Eight killed as car bombs rock Damascus

DAMASCUS, SYRIA— A series of car bomb explosions rocked Syria’s capital Sunday, killing at least eight people and wounding 12, as officials claimed to have foiled a plot to target crowded areas during the first morning commute after a Muslim holiday.

The Interior Ministry said security forces tracked three cars loaded with explosives as they headed toward central Damascus. Two of the cars were intercepted at checkpoints on the airport road and detonated, apparently in controlled explosions, while the third made it into the city centre, where the driver blew himself up near Tahrir Square.

The Syrian minister of local administration, Hussein Makhlouf, said the response marked a “major success in foiling a plot” to cause mass casualties.

The attack came on the first full work day after the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. State TV showed footage of two scorched vehicles on the airport road, as well as footage from Tahrir Square showing a damaged building and mangled cars at the small roundabout.

Syrian state television reported that eight people had died and 13 had been injured, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group based in Britain, reported that 21 were killed, including the three attackers.

Such attacks have been relatively rare in Damascus, the seat of power for President Bashar Assad, who made a series of public appearances last week in a show of increased confidence after more than six years of battling a rebellion.

The blasts came as Assad has solidified his control over most of Syria’s main cities, where the majority of the country’s remaining population lives. But that control has come at great cost, with the country’s economy badly battered and many towns and neighbourhoods destroyed.

More than half of Syria’s prewar population of 22 million has been displaced since the start of the civil war in 2011, and millions of Syrians have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.

Assad’s forces have struggled to maintain security in areas under their control while continuing to battle rebels seeking Assad’s ouster as well as jihadist groups that have exploited the war’s chaos to seize territory and set up operations.

Pro-government forces have engaged in heavy fighting in Damascus’s suburbs during the war, but have largely kept the rebels out of the city centre.

In recent days, Syrian troops and allied forces have been fighting to drive the rebels out of Ain Terma and Jobar, adjacent areas on the city’s eastern outskirts that have been under rebel control since 2011.

The rebels said government forces attacked them with chlorine gas overnight and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 12 fighters were treated for suffocation. The Syrian military denied the claims. With files from the New York Times