School bus full of children plunges into river in Syria

At least six people, most of them children have reportedly died after a school bus plunged into a river in Syria Thursday.

The Syria Civil Defense group said the bus carrying dozens of children left the road near the city of Darkush, west of Idlib, and plunged into the Orontes River.

“Rescue teams were searching for survivors in the cliffside and in the river,” a local civil defense organization also known as the White Helmets noted in a statement.

It was not immediately clear what caused the bus to go off the road. Images from the scene showed a steep crag overlooking the riverbed where searchers were scrambling over boulders.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based war monitor, said the children had been attending a Quran memorization institute, of which there are many in northwest Syria.

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It was the latest tragedy to affect an area that has already been hit hard by Syria’s ongoing civil war and by a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Turkey and northern Syria last year.

Most of most of the 5.1 million people living in opposition-held northwest Syria have been internally displaced, sometimes more than once, in the country’s civil war, now in its 14th year, and rely on aid to survive.

Images from the scene showed a steep crag overlooking the riverbed, with searchers scrambling over boulders to find survivors, according to the Associated Press. The bus was reported to have overturned multiple times before coming to a halt in the river, making the rescue operation more challenging.

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