Blasts jolt Assad bastion 40 Iraqis among 46 dead as Shiite shrine in Damascus targeted
DAMASCUS: Twin bombs targeting Shiites on Saturday killed 46 people in Damascus, most of them Iraqis, a monitoring group said, in one of the bloodiest attacks in the Syrian capital.
There have been periodic bomb attacks in Damascus, but the stronghold of the regime of President Bashar Assad has been largely spared the destruction faced by other major cities in six years of civil war.
A roadside bomb detonated as a bus passed and a suicide bomber blew himself up in the Bab Al-Saghir area, which houses several Shiite mausoleums that draw people from around the world, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, giving a toll of 46 killed.
“There are also dozens of people wounded, some of them in a serious condition,” Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
State television said there were 40 dead and 120 wounded after “terrorists detonated two bombs.”
It broadcast footage of several white buses with their windows shat- tered, some of them heavily charred.
Shoes, glass pieces and wheelchairs laid scattered on the ground covered in blood.
Mohammad Shaar, Syrian interior minister, said the attack targeted pilgrims of various Arab nationalities. “The sole aim was to kill,” he said. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry said around 40 of its nationals were among the dead and 120 among the wounded.
A witness told an AFP photographer that the second bomb struck as passers-by gathered at the scene of the first attack, while state television said a booby-trapped motorcycle was defused nearby.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. The Sayyida Zeinab mausoleum to the south of Damascus, Syria’s most visited Shiite site, has been hit by several deadly bombings during the war.
Three hundred families of Daesh fighters have fled the terrorists’ self-proclaimed Syrian capital of Raqqa in 24 hours, as rival forces advance on the city, a monitor said Saturday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 300 families of foreign fighters of Daesh have left the city of Raqqa since dawn Friday to take refuge in the province of Deir Ez Zor to the east and Hama to the west.
Rahman said that Daesh families were using the only remaining escape route, on boats across the Euphrates River to the south.
The US on Thursday turned up the heat on the militants, sending an additional 400 American troops into Syria to support operations to retake Raqqa.
The city is the target of advancing Turkish-backed Syrian fighters, a US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab forces as well as Syrian regime troops supported by Russia.