A suicide bomber detonated his bomb-rigged truck near a primary school in a Syrian Shia town on Sunday, killing at least 12 people, half of them children, as Government military aircraft dropped barrels laden with explosives onto a marketplace in the north, activists said.
The suicide truck bombing occurred outside a compound of schools in the town of Umm al-Amed in the eastern province of Homs, said Rami Abdurrahman of the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The organisation obtains its information from a network of activists on the ground. Syrian state media said eight people were killed, and said 34 were wounded, mostly children.
It wasn’t immediately possible to reconcile the conflicting tolls. The bombing underscores how Syria’s civil war, now in its third year, has become more sectarian.