Six people were wounded when a roadside blast hit a convoy transporting local officials including the governor in Syria’s southern Daraa province on Wednesday, the interior ministry said.

“Six people were lightly wounded” when a roadside “explosive device planted by a terrorist group” went off while the local officials were returning “from a work visit” in the province’s east, a ministry statement said.

The Daraa governor, a police chief and a local official from the ruling Baath party were among the officials in the convoy, the ministry added, without specifying who was injured in the attack.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said several police officers were wounded in the incident.

Daraa was the cradle of the 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad but it returned to government control in 2018 under a ceasefire deal backed by Russia.

The southern province has since been plagued by unrest, with regular attacks, armed clashes and assassinations, some claimed by the Islamic State group.

Former rebels in Daraa province who accepted the 2018 deal sponsored by Russia, Damascus’s main ally, were able to keep their light weapons.

Syria’s war spiralled into a complex conflict drawing in foreign armies and jihadists.

It has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country’s infrastructure and industry.

With AFP

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