A drone attack on a military college in Syria’s Homs provincecaused a large number of casualties, Syrian state TV reported on Thursday. 
The Syrian regime’s Al-Ikhbariya channel said: “A drone attack targeted the graduation ceremony for an officers’ course at the Military College in Homs, resulting in large numbers of deaths and injuries.”
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, as cited by AFP, at least 80 people were killed – including military personnel and at least nine civilians – with 240 more wounded. The death toll is likely to increase.

Local sources reported that explosions were heard in several neighbourhoods of the western city of Homs, with drones targeting the city’s Military College building. 
Meanwhile, the Russian agency Sputnik, citing local medical sources said that ambulances had arrived and began transporting the injured to Homs Military Hospital.

Regime-affiliated television described the attack as “terrorist-related” on the Telegram messaging app. However, no group has yet claimed the attack.
Israel has carried out strikes in Homs and other areas, while the Syrian regime is also engaged in fighting with a small pocket of Islamic State group fighters in a remote corner of the province. 
Syrian rebels and the extremist group Hayaat Tahrir Al-Sham have also hit regime security targets across Syria, including military and police bases.
Parts of Homs city and the province were held by rebels until brutal regime assaults forced them to surrender.

Unknown parties downed A Turkish drone on Wednesday, 4 October, as it approached a US Coalition base in northeast Syriawhile Turkish aircraft carried out a series of airstrikes against US-backed Kurdish fighters (SDF) in the area.
Local media outlets claimed that the Turkish drone was either downed by US Coalition forces or the SDF, but neither party claimed responsibility for the attack.
Videos published by activists showed an explosion in the sky, followed by photos of the wreckage of the Turkish drone.

Turkish forces struck at least 17 locations in the area controlled by the SDF, the Rojava Information Center reported.

The renewed Turkish offensive follows comments by Turkey’s FM Hakan Fidan on Tuesday, where he claimed that the two attackers who bombed government buildings in Ankara had come from Syria.
“All infrastructure, superstructure and energy facilities that belong to the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] and the YPG [the main contingent of the SDF], especially in Iraq and Syria, are legitimate targets,” Fidan said.

Fidan’s comments and the bombing spree that accompanied it sparked alarm within the SDF, with the head of the US-backed militia denying any links to the PKK attack in Ankara over the weekend.

Turkey views the SDF as an offshoot of the PKK, the latter of which has been engaged in an on-again-off-again conflict since the 1980s that has left more than 40,000 dead.

Will Turkey go to Ground operation in northeast Syria? 
Fidan’s comments were met with silence by the SDF’s international partners, the US and Russia, who have mediated between them and Turkey in the past.
The last Turkish Ground operation in northeast Syria was in October 2019, when Turkish-backed Syrian fighters pushed SDF fighters away from the border to create a “security buffer” between the SDF and Turkey.

Since then, Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly pledged to crack down on the SDF but has not followed through on his threats.
“We should expect a string of Turkish airstrikes and a potential ground operation depending on new developments like the Russian insistence on protecting the YPG,” Ömer Özkizilcik, an Ankara-based foreign policy analyst who focuses on Syria, told The New Arab.

Özkizilcik specified that Turkey’s willingness to launch a ground invasion of northeast Syria depends much on Russia, which conducts joint-security patrols along contested areas along SDF territory.

The US, the SDF’s main backer, also has a significant role in allowing any Turkish Ground operation in northeast Syria.

“Turkey wouldn’t dare such a venture without tacit US consent. Until now, it’s not there, not even from Russia’s side,” Hassan al-Ali, a Syrian activist based in Deir e-Zour, told TNA.
Turkey’s foreign minister warned “third parties” to “stay away from the facilities and people belonging to the PKK and the YPG” on Tuesday, understood to reference US and Russian troops.

According to al-Ali, despite the increased air strikes by Turkey, a ground operation is unlikely unless it is given the green light from both Russia and the US.
The SDF is now facing pressure on its northern borders with Turkey and in the south in Deir e-Zour province, where tribal elements have tried to wrest control of key towns from the militia.

An elderly woman and her four children were killed in Syrian regime bombing of an opposition-held village in Aleppo province on Wednesday night, according to reports.
The overnight bombardment targeted their home in Kafr Nuran, close to the front line in the west of Aleppo province.
“An elderly woman and four of her children were killed in shelling by regime forces on the outskirts of Kfar Nuran,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.
The Syrian Civil Defence, known as the White Helmets, also said a house was hit, killing “five civilians from the same family, including three women”, and wounding another woman.
The family, like thousands of others living in Idlib and Aleppo provinces, had been displaced from elsewhere in Syria as a result of brutal regime assaults on opposition-held areas.
The bodies of the woman, her two daughters, and two sons were wrapped in white shrouds and taken to a location near the town of Atareb, an AFP correspondent said.
Also on Wednesday, a child was killed and six other people – including four children – were injured following renewed Syrianregime bombing of residential areas of Sarmin in Idlib province.
Regime forces used artillery and rocket launchers to bomb residential neighbourhoods and Al-Wahi Al-Sharif school in Sarmin, activist Moustafa Al-Mohammed told The New Arab’s Arabic sister service Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.
The bombing took place as pupils left a school in the area.
Al-Mohammed added that the town’s main mosque was also damaged by rocket-propelled grenades.
Munir Al-Mustafa, deputy director of the White Helmets civil defence group confirmed that regime forces targeted civilian homes, the mosque, and a school.

The White Helmets, which operates in rebel-held parts of Syria, evacuated some of the injured to hospitals.
Sarmin was also bombed the previous day in an attack targeting neighbourhoods, a petrol station, and areas close to a school where children were leaving. A man and a woman were injured.
Idlib is located in northwest Syria and is one of a few regions of Syria still outside the control of the regime.

More than four million people live in rebel-held parts of northern and northwestern Syria.
Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and rebel groups control the last parts of northwestern Syria, including areas of Idlib, Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia provinces.
A ceasefire brokered by Russia and Turkey was declared in Idlib after a regime offensive in March 2020, but it has been repeatedly violated by the regime and Moscow.
War erupted in Syria after regime leader Bashar Al-Assad’s security forces crushed peaceful protests in 2011. With backing from Iran and Russia, Assad has recaptured most of the territory it lost to rebel groups at the start of the conflict.
The war has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.