Explosion rocks Damascus in rare terrorist attack

Several people were feared dead in Damascus on Sunday after the city was rocked by a huge explosion in what appears to be the first terrorist attack in more than a year.

The attack took place on a highway near the southern suburbs, according to the regime news agency SANA, while Syrian experts said a number of people had been wounded and killed.

However, SANA News denied that anyone had been killed but said a "terrorist" had been arrested.  That claim was challenged by the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Rami Abdel Rahman, the group's head, told the Telegraph that there had been “some killed and some wounded” in the attack, which involved a small explosion targeting a car in the southern suburbs of Damascus. The nature of the attack was unclear on Sunday.

Asef Hababe, head of the Syrian capital’s Civil Defence, told the Reuters news agency that the bomb had been detonated by military technicians, while the Observatory suggested the bombing could have been a direct attack on the vehicle, or a suicide bombing.

Damascus has remained under regime control throughout the eight-year long civil war, although some suburbs were taken by various rebel groups. 2018 saw a number of large-scale military offensives undertaken by the government to reassert complete control over the area.

The high-profile siege of the suburb of Eastern Ghouta, which a UN commission called “barbaric and medieval,” concluded in April 2018.

The government subsequently declared it had taken full control of the capital and its suburbs after taking the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp and the Hajar al-Aswad district from the Islamic State. Attacks in the capital itself are infrequent: according to the Observatory, this was the first bombing since December 2017, when 40 Iraqis were killed near the Bab al-Saghir cemetery, which houses a number of Shia mausoleums.

Later on Sunday SANA reported that air defence systems had downed a number of Israeli missiles, in a rare daytime attack by Syria’s southern neighbour.

The Israeli military responded by saying it had downed a number of missiles over the Golan Heights.

Israeli attacks on Syria have been relatively restrained after the accidental downing of a Russian military plane caused a sharp increase in tensions with Moscow, although Israeli jets reportedly struck a number of Hizbollah targets outside Damascus on Christmas Day.