DAMASCUS: A cargo train was targeted and derailed by a “terrorist” attack Sunday as it carried phosphate through central Syria, the war-torn country’s transport ministry said.
The train’s crew suffered “various injuries” when the train came off the tracks in Homs province, spilling the loads from two cars and starting a fire, it said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported the incident, saying a bomb placed by “unknown people” on a stretch of track east of Palmyra had exploded as the train passed.
The blast put the train “entirely out of service”, the Britain-based war monitor added.
There was no immediate claim for the attack, but Islamic State group sleeper cells have a presence in Syria’s vast desert and have continued to carry out attacks despite losing the last scrap of their territorial “caliphate” in March.
Sunday’s blast comes a week after a sabotage attack temporarily took down a key pipeline transporting gas from the vast government-controlled Shaer gas field, also in the central province of Homs.
Last month, underwater pipelines connected to a refinery in western Syria were sabotaged.
A senior official at the time said the attack was carried out with the help of a foreign state.
In March 2018, Syria granted Russian firm Stroytransgaz a 50-year concession to extract phosphate in the Palmyra region.
The regime of President Bashar Al-Assad has accused the West of waging an “economic war” against Syria.
Shortly after Syria’s conflict broke out in 2011 with anti-regime protests that were brutally repressed, Western powers imposed sanctions on Assad’s regime including a fuel embargo.
The complex war, which has since dragged in regional and world powers including regime allies Russia and Iran, has left more than 370,000 people dead and millions displaced. — AFP
