A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle near a revered Shiite shrine in the Syrian capital on Thursday, wounding 14 people and damaging the shrine, state media and witnesses said.
State news agency SANA said the vehicle exploded in a garage 50 metres (yards) from the Sayyida Zeinab shrine. There was “substantial damage in the area of the blast” and “the terrorist who carried out the operation was killed,” it said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, citing anti-regime activists, said the bomb went off near security offices, damaging the apparent target as well as the shrine, as seen in a video posted on the Internet.
A witness said a van drove at speed into the parking lot at 6 am (0300 GMT) and exploded among parked vehicles, including pilgrim buses. The vehicles and a nearby police station were damaged, an AFP photographer at the site said.
The windows of the mausoleum were shattered and its air vents ripped out by the force of the blast, which left a three-metre (10-foot) crater. Tiles on the minarets were damaged.
International peace envoy Kofi Annan has warned that Syria’s 15 months of deadly unrest could turn into all-out sectarian war.
Most of Syria’s 22-million population are Sunni Muslims, while its minorities include Alawites, an offshoot Shiite community to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs.
Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, mainly from Syria’s ally Iran, travel each year to the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab, a granddaughter of Prophet Mohammed, in an area of south Damascus that is home to many Iraqi refugees.
Also early Thursday, a car bomb in Idlib city in northwest Syria targeted a military checkpoint, the Syrian Observatory said, adding that an unknown number of soldiers were killed or wounded in the blast.
At least 10 civilians and three rebels were killed in the latest violence across the country, it said.
International observers, meanwhile, visited Al-Haffe town in the Mediterranean province of Latakia, a day after Syrian authorities said the area had been “cleansed” of rebel fighters, a UN spokeswoman in Damascus said.
Syrian rebels withdrew on Wednesday from the besieged town and nearby villages that had been under intense shelling by regime forces for eight days, according to the Observatory.
As the death toll of the 15-month conflict soars, Amnesty International accused Syria of committing crimes against humanity to punish communities supporting rebels.
The London-based group called for an international response after claiming it had fresh evidence that victims, including children, had been dragged from their homes and shot dead by soldiers, who in some cases then set the remains on fire.
“This disturbing new evidence of an organised pattern of grave abuses highlights the pressing need for decisive international action,” said Amnesty’s Donatella Rovera on the release of the 70-page report entitled Deadly Reprisals.
The advocacy group interviewed people in 23 towns and villages across Syria and concluded that government forces and militias were guilty of “grave human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law amounting to crimes against humanity and war crimes.”
The allegations came as the Syrian Observatory reported that more than 14,400 people have been killed in Syria in the revolt against Assad’s regime, including 2,302 in the past month alone.
The Observatory said five civilians were killed on Thursday during clashes between regime troops and rebels in the central city of Homs.
Two opposition fighters and a dissident were killed in the central province of Homs, while in the southern city of Daraa five people were killed in Tareek al-Sad district, which was heavily shelled by regime troops.
On the diplomatic front, a mistranslation Wednesday of remarks made in Tehran by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov threatened to further heat a diplomatic row between Russia and the United States.
Lavrov was quoted in Iranian media as accusing the US of supplying weapons to rebels who are battling the regime. Russia’s foreign ministry later insisted that Lavrov had been speaking about US weapons supplies “in the region.”
Washington and Moscow are already at swords drawn after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday she had information that Russia was sending attack helicopters to Syria.
Lavrov responded to her comments during a brief visit to Iran by saying that Russia was supplying “air defence systems” to Damascus in a deal that “in no way violates international laws.”
China meanwhile said on Thursday it disapproved of “one-sided” sanctions and pressure on Syria after France raised the prospect of a new raft of punitive measures against Assad’s regime.
Suicide bomber hits revered shrine in Damascus
