ISIS claimed responsibility for suicide and car bomb blasts that struck a Damascus suburb on Saturday near Syria’s holiest Shia shrine, and a monitoring group said at least 20 people were killed.
ISIS claimed responsibility for suicide and car bomb blasts that struck a Damascus suburb on Saturday near Syria’s holiest Shia shrine, and a monitoring group said at least 20 people were killed.
State television showed debris, mangled cars and wrecked shops in a main commercial thoroughfare near the Sayeda Zeinab shrine, in an area where three bomb attacks claimed by ISIS killed and wounded scores of people in 2016.
The ultra-hardline Sunni militants of ISIS, whose many foes are advancing on a number of fronts in both Syria and Iraq, are avowed enemies of Shias, whom they consider a heretical group within Islam.
The state media said at least eight people were killed. But the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the death toll had risen to at least 20, including at least 13 civilians, with the other victims coming from pro-government militias. It said the number was expected to rise because many of the scores of wounded people were in critical condition.
An ISIS-affiliated news agency said two of the group’s suicide bombers had blown themselves up and operatives had detonated an explosives-laden car.
