At least 18 people killed after three car bombs hit Damascus
Two cars intercepted at city’s outskirts, third explodes despite being surrounded
DAMASCUS: A suicide car bomber pursued by security forces blew himself up in eastern Damascus on Sunday, with a monitor reporting 18 killed in the deadliest attack to hit the Syrian capital in months.
Syrian state media and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said security forces intercepted three car bombers on their way into the city on Sunday morning.
State television said two of the vehicles were blown up on the outskirts of the city.
A third managed to reach the eastern Tahrir Square district, where he was surrounded but able to detonate a bomb.
The Observatory, a Britainbased monitor, said 18 people were killed in the bombing, including at least seven members of pro-regime security forces and two civilians. It had not identified the remaining victims.
Syrian state news agency SANA quoted an interior ministry statement as saying two of the vehicles had been “destroyed” at a roundabout on the road to the city’s airport.
The driver of the third blew himself up while being pursued, it said, “killing a number of civilians, injuring others, and causing material damage to public and private properties.”
Tahrir Square resident Mohammad Tinawi told AFP that he had heard “gunfire, then an explosion which smashed the glass of houses in the neighbourhood.” He said he had seen Red Crescent volunteers treating two wounded soldiers.
Damascus has been spared the large-scale battles that have devastated other major Syrian cities during the country’s six-year civil war. But dozens of people have been killed in bombings, particularly on the outskirts of the capital.
Battlefronts around Damascus have calmed since a May deal that saw opposition fighters withdraw from several neighbourhoods, along with a separate agreement on “de-escalation” zones, including one in a rebel stronghold just outside the city.
Syria’s conflict broke out with anti-government protests in 2011, but has since evolved into a multifront war that has killed more than 320,000 people.