Blast hits munitions depot northeast of Damascus

 An explosion targeted a munitions depot northeast of the Syrian capital Tuesday, causing casualties, a war monitor said, two days after a similar explosion hit warehouses belonging to pro-Iran groups.

The explosion struck a depot containing "missiles and ammunition" in an area northeast of Damascus that is "dominated by Lebanon's Hezbollah," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.

The Britain-based monitor, which has a wide network of sources inside Syria, reported an unspecified number of casualties near the town of Al-Ruhaiba.

The cause of the explosion was not immediately clear.

Syrian state media did not immediately report the blast, which came just two days after the SOHR reported explosions at missile warehouses held by pro-Iran groups in a mountainous area west of the capital.

"We don't know if it was from an air strike or ground operation," SOHR head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP on Sunday.

During more than a decade of civil war, neighboring Israel launched hundreds of air strikes on Syrian territory, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces and Hezbollah fighters, as well as Syrian army positions.

Israel rarely comments on strikes it carries out on targets in Syria, but it has repeatedly expressed its dismay at Iran's expanded presence in the region.

With Iranian and Russian support, Assad's government has reclaimed much of the territory it lost to rebel factions early on in the conflict, which broke out in 2011 and attracted foreign actors.

The Syrian civil war killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country's infrastructure and industry.