Unknown assailants opened fire on a civilian bus on the Masyaf Bridge in Syria’s Homs province. According to the SANA news agency, at least seven people were killed and four others were injured and taken to hospitals. Homs’s head of internal security said the target was a bus belonging to one of the companies and that the attack was being treated as an attempt to undermine the city’s security and stability. He vowed that the crime would not go unpunished. France’s AFP news agency, citing an anonymous source, added that the bus was carrying engineers and workers from a private energy company.
The attack came amid a series of alarming incidents in different parts of Syria. According to official media reports, shortly beforehand an explosion occurred on a gas pipeline near one of the main power plants in the Damascus suburbs, while two days earlier the authorities described damage to another gas pipeline in the east of the country as “sabotage.” Since late 2024, following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Syria’s new authorities have faced security problems in several regions, including Damascus and its outskirts.
This was not the first such incident. On August 22, an explosion near a bus carrying internal security forces outside Damascus wounded several personnel; earlier that month, 14 people were injured when a passenger bus exploded in Jaramana, a Damascus suburb. In July, Syrian authorities linked two simultaneous explosions near a hotel where French President Emmanuel Macron was staying during a visit to Damascus to an Islamic State cell. These incidents underscore how fragile security remains in the country.
Full version: 7 killed in shooting targeting a bus in Homs