Syria Today | Damascus bomb blast kills 17

Damascus bomb blast kills 17

Seventeen people were killed and at least 14 wounded when a car packed with 200kg of explosives blew up in Damascus on September 27, the worst attack the country has seen in 20 years.

The blast occurred near a Syrian security building at an intersection a few miles away from the Saida Zeinab Shrine, a holy Muslim site popular with Shi’ite pilgrims.

Syria’s official news agency SANA reported the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber in a wine-coloured GMC Suburban which entered the country from an Arab neighbour the previous day.

The report said the bomber was part of a “Tafkir” group, several members of which had previously been arrested by Syrian police. As of yet, no group has publicly claimed responsibility for the attack. The government is carrying out DNA tests to identify the bomber.

The attack follows a number of security incidents in Syria over the past seven months. On February 12, the military commander of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated in a car bombing in the up-market Damascus suburb of Kafer Suseh. On July 5, a number of Islamist inmates and military police were reportedly killed and wounded in a riot which erupted at Sednaya prison, 30km northwest of Damascus, On August 1, General Mohammad Suleiman, a senior military aide to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was shot dead in mysterious circumstances at the coastal resort of Tartous.

In recent months Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has warned of the threat posed by fundamentalists based in Tripoli in neighbouring Lebanon. On September 22, one week before the Damascus bombing, Syria deployed up to 10,000 troops along the border with Lebanon in what government officials say is a crackdown on smuggling.

“Syria is between two boiling countries, Lebanon and Iraq,” Syrian Parliament Secretary Khalid Aboud told Syria Today. “All of these security incidents in the country are targeting Syria’s political position.”

Echoing similar sentiments, Imad Fawzi Shueibi, director of Data and Strategic Center, a think tank on Syrian issues, told Syria Today: “The terrorists’ father is Iraq, their mother is Lebanon and the USA and some Arab countries are their godfathers. For that reason, Syria should be careful of such security incidents which try to weaken the country’s diplomatic victories.”

In the days following the blast, Syrian media reports said the government has arrested numerous people belonging to Tafkir groups in Damascus’ suburbs, the city of Idleb 300km north of Damascus and other regions.

On October 9, three people and a Syrian policeman were killed during clashes between Syrian security forces and members of an unidentified armed group in Damascus’s Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp.