Syria’s new army has lost about thirty men to its own ammunition since September 1
A fourth depot explosion, at al-Eis south of Aleppo, has gone unexplained by Damascus. The casualties are almost entirely uniformed, which makes this a story about how the army was built.
Reuters, filing from Aleppo on 21 September, reported a series of explosions tearing through an army weapons depot near Al-Eis early on Monday, the fourth such incident this month, with authorities offering no immediate explanation. Four people were hurt, one by falling shrapnel, according to the Emergency and Disaster Management Ministry via the state agency SANA. Al Jazeera compiled the month’s toll: five killed on 1 September when a vehicle carrying ammunition exploded at Binnish, Idlib; fourteen defence ministry personnel killed on 9 September at Sarmada, also Idlib; eleven soldiers killed on Friday 18 September at Ayyash, west of Deir ez-Zor; four injured at al-Eis. That is roughly thirty dead in three weeks, virtually all of them serving personnel, from munitions the state was storing rather than from anything fired at it.
On cause, the published assessments diverge sharply. Al Jazeera cited the analyst Ömer Özkızılcık saying there was “no public information about possible sabotage” and no evidence of a direct attack, while noting that analysts have not ruled it out given repeated Israeli strikes. Against that, The National reported Brig Gen Mohammad Al Baqaei telling the private Syria TV channel he was “almost certain that this was a deliberate act of sabotage”, and speculating that unidentified aircraft, “most likely Israeli”, had struck the depot — a commentator on a private channel, not an official or an investigator, and unsupported by any evidence in the record. The backdrop is structural: Asharq Al-Awsat reports the first stage of army-building grouped more than 100 former factions into about 22 divisions, while the EU Agency for Asylum’s July 2026 country report describes former rebel militias “reflagged” as divisions and brigades, with ISW and the Critical Threats Project counting 20 active divisions as of September 2025.
Assessment: Damascus has attributed nothing, and that silence is itself the finding. An army assembled by relabelling more than a hundred factions inherits their arsenals, their storage habits and their local chains of custody along with their men; the munitions killing defence ministry personnel in Idlib are the same stock those units brought with them. Sabotage cannot be excluded, but the Israeli-aircraft theory currently rests on one television commentator. Note the asymmetry with the New York story: Sharaa counts Israeli strikes in the hundreds at the UN rostrum while his government declines to blame Israel for the explosions actually killing its soldiers. That reticence is the more reliable indicator of what the state believes happened.