Bomb blasts killed scores of people in the Syrian coastal cities of Jableh and Tartous on Monday, and wounded many others in the government-controlled territory that hosts Russian military bases, monitors and state media said.
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Several bomb blasts rocked Jableh and Tartous on Syria’s Mediterranean coast on Monday, leaving almost 150 people dead and at least 200 others wounded, local media reported.
The attacks Monday morning began with a vehicle bomb in a bus station in Jableh, followed by three suicide bombers detonating explosive belts, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a United Kingdom -based opposition monitoring group.
The World Health Organization says a suicide attack at a hospital in Syria’s coastal city of Jableh the previous day has killed 43 people.
Supporters of the Islamic State group circulated a claim of responsibility for the attacks in Tartus and Jableh on social media, which dpa could not independently verify.
IS is not known to have a presence in Syria’s coastal provinces, where Al-Nusra is much more prominent.
“I thought the war was over and that I could walk safely. But I was surprised to see that we’re still in the heart of the battle”, he said.
Russia, which intervened in the Syrian war in support of President Bashar Assad last September, operates an air base at Hmeymim in Latakia and a naval facility at Tartous.
The Syrian Observatory said at least 53 people were killed in Jableh, and 48 in Tartous.
The rare attacks occurred in the normally quiet pro-government coastal areas where Russian Federation keeps a naval base in Tartus and an air base in Latakia province.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said three explosions hit the city of Tartus on the Mediterranean coast.
It said a pickup truck blew up at the gate of the bus station, while two suicide bombers detonated their explosive belts inside the station.
Other television footage showed minibuses, vans and taxis ablaze, while panicked people ran and shouted for help.
The same bus station was attacked in Jableh in 2012, but Monday’s bombings in Tartus were the first to hit the city since the war began as an uprising against Assad’s rule in 2011.
Jableh’s bus station was also targeted, along with the town’s hospital.
Russian Federation has been conducting airstrike operations against IS targets in Syria, though it has been accused by the United States government of also directly aiding Assad, who in turn has been accused of human rights violations and bombing his own people by the USA and other Western nations. “And this one more time underscores the need for new urgent steps to continue the negotiating process”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists. Yet fighting had resumed in earnest around the country by late April.
The two cities, which are majority Alawite – the offshoot of Shi’a Islam followed by Assad – had been relatively insulated from Syria’s five-year civil war.
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IS seized control of large parts of Syria and Iraq in mid-2014, declaring an Islamic “caliphate” and spreading its influence.
