Damascus blast ‘kills’ at least 11

DAMASCUS, Oct 2, (Agencies): A double suicide bomb attack hit a police station in Syria’s capital Damascus on Monday, state media said, with a monitor saying at least 11 people were killed.

Damascus has been largely insulated from the worst of the violence during the country’s brutal six-year war, but several bomb attacks have shaken the city.

Syria’s interior ministry said two suicide bombers had blown themselves up at the police station in the southern district of Midan, leading to the “deaths of a number of civilians and a number of policemen”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the war, said at least 11 people were killed in the attack, among them six police officers.

The monitor also reported that a car bomb had been detonated during the attack, but state media made no mention of a third blast.

Interior Minister Mohammed Shaar told reporters that one of the attackers had managed to enter the police station and reach the first floor of the building.

State television showed images of damage from inside the building, with a black police uniform shirt covered in dust lying in the rubble of partially collapsed walls.

The entire front of one room on the first floor had been blown out by the explosion, and inside what remained, twisted bits of metal were scattered across the rubble.

Policemen carried one body away from the scene wrapped inside a white tarpaulin.

Manal, a 28-year-old teacher living in Midan, said she heard at least two blasts on Monday afternoon.

“I was coming back from work when I heard the sound of an explosion, it was around 2:30 pm, I didn’t know what it was, and then there was another explosion a few minutes later and buildings shook,” she told AFP.

“Afterwards I heard gunfire, which usually happens to get people to move out of the way and clear the road so ambulances can get through to retrieve the injured,” she added.

Damascus has also been rocked by occasional bomb blasts throughout the Syrian conflict, including previous attacks on Midan, a middle-class residential and shopping district.

In December 2016, three police officers were wounded when a sevenyear-old girl walked into the neighbourhood’s police station wearing an explosive belt that was remotely detonated.

Expelled

Rebel groups have been gradually expelled from territory in the capital they once held, though they maintain a presence in a handful of positions, including the Jobar neighbourhood.

They also hold territory in the Eastern Ghouta region outside the capital, and have regularly launched rockets into the city.

More than 330,000 people have been killed in Syria since its conflict began with protests that were met with a harsh government crackdown.

A wide array of international players have been drawn in on both sides, with the government relying on allies including Iran, Russia and the powerful Hezbollah militia from neighbouring Lebanon.

Ten Hezbollah members were killed on Monday in a suspected drone strike in the Badiya desert region in the central province of Homs, the Observatory reported, revising an earlier toll of at least eight.

The unidentified strike came near the town of Sukhna in a region where Syria’s government and allied fighters are battling the Islamic State jihadist group.

Meanwhile, at least ten Hezbollah fighters were killed in a drone strike in the eastern Syrian desert, where pro-government forces are engaged in a grinding battle against the Islamic State group, a monitoring group said Monday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fighters belonging to the Lebanese militant group were killed Monday morning when their position came under attack from the sky. The group is fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces.

A Hezbollah official confirmed the strike but not the toll. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters.

It was not immediately clear who was operating the drone. Unmanned aerial vehicles are now widely used in Iraq and Syria by armies and militant groups alike.

Regularity

Israel has been targeting Hezbollah’s convoys in Syria with growing regularity, saying it cannot allow advanced weapons provided by Iran to be sent to Lebanon. Iran has sponsored and supplied Hezbollah since establishing the group in the 1980s to fight Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon.

But Israel’s strikes are generally confined to western and southern Syria, near the Lebanon and Israel borders. It has also been accused of striking Syrian government positions.

The US has also attacked Syrian pro-government forces by air, but only once in any connection to the war on the Islamic State group, in September 2016, when an air raid killed at least 60 Syrian soldiers. The White House called the raid a mistake, and said it was committed to the war against the jihadist group.

Raqqa’s hospital, a big complex pocked with bullets holes, whose capture will signal the end of Islamic State’s crumbling Syrian capital, lies just 200 yards from a front-line base of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

Beyond it, a roundabout where the jihadists once displayed the heads of their enemies, crucified people and held military parades at the height of their expansion is another strategic prize sought by the US-backed militia alliance.

Commanders directing the battle on the ground say seizing these and a nearby stadium, Islamic State’s last strongholds in the city, could take as little as a week once a final assault begins against just a few hundred remaining militants.

But the ultra-hardline group is holding civilian hostages in the hospital and stadium and using sniper fire, booby traps and tunnels that emerge behind SDF lines to slow the battle.

The SDF faces a tough final showdown with IS which commanders say will end at the hospital, now almost completely surrounded.

“There are many civilians being held. We can’t use heavy weaponry or air strikes around the hospital or stadium, so we’ll encircle them as we advance,” commander Haval Gabar said at the front-line base, a home that SDF units captured last week.

“The hospital will be the last point (in Raqqa) to be freed,” he said on Saturday, as bullets coming from the sprawling medical complex whizzed over the base.

The SDF, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias dominated by the Kurdish YPG, has been fighting since June to drive Islamic State from Raqqa city, backed by air strikes and special forces from a US-led coalition.

The assault, which YPG officials initially predicted would take weeks, has dragged on as Islamic State bogs down forces with tactics used in other bastions such as Iraq’s Mosul. Senior Kurdish commanders recently said Raqqa would fall by the end of October.

“Right now there’s no advancing,” Gabar, 25, said.

“There have been many attacks from behind us” with militants launching surprise raids from a network of tunnels they dug after marauding through swathes of Syria and Iraq and capturing Raqqa in 2014, he said.

“When that happens we divert forces from front-line assaults to deal with the infiltration. But it doesn’t take long, maybe half an hour to deal with each attack.”

The home the SDF was using as a base had an IS tunnel emerging into its living room — now blocked up with furniture.