TEHRAN (Iran News) – An explosion caused by a “terrorist attack” against a major gas pipeline in Syria has caused a temporary countrywide blackout.
Reporting on Monday, the official Syria Arab News Agency (SANA) cited Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem as saying that the entire country was left in blackout overnight after the blast at the Arab Gas Pipeline that feeds the country’s southern power stations, Press TV reported.
Syria’s Al-Ikhbariya TV channel cited him as identifying the location of the blast as the stretch of the pipeline that runs between the towns of Al-Dumayr and Adra, northwest of the capital of Damascus.
“After an assessment of the situation, it was determined that the explosion that took place on the gas pipeline between Adra and Al-Dumayr had been caused by a terrorist attack,” the minister was quoted as saying.
Electricity Minister Muhammad Zuhair Kharboutli, however, said some power stations were eventually reconnected and power provided to vital infrastructure. By dawn, electricity was gradually returning to several provinces, he added.
According to Reuters, the US Syria envoy James Jeffrey told reporters in Geneva that there had been an upsurge in Daesh activity in the southeast of the Syrian desert.
The terrorist group lost its last territory in Syria in March 2019 but pockets of terrorists remain.
“We are still looking into (the explosion). But it was almost certainly a strike by ISIS (Daesh),” Jeffrey told reporters at the start of UN-sponsored talks on the Syria conflict.
This is not the first time incidents hit Syria’s gas system since 2011, when the Arab country found itself in the grip of rampant foreign-backed violence.
A major incident came in 2013, when foreign-backed militants shelled a gas pipeline, plunging much of the country into a similar blackout.
- source : Iran Daily
