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An explosion at a weapons depot near the northwestern city of Idlib killed at least 14 people and injured 11 others, Syria’s Health Ministry said.
“The toll from the explosion in a temporary storage for collecting weapons and war remnants near the town of Sarmada … registered 14 killed and 11 injured in a preliminary count,” the Idlib health department said.
Security forces cordoned off roads leading to the Burj al-Nimra area on the road to Sarmada, some 45 kilometres from Idlib, as Civil Defence and Syrian Red Crescent first-responders continued to search for survivors trapped under the rubble.
Video footage widely circulated after the blast showed a large plume of black smoke and smaller explosions could be heard.
The depot was used to store weapons and munitions left over from the country’s civil war from 2011 until 2024, according to authorities.
The cause of the blast near the town of Sarmada was not immediately clear. Initial assessments indicated the explosion was caused by munitions, said the head of emergency operations for Idlib’s disaster management directorate, Walid Aslan.
Ahmad Faour, a mechanic who works near the warehouse, said he and others first heard a small explosion and ran away before the large blast.
“A weapons warehouse should not be placed in a public area, in a village with people and shops,” he said, after looking through the damaged cars in his garage. “Those poor people who died were not guilty of anything.”
The incident on Wednesday is the second deadly blast in Idlib this month, after a car carrying ammunition exploded, killing five in the city of Binnish.
A government source said at the time that the car was owned by a weapons trader, while authorities did not announce the cause of the blast.
Remnants of war
Syria is ranked among the world’s most heavily contaminated countries for unexploded ordnance.
Explosions involving munitions-laden cars or arms depots have sporadically occurred in Idlib, a former front-line province where multiple armed factions stored weapons throughout the civil war which is among the most severely affected areas.
In November 2025, a blast at an ammunition depot in the Kafr Takharim area killed five workers and wounded nine.
In August 2025, an ammunition explosion on the outskirts of Idlib city killed four people and wounded five.
Humanitarian organisations called on Wednesday for intensified international and local efforts to clear mines and war remnants from the province, which they said continued to claim Syrian lives on a recurring basis.
UK mine-clearance charity HALO Trust estimated that this year unexploded ordnance was killing or wounding one person in Syria every six hours on average.
By August, some 700 casualties from explosive accidents were recorded, one-third of them deadly and one-third being children, according to Simon Jackson, HALO Trust’s Syria programme manager.
According to Jackson, last year saw “a large spike in accidents as people rushed back to their communities” after the fall of al-Assad in December 2024.
Additional sources • AP, AFP