Syria said a blast at a depot for war remnants in the northwestern province of Idlib killed four people Thursday, with a war monitor saying the explosion occurred in a base for foreign fighters.
Residents told AFP they heard the sound of explosions on the outskirts of the provincial capital.
State news agency SANA, citing the health ministry, reported at least “four dead and five others injured” in the blast.
The ministry for emergencies and disaster management said in a statement that the “large blast” occurred “in a depot for war remnants”.
Minister Raed al-Saleh said on X that the death toll included two children and stressed “the need to unite the efforts of ministries, institutions and local bodies to limit the risks of unexploded ordnance and war remnants”.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported “the sound of successive large explosions at a base for non-Syrian fighters containing a weapons depot as a drone was in the air”.
The Britain-based monitoring group gave a higher toll of six dead including two civilians and eight others injured, three of them civilians.
Northwest Syria’s Idlib region was a bastion of rebel and jihadist groups including foreign fighters before Islamist-led forces launched a lightning offensive last year and overthrew longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.
Some groups of foreign fighters still have bases in the region.
Late last month, a series of explosions in Idlib province killed at least 12 people and wounded more than 100, the Observatory said at the time.
Those blasts occurred at a weapons depot belonging to Uyghur jihadist group the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) in Maaret Misrin, the monitor reported.
Authorities did not immediately say what may have caused those explosions.
bur-lar/lg/dcp
© Agence France-Presse
