Fire broke out on a gas pipeline in Syria's eastern province of Deir Ezzor, after an isolation valve explosion that authorities attributed to sabotage.
A local oil official told The National that the cause was an apparent gas theft “gone wrong”. The explosion occurred in Al Sholah, near a desert road connecting the provincial capital of Deir Ezzor to Palmyra in central Syria.
It was the second incident this month involving energy infrastructure in Syria, which has continued to struggle with fuel shortages since the civil war. The war ended in December 2024 with the overthrow of former president Bashar Al Assad by militant forces led by current President Ahmad Al Shara. On Monday, the authorities in the coastal province of Tartus announced the arrest of a man on suspicion of stealing crude oil from a pipeline near the Mediterranean.
The Deir Ezzor blaze erupted late on Monday, as a result of “an act of sabotage” that halted gas flows from the Jbeissa gas plant to power generation stations, the official Sana news agency reported, citing the state's Syrian Petroleum Company (SPC).
The province is among the most impoverished governorates in Syria and discontent has been rising. This month, demonstrations broke out in the area to protest rising prices, as well as lack of public services and government support.
Fire crews isolated the area on both sides of the blaze and were working to extinguish it as gas pressure fell, Sana reported. Hisham Al Saleh, a gas sector official at the Syrian Petroleum Company, said crews began isolating the area immediately after the fire broke out.
The local official said that the explosion was apparently caused by thieves who broke into the pipeline to steel the gas. “It seems that the theft had gone wrong. It takes a degree of professionalism to break into a gas pipeline and emerge unscathed,” the official said.
Deir Ezzor is a centre of gas production in Syria. Investment by Russian and western companies helped production reach 22 million cubic metres (mcm) per day in 2010, the last year before the Syrian revolt and the ensuing civil war.
Much of the gas infrastructure was not maintained during the war, or was damaged. The central authorities also lost control of some of the country's main gasfields. Syria's production is now running at an estimated 7mcm per day. Syria's oil production suffered a similar decline. Official data show production at 112,000 barrels per day, compared to 350,000 bpd in 2020.
In the Tartus incident, a statement by the authorities said the suspected thieves punctured a pipeline and “stole quantities of oil from it”. Security forces are looking for accomplices involved in the theft, the statement said. They accessed the pipeline from a cemetery and had filled a tanker several times with the stolen oil before they were discovered.
