Kids among 39 civilians dead in Syria arms depot

Beirut, Aug. 12: An explosion at a weapons depot in a rebel-held town in northwest Syria killed at least 39 civilians including a dozen children on Sunday, a monitor said.

An AFP correspondent at the site in Sarmada in Idlib province near the Turkish border said the explosion of unknown origin caused two buildings to collapse.

Rescue workers used bulldozers to remove the rubble and extract trapped people from the flattened buildings, the correspondent said.

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, said a previous death toll of 12 increased after more bodies were retrieved from the rubble.

“The explosion occurred in a weapons depot in a residential building in Sarmada,” said the head of the Britain-based monitor, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria.

But the cause of the blast was “not yet clear”, Abdel Rahman added.

He said most of those killed were family members of fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an alliance led by jihadists from Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate, who had been displaced to the area from

the central province of Homs.

A rescue worker carried the motionless body of a small child from the wreckage to an ambulance, the AFP correspondent said.

White Helmet rescue workers attempted to lift part of a floor of one of the buildings with a tall crane. Nearby three young boys watched on in silence, perched on a rock. Behind mounds of rubble, the facade of a building was scorched black, due to a fire after the blast.

A civil defence source said that women and children were among the dead. But rescue workers had pulled out “five people who were still alive”, the source said.

Most of Idlib is controlled by rebels and HTS, but the Islamic State jihadist group also has sleeper cells in the area.