An explosion at a weapons depot that toppled buildings in a rebel-held town of northwest Syria killed at least 39 civilians including a dozen children 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 the collapse of two buildings.
Rescue workers used bulldozers to remove rubble and extract trapped people from the flattened buildings, the correspondent said.
A civil defence source told AFP that rescue workers had pulled out “five people who were still alive”.
But the death toll rose as more bodies were retrieved from the rubble, according to Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.
Three Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) members were also killed, apart from the 39 civilians, he said.
“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 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, as 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.
– Bombing ramped up –
Most of Idlib is controlled by rebels and HTS, but the Islamic State jihadist group also has sleeper cells in the area.
In recent months, a series of explosions and assassinations — mainly targeting rebel officials and fighters — have rocked the province.
Agencies.
