At least 45 people have been killed in a triple bombing targeting Syria’s holiest Shiite shrine Sunday.
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The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group that monitors both sides of the conflict through a network of activists inside Syria, said the blast killed 12 people and wounded about two dozen.
Syrian state television SANA said a group of militants detonated a auto bomb at a bus station, followed by two blasts set off by suicide bombers as rescuers rushed to the scene of the first explosion.
Syria’s official SANA news agency, for its part, said that 45 people had been killed – and another 40 injured – by the twin blasts.
It has continued to attract pilgrims from Syria and beyond, particularly Shiites from Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq, throughout the almost five-year war in Syria. The area has become a foothold for Hezbollah and other Shiite militias assisting the government in fighting insurgents in the Damascus suburbs, but it also houses civilians displaced from Shiite towns in northern Syria.
The cause of the second explosion was not made clear.
The blasts, which came as the UN’s Syria envoy struggled to convene fresh peace talks in Geneva from which IS is excluded, tore a massive crater in the road, overturning and mangling cars and a bus and shattering windows. The mainstream opposition views both groups as fellow rebels, despite their ideological differences, while the Syrian government and its close ally Russian Federation view them as extremists.
Only on Friday, the HNC said it would boycott the process, insisting it wanted an end to air strikes and sieges of Syrian towns before joining the negotiations.
The United Nations is aiming for six months of negotiations, first seeking a ceasefire, later working toward a political settlement to the civil war that has also killed over 250,000 people and driven more than 10 million from their homes.
Syrian Ambassador Bashar Jaafari, head of the government delegation at Geneva, said the blasts in Damascus just confirmed the link between what the government says are a Saudi-led and funded Islamist “opposition” and terrorism.
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But while the opposition agreed to travel to Geneva after days of delays, it has so far refused to engage in indirect talks with the government.
