ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – The death toll from an explosion at a Syrian army ammunition depot in Deir ez-Zor countryside reached 11, Syrian state media reported Saturday.

An explosion was reported Friday at a weapons depot inside a Syrian army position in the Ayyash area of western Deir ez-Zor, prompting an investigation into its cause and the resulting damage.

“Eleven soldiers, martyred in the Deir ez-Zor blast, were escorted Saturday to their final resting place,” state-run SANA reported, adding that funeral processions were held at the National Hospital in Deir ez-Zor city and attended by officers and relatives of those killed.

A similar explosion occurred earlier in September at a weapons depot in the city of Sarmada, northwestern Idlib, killing 14 people and injuring 11, according to the province’s health directorate.

The Sarmada site was affiliated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), where fighters would buy weapons and ammunition, “including spoils of war,” from the facility to prevent individual sales before it was transferred to the Syrian defense ministry following the regime change in Syria, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) asserted.

It added that it had obtained information indicating that the Islamic State (ISIS) may be behind both the Sarmada and Ayyash explosions.

ISIS took control of swathes of Syrian and Iraqi territory in 2014, declaring its so-called caliphate with the Iraqi city of Mosul as its capital. They were territorially defeated with assistance from the US-led coalition forces in Syria in 2019.