SOHR: Bomb Attack on Syrian Army Bus in Damascus Kills at Least 14

At least 14 people were killed Wednesday when two bombs exploded that were attached to a Syrian army bus in Damascus, state media reported

The attack was one of the deadliest in the Syrian capital since President Bashar al-Assad’s troops forced opposition fighters from the capital’s outskirts in 2018. A decade of fighting continues between the Syrian government and insurgents in other parts of the country.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred near a bus transfer point where commuters and schoolchildren usually converge.

State media quoted a military source as saying the two bombs had been attached to the bus before it began transporting army personnel and that the army had defused a third device

One of the last large explosions in Damascus occurred in 2017, when suicide bombers killed nearly 60 people in an attack on a judicial office building and a restaurant. The attacks were claimed by the Islamic State militant group, which has not held territory in Syria since 2019 but continues to pose a threat with sleeper cells hiding primarily in Syria’s desert.

Shortly before the Damascus bombing, the Syrian army shelled a town in the last rebel enclave in northwestern Syria, killing at least 10 people, including four children and a woman.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attack on the town of Ariha resulted in the highest civilian death toll in the Idlib area since March 2020, when a truce in the northwest was negotiated by Syrian allies Turkey and Russia. The truce has been repeatedly violated.

 

 

 

SOURCE: VOA News