ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Syrian army announced on Thursday that it downed two drones in Damascus without explicitly blaming any party.
The army said its air defence systems "confronted two enemy drones" flying over the skies of of the capital city," adding that it did not cause any material damage or casualties.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that "explosions" were heard in Damascus without blaming any groups.
This comes amid an escalation of tensions in the country.
A coalition of Syrian rebels led by the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-led (HTS) launched a blistering offensive against the Syrian army over the past week. They took control of the northern city of Aleppo, the largest in the country, and later advanced their offensive into Hama province.
Syrian army announced its withdrawal from Hama on Thursday, acknowledging that it lost "many" soldiers in the clashes to maintain control of the province.
The United Nations on Wednesday estimated that over 115,000 people have been displaced in Idlib and Aleppo by the renewed clashes.
Syrians rose against the Bashar al-Assad regime in 2011, leading to a full-scale civil war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, left millions more in dire need of humanitarian assistance, and left much of the country’s infrastructure in ruins.
More than 13 million Syrians, half the country’s pre-war population, have been displaced since the start of the civil war, more than 6 million of whom are refugees who have fled the war-torn country, according to United Nations figures.
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