A blast targeting a bus in Syria’s eastern province of Deir Ezzor on Thursday killed at least five defence ministry personnel, an official from the ministry told AFP.<\/p>\n
“An explosive device detonated as a bus carrying oil facility guards affiliated with the defence ministry passed by, killing five of them and wounding 13 others, including civilian bystanders,” the official said, requesting anonymity.<\/p>\n
State television said a blast hit a bus on the road between the cities of Deir Ezzor and Mayadeen, some 50 kilometres (30 miles) away.<\/p>\n
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the perpetrators were “likely affiliated with an Islamic State (IS) group cell”.<\/p>\n
IS jihadists, once in control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria, were territorially defeated in Syria in 2019 in a battle spearheaded by the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with support from an international coalition.<\/p>\n
The jihadists still maintain a presence, particularly in Syria’s vast desert, launching attacks mostly on Kurdish-controlled areas in the country’s northeast.<\/p>\n
During Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011, IS carried out similar attacks on buses targeting the forces of former ruler Bashar al-Assad.<\/p>\n
Since the new Islamist-led authorities took power after Assad’s December ouster, jihadist attacks on government-controlled areas have been scarce.<\/p>\n
In May, IS claimed its first attack on the new forces, with the Observatory saying one member of Syrian army personnel was killed and three others wounded.<\/p>\n
The following month, authorities accused IS of being behind a deadly suicide attack in a Damascus church that killed 25 people, though the group never claimed responsibility.<\/p>\n
str-nad\/lg\/csp<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A blast targeting a bus in Syria’s eastern province of Deir Ezzor on Thursday killed at least five defence ministry personnel, an official from the ministry told AFP. “An explosive device detonated as a bus carrying oil facility guards affiliated with the defence ministry passed by, killing five of them and wounding 13 others, including […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"jnews_post_split":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[158,125],"class_list":["post-14482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-regional","tag-attack","tag-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14482"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14485,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14482\/revisions\/14485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.iq\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}