib region made up of Uighur fighters who joined the Syrian civil war to fight against former president Bashar Assad.
Syria’s health ministry reported seven deaths and 157 wounded in the blasts, in a toll published by the official news agency SANA.
The state-run Al-Ikhbariya TV referred to the explosion as involving “remnants from the war,” likely shorthand for arms and ammunition left over from Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war. The TV report did not give more details.
Syrian Minister of Emergency and Disaster Management Raed Al-Saleh said in a post on X that teams were transporting the wounded and dead despite “continued recurring explosions in the area, which are hampering response efforts.”
The interior ministry said in a statement it had opened “an urgent and deep investigation to determine the circumstances and causes of the explosion and hold those responsible to account.”
It added it was “taking all necessary measures to avoid such incidents reoccurring in future.”
Syria is struggling to recover since the war ended with the ouster of Assad in a lightning rebel offensive in December. During the war, which killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million, Idlib was an opposition-held enclave.
The country’s current interim President Ahmad Al-Sharaa formerly led Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an insurgent group based in Idlib that spearheaded the offensive that unseated Assad.
