DAMASCUS: A shooting attack on a bus in central Syria on Wednesday killed seven people and left four others wounded, state media reported.

The perpetrators of the shooting in Homs province have not yet been identified, the official Sana news agency added.

A security source who requested anonymity had initially given AFP a preliminary toll of five dead.

Among the bus passengers were “engineers and workers from a private company” and an employee of the Syrian Electricity Company, who is among the victims, the security source said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said all of the victims were from the Alawite minority, which has suffered attacks including massacres on the coast in 2025 that left more than 1,400 people dead.

Syrian authorities have been facing major security challenges since the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime at the end of 2024, with Damascus and its outskirts hit by several attacks.

Shortly before the bus attack, state media reported an explosion at a gas pipeline near one of the country’s main power plants, close to Damascus, two days after the sabotage of another pipeline in eastern Syria.

On August 22, a bomb attack on a bus carrying members of the Syrian internal security forces near Damascus injured several people.

In early August, a bus explosion in Jaramana, a town near Damascus where Christian and Druze communities live, left 14 people wounded.

In July, two explosions occurred near a hotel where French President Emmanuel Macron was staying during an official visit, although he was not there at the time.

Those blasts killed one person and wounded 36. The authorities later announced the arrest of those responsible, saying they belonged to the Daesh group.