Damascus (AFP) – A crash between two passenger buses in a central-eastern desert region of Syria on Saturday killed at least 35 people, state media said.

News agency SANA, quoting a health ministry official, also said 30 others were injured in the "collision between two passenger buses on the Damascus-Deir Ezzor road".

The interior ministry said the crash was between "a bus carrying a number of internal security forces personnel and a civilian bus", without specifying how many of the casualties were from its forces.

State media broadcast footage of the crash, including images of a bus on fire and with debris strewn along the highway, and reported that military helicopters had been deployed to airlift casualties from the scene.

Emergency and disaster management minister Raed Al Saleh described the crash as "one of the deadliest road accidents in Syria in recent years in terms of the number of victims".

He said it "places a shared national responsibility on all of us to work to prevent such painful incidents from recurring", according to SANA.

"It also underscores the urgent need to address the accumulated challenges facing the country's road infrastructure, which is burdened by years of neglect and the damage inflicted on various public service sectors."

Earlier this month, five people were killed and dozens of others injured, most of them Lebanese, when a bus carrying pilgrims returning from Saudi Arabia overturned on a highway in southern Syria's Daraa province.

After years of civil war and neglect, Syria's infrastructure is crumbling and many of its roads are in need of repairs.

State television quoted the director of road transport in Damascus, Moaz Najjar, as saying that authorities "have directed that road maintenance in the eastern region be treated as a priority".

He added that "most roads are in a state of disrepair and have not undergone maintenance for the past 15 years".

Last year, at least 12 people were killed and several others injured when a bus collided with an oil tanker in northeastern Syria.

But Saturday's accident was one of the worst in recent years.

In 2020, at least 32 died when a fuel tanker crashed into two buses on a road between Damascus and Homs province.