Daily Times

A double bomb attack in Syria’s jihadist-held city of Idlib on Monday killed 24 people, including four children, a war monitor said. The first blast was caused by a bomb planted under a car in the main city of the Idlib region, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. A motorcycle bomb detonated after ambulances arrived at the scene of the first explosion, the Britain-based monitoring group said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which the Observatory said also wounded at least 51, updating an earlier casualty toll. Idlib, the last major part of Syria still outside the control of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, is held by an alliance led by Syria’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. HTS took administrative control of the whole of the region last month, after overpowering smaller Turkey-backed factions.

Published in Daily Times, February 19^th 2019.