Dozens killed in Syria

Damascus: A rare bombing of an army bus in Damascus and shelling moments later of a town in rebel-held northwestern Syria killed at least 27 people on Wednesday in the deadliest flareup in months.

Two bombs planted on an army bus in central Damascus were detonated early in the morning, killing 14 people in the worst such attack in the capital in four years, the state news agency SANA reported.

There was no immediate claim for the bombing but moments later shelling by government forces killed 13 people in Idlib province, an area controlled by groups that have claimed such attacks in the past.

“A terrorist bombing using two explosive devices targeted a passing bus” at a key bridge in the capital, the news agency said, reporting that at least three people had also been wounded. Images released by SANA showed first responders searching the charred carcass of the bus and what the news agency said was a bomb squad defusing a third device planted in the same area.

A military source quoted by the news agency said the bombs were detonated as the bus passed near the Hafez al-Assad bridge, close to the national museum in the heart of the capital.

“We hadn’t seen violence of that type in a long time,” a fruit vendor who gave his name as Salman told AFP at the scene. “We thought we were done with such attacks. I hope this will be the last bombing,” he said.

Damascus had been largely spared such violence in recent years, especially since troops and allied militia retook the last significant rebel bastion near the capital in 2018. The attack is the deadliest in the capital since a bombing claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group targeted the Justice Palace in March 2017, killing at least 30 people.

Around an hour after the Damascus attack, shelling by the Syrian army struck the rebel-held town of Ariha, in the northwestern region of Idlib. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the rockets struck a busy area at the time children were heading to school.

Three children were among 13 people killed, the Britain-based war monitor said. It was the highest civilian toll since a March 2020 truce deal brokered by Turkey and Russia effectively put fighting in Idlib on standby, according to the Observatory.

“At 8 am (0500 GMT) we woke up to the bombardment. The children were terrified and were screaming,” said Bilal Trissi, a father of two who lives nearby. “We didn’t know what to do or where to go and we didn’t see anything because of all the dust around us,” he

told AFP.

“They bombed us in our neighbourhood and in the market. There are children who died and people who lost their limbs... We don’t know why, what are we guilty of?” The Damascus bombing will challenge the government’s assertion that the decade-old war is over and stability guaranteed for reconstruction efforts and investment projects to begin in earnest.

The government of President Bashar-al-Assad has been striving to claw itself out of international isolation and had been making inroads in recent months. The conflict that erupted with the brutal repression of unarmed protests demanding regime change in 2011 has left around half a million people dead.

Assad’s position once held by a thread, with his forces and their allies controlling barely a fifth of Syrian territory, but Russia’s military intervention in 2015 marked the start of a long and bloody fightback.

Also backed by Iran and its proxy militias, government forces have recaptured nearly all key cities in the country, with US-backed Kurdish forces still running the northeast. The IS group’s once-sprawling caliphate, that straddled swathes of Iraq and Syria, inexorably shrank to its death, which came in eastern Syria in early 2019.

Since then, the Syrian government’s main focus has been Idlib, where many of the rebels forced to surrender in other parts of the country have gathered. The area is dominated by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which includes leaders of Al-Qaeda’s former Syria franchise and over which Turkey has some sway.

HTS has not claimed attacks in Damascus in years however. The remnants of IS in eastern Syria have gone underground but continue to harass government and allied forces, mostly in desert areas, in hit-and-run attacks.

In another incident on Wednesday, six members of a pro-government militia were killed in an arms depot blast in the central Syrian province of Hama, the Observatory said. Seven other members of the National Defence Forces militia were wounded in the explosion, the cause of which remains unclear, the monitor added.