Blast kills 19 in Alawite town in Syria

Damascus: A roadside bomb struck a bus in Syria’s central province on Thursday, killing 19 people, a local government official said.

The explosion in the village of Jbourin also wounded four people on the bus, according to the official from the governor’s office in Homs province who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

The village is predominantly Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam and a minority sect to which President Bashar Al Assad belongs, but it also has Christians and Sunnis. It was not immediately clear why the bus was targeted but Syria’s civil war, which has left more than 100,000 dead since the crisis erupted in March 2011, has taken increasingly sectarian overtones.

Most of the rebels trying to overthrow Al Assad belong to the majority Sunni sect. Also on Thursday, the international aid agency Oxfam issued an appeal, saying many donor countries are failing to provide their share of the urgently-needed funding for the humanitarian response to Syria crisis.

Oxfam said donors, including France, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Russia, should prioritise funding the UN’s $5 billion (Dh18.6 billion) appeals. Oxfam’s report came ahead of next week’s donors meeting in New York. The donor countries have been influential in shaping the international response to the conflict, but should also bear their fair share of the burden of humanitarian aid, the agency said.

“Too many donor countries are not delivering the level of funds that is expected of them,” said Colette Fearon, head of Oxfam’s Syria program. “While economic times are tough, we are facing the largest man-made humanitarian disaster in two decades and we have to seriously address it.”

“The scale of this crisis is unprecedented and some countries must start to show their concerns to the crisis in Syria by putting their hands in their pockets,” Fearon said.

The fighting in Syria has forced seven million people to flee their homes. Five million Syrians have been displaced inside the country and more than two million have sought refuge in the neighbouring countries of Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, according to the UN.