Heavy rain across northern and eastern Syria has set off flash floods that killed several people, most of them children, and cut a main road between two provinces.
The death toll rose over two days of reporting. Al Jazeera, reporting on Friday, put it at five dead including four children, citing a statement issued on Thursday by Syria’s Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management. Hiru News, filing a Reuters-sourced report on Saturday, gave a higher figure of seven dead including five children, with seven injured and four people missing. Al Jazeera’s earlier account had listed five missing, two of them children.
The children drowned in bodies of water across the Raqqa and Deir Az Zor governorates, the ministry said. A man died separately when his car was caught in floodwaters near the al-Salmani Bridge in the western Raqqa countryside — an account that matches, in more detail, Hiru’s reference to one death in a road accident.
Emergency and Disaster Management Minister Raed al-Saleh said the children had died after being submerged in flooded ground. Details of the seventh death in the later toll have not been disclosed.
The ministry reported damage to infrastructure and disruption to bridges across five governorates: Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir Az Zor, Hasakah and Homs. The state news agency SANA said the al-Salmani Bridge, west of Tabqa, collapsed in the flooding, closing the road linking Raqqa to Aleppo.
Thursday was the second consecutive day on which the ministry recorded flood responses nationwide. Rescue teams were still working in submerged areas, searching for those unaccounted for.
The storms have fallen on a country where large numbers of people remain in displacement camps, in tents poorly suited to sustained rain.
Not reported: The two tolls were filed roughly a day apart and neither source states a consolidated final figure, so the casualty count should be read as provisional.
