Syria Vows Revenge as Dozens are Killed in Drone Strike on Military Academy Graduation

At least 54 people were killed and 125 wounded in a drone strike on a graduation ceremony at a Syrian military academy, local news reports said Thursday. 

The death toll was expected to exceed 100, SyriaPulse reported.

“Armed terrorist organizations supported by well-known international parties this afternoon targeted the graduation ceremony of military college officer students in Homs with drones carrying explosive ammunition immediately after the ceremony ended, resulting in the death of a number of martyrs,” Syria’s military said in a statement published by state news agency SANA.

It didn’t name the parties responsible for the attack.

Photos from the graduation showed hundreds of civilians packed into a parade ground in Homs, in Western Syria, prior to the drone strike.

The military said the attack killed “civilians and soldiers,” with “dozens of wounded, including critical injuries among the invited families, including women and children, in addition to a number of college students participating in the graduation.” 

Syria is “a constellation of overlapping crises,” according to the International Crisis Group, where a brutal government battles ISIS and other Islamist extremists and 12 years of conflict that has killed more than 300,000 Syrian civilians.

An estimated 100,000 Syrians are missing, many of them “forcibly disappeared, abducted, tortured, and arbitrarily detained,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in March.

The military said it would respond to Thursday’s attack “with full force and decisiveness to these terrorist organizations wherever they exist.”