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TweetMore mayhem during the muslim holy month. This time in Syria.
DAMASCUS (AFP) — A car bomb exploded near a Shiite shrine in Damascus on Saturday, killing 17 people and wounding 14 in one of the deadliest attacks to hit Syria in more than a decade, state media said.
The bombing drew condemnation from around the world, including from the United States which has criticised Syria in the past for not doing more to stop militants infiltrating neighbouring Iraq to carry out deadly attacks against US troops.
The car packed with 200 kilogrammes (440 pounds) of explosives blew up near a security checkpoint on a road to Damascus airport in what Interior Minister General Bassam Abdel Majid described as “a terrorist act.”
All the casualties were civilians, he told state television.
“A counter-terrorist unit is trying to track down the perpetrators,” he said.
The rare attack in a country known for its iron-fisted security struck the teeming neighbourhood of Sayeda Zeinab, the state-run SANA news agency said.
The district draws tens of thousands of Shiite pilgrims from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon each year to pray at the tomb of Zeinab, daughter of Shiite martyr Ali and granddaughter of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed.
Witnesses told state television the bomb could have claimed more victims if it had gone off a day later when schools were open.
“It felt like an earthquake. The force of the explosion threw me out of bed,” said one man who lives nearby.
“Thank God this was Saturday. The catastrophe would have been bigger if the attack had taken place on Sunday when schools were open.”
Another man said the blast was heard some 10 kilometres (six miles) away.
The attack drew condemnation from the US State Department as well as the UN Security Council. It also prompted Washington to announce it was closing its consular section in Damascus as well as the Damascus Community School.
The facilities will be closed “in light of heightened security,” but will reopen after the end of this week’s Muslim holiday, State Department spokesman Rob McInturff said.
Neighbouring Lebanon, which has been riven by tensions between pro- and anti-Damascus factions, also condemned the bombing, as did Arab and European states and Syrian allies Iran and Russia.
The exiled head of Syria’s banned opposition Muslim Brotherhood Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni said the attack could be the work of extremist groups or part of a “struggle between security forces.”
“The security agencies have set up terrorist groups and sent them to neighbouring countries like Lebanon and Iraq. I don’t rule out that they have slipped from their control and are carrying out such acts,” he told AFP by telephone from Saudi Arabia..
“There is a mood of oppression in Syria and this breeds extremism,” he said.
Dubai-based Arab political analyst Fawaz Najia linked the attack to “mounting Sunni-Shiite tensions in the region,” and Sunni fears of Shiite Iran’s “penetration” of predominantly Sunni Arab countries.
“A recent report by a London-based Syrian study centre said that Iran was pouring millions of dollars in Syria to convert Sunnis to Shiism,” he told AFP.
President Bashar al-Assad hails from Syria’s Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and has been ruling Sunni-majority Syria for nearly four decades.
Foreign Minister Walid Muallem told Al-Arabiya television that “terrorism has spread since the war launched by the United States against terrorism.”
The blast was the deadliest since a spate of attacks in the 1980s blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood and the first since February, when Hezbollah commander Imad Mughnieh was killed in a Damascus car bombing.
The Lebanese Shiite militant group blamed Israel for that bombing. It denied involvement.
In August, Syria confirmed the assassination of top army general Mohammed Sleiman in a seaborne shooting ambush, amid reports suggesting he was the government’s liaison with Hezbollah.
On Thursday, UN atomic agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said the watchdog’s probe into alleged illicit nuclear work in Syria had been delayed because its contact man in Syria — whom he did not identify — had been murdered.
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