BEIRUT: A missile struck a Syrian military bus in the country’s north early on Friday, killing 10 soldiers, Syria’s state-run media and an opposition monitor said. It wasn’t immediately clear who was behind the attack, one of the deadliest since a truce deal reached more than two years ago.
The official news agency SANA said “terrorists” targeted the bus in the western countryside of Aleppo, in the Anjara area. Nine soldiers were wounded in the attack, the report said.
There was no claim of responsibility. The area is dominated by the al-Qaida-linked militant group, Hayaat Tahrir al-Sham.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights — a war-monitoring group with a network of activists on the ground — reported the attack but said that Syrian opposition forces fired the missile and that the 10 killed were government-allied fighters.
Most of Syria has returned to government control after a decade of war, with the exception of the opposition-held bastion of Idlib in the northwest and nearby areas, and the oil-rich northeast, held by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish groups.
The violence has largely tapered off in most of the country, but few among the nearly 6 million refugees scattered across the globe have returned.