Explosion at Syrian weapons depot kills 39

AN EXPLOSION at a weapons depot in a rebel-held town in north-west Syria yesterday killed at least 39 civilians, including 12 children, a monitor said.

The explosion happened in Sarmada, near the Turkish border and north of Idlib, the provincial capital city.

Rami Abdel Rahman, the 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.

But the cause of the blast was “not yet clear”, Mr 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 alqaeda affiliate, who had been displaced to the area from the central province of Homs. A civil defence source told AFP news agency that women and children were among the dead. Rescue workers had pulled out “five people who were still alive”, the source said.

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

In recent days, regime forces have ramped up their deadly bombardment of southern Idlib and sent reinforcements to nearby areas they control.

On Friday, 12 civilians, three of them children, were killed in regime bombardment of the towns of Khan Sheikhun and Al-tah.

Bashar al-assad, the Syrian president, has warned that government forces intend to retake Idlib, after his Russia-backed regime regained control of swathes of rebel-held territory in other parts of the country.