Family members of some of the victims of a deadly drone attack on a crowded military graduation ceremony that killed scores gathered outside a military hospital in the central city of Homs on Friday to collect the bodies of their loved ones, who died in one of Syria’s deadliest single attacks in years.

Thursday’s strike on the Homs Military Academy killed 89 people, including 31 women and five children, and wounded as many as 277, according to the health ministry. The death toll could rise as some of the wounded are in critical condition. Syria announced a three-day state of mourning starting Friday.

The attack is likely to lead to a renewed wave of violence in the country’s opposition-held northwest, where front lines have been relatively calm since Russia and Turkey, who support rival sides in the country’s conflict, reached a cease-fire in March 2020, ending a three-month Russian-backed government offensive against insurgents.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for Thursday’s attack as Syria endures its 13th year of conflict that has killed half a million people. In the aftermath, Syrian government forces intensified their shelling and airstrikes on rebel-held regions and insurgents fired back toward areas held by President Bashar Assad’s forces.

The attack was an indication that the war is far from over and a sign of weakness within the Syrian military, which failed to prevent it despite the fact that the army has regained control of most of Syria in recent years with the backing of Russia and Iran.

The last such large-scale killing against government forces came in 2014, when the Islamic State group killed more than 160 Syrian government troops at a military base in the northern province of Raqqa. In a video released at the time, dozens of terrified young conscripts were made to run while stripped down to their underwear before being killed.

Around noon on Friday, the Syrian military fired machine guns toward another drone that flew over Homs, two pro-government media outlets, Al-Watan and Sham FM, reported. It was not immediately clear if the drone was shot down.

The city of Homs is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of rebel-held areas, indicating that insurgents might have acquired weaponized long-range drones.

Fearing retaliation from the government, religious authorities in areas held by the opposition in northern Syria said Friday prayers will not be held in mosques and called on people to pray at home instead “out of concern for the safety of Muslims.”

Syria’s military said in a statement Thursday that drones laden with explosives targeted the ceremony packed with young officers and their families as it was wrapping up. Without naming any particular group, the military accused insurgents “backed by known international forces” for the attack and said “it will respond with full force and decisiveness to these terrorist organizations, wherever they exist.”

Overnight, Syrian troops pounded the last major rebel-held region in parts of Idlib and Aleppo provinces, killing at least three people and wounding more than 15 in the town of Daret Azeh, according to the opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense, also known as White Helmets. The group reported that a child was killed in another strike in a village in the region.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, reported that Russian warplanes carried out several airstrikes on the town of Jisr al-Shughour and nearby villages on Friday. The area is a stronghold of the Turkistan Islamic Party, a Uyghur militant group, many of whose fighters are Chinese Muslims.

In Homs, hundreds of people, many of them dressed in black and weeping, gathered outside the Abdul-Qader Shaqfa Military Hospital where the bodies of 30 victims in coffins draped with Syrian flags were put in ambulances to be taken to their hometowns for burial.

Army Lt. Ibrahim Shaaban came to collect the body of his fiancee, Raneem Quba, 23, who was killed along with her father, Mohammed, and younger sister, Rima, while attending the graduation of her brother, Lt. Hussein Quba.

“I feel that my back was broken,” Shaaban said, holding back his tears while standing by her coffin. “She was not only a fiancee, but a mother, a sister and a friend.”

Legislator Bassam Mohammed said targeting a place where civilians are present “is a terrorist criminal act,” and that the attackers intended to inflict large numbers of casualties.

Syrian Defense Minister Gen. Ali Abbas was present Friday outside the hospital, where he comforted the families of victims. An opposition war monitor reported Thursday that Abbas had left the graduation ceremony shortly before the attack.

“We will go after them and after those who support them,” Abbas said of the insurgents. “We will avenge the blood of martyrs and clean Syria’s soil from terrorists and criminals.”

One of the survivors, Lt. Jaafar Mohammed, 23, said he was taking photos with relatives by the platform when something suddenly exploded in front of them.

“I was thrown to the ground,” said Mohammed, who suffered an arm injury. He said his brother was killed and his father and younger brother were also injured.

Syria’s crisis started with peaceful protests against Assad’s government in March 2011 but quickly morphed into a full-blown civil war after the government’s brutal crackdown on the protesters. The tide turned in Assad’s favor against rebel groups in 2015, when Russia provided key military backing to Syria, as well as Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

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A drone attack struck a packed graduation ceremony for military officers in the Syrian city of Homs
| Photo Credit: AP

A drone attack struck a packed graduation ceremony for military officers in the Syrian city of Homs on Thursday, killing and wounding dozens, including civilians and military personnel, reports said.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack and the reports could not be independently confirmed. Earlier, the army said that drones laced with explosives had targeted the ceremony in the central city of Homs as it was wrapping up but didn’t provide any figures or breakdown of the casualties.

By nightfall, the military had still not provided any definitive casualty numbers. However, Syria’s state television said the government has announced a three-day state of mourning, starting on Friday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said at least 60 officers and civilians were killed, and a further 120 were wounded in the drone strikes. The pro-government Sham FM radio station said 66 people died and around 190 others were wounded.

The military accused insurgents “backed by known international forces” of the attack, without naming any particular group, and said that some of the wounded were in critical condition, including women and children.

The Syrian military said “it will respond with full force and decisiveness to these terrorist organisations, wherever they exist.”

Following the drone attack, the government shelled villages in Idlib province, in the rebel-held northwestern part of the country. There were no immediate reports of casualties there.

The Syrian army shelled another village in the region earlier on Thursday, killing at least five civilians, activists and emergency workers said. The shelling hit a family house on the outskirts of the the village of Kafr Nouran in western Aleppo province, according to opposition-held northwestern Syria’s civil defence organisation known as the White Helmets.

The dead were an older woman and four of her children, according to the Observatory. Nine other members of the family were wounded, it said.

Northwestern Syria is mostly held by al-Qaida linked fighters as well as Turkish-backed opposition forces. The vast majority of around 4.1 million people residing in the enclave live in poverty, relying on humanitarian aid to survive. Many of them are Syrians, internally displaced by the war from other parts of the country.

Meanwhile, local authorities in northeastern Syria, which is under U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said Turkish drone attacks struck in Hassakeh and Qamishli provinces on Thursday, hitting oil production facilities, electrical substations and a dam.

A statement from the local Kurdish authorities said six members of their security forces and two civilians were killed.

Turkey didn’t immediately comment on the strikes but Ankara says the main Syrian Kurdish militia is allied with Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has led an insurgency against Turkey since 1984 that has killed tens of thousands of people. Ankara has declared the PKK a terrorist group.

Syrian Kurdish forces were a major U.S. ally in the war against the militant Islamic State group, which was defeated in Syria in March 2019.