Damascus: Rebels on Sunday carried out a second major suicide bombing in as many days, this time in the Orontes Valley city of Hama, the site of a 1982 massacre of some 10,000 to 40,000 people ordered by president Hafez Al Assad during a crackdown on an earlier revolt.
“At least 31 people, including regime troops, were killed when a man detonated a truck laden with explosives at a checkpoint near an agricultural vehicles company on the road linking Hama to Salamiyeh,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The number of victims is expected to rise, “as there are dozens of wounded, some of them in critical condition,” added the Britain-based group, which relies on a network of activists and medics across the war-torn country.
The attack came a day after rebels from the Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaida-linked group, set off a car bomb and launched a major assault on a checkpoint near the mixed Christian-Druze neighbourhood of Jaramana in Damascus.
Fighting raged for much of the day, with rebel mortar fire hitting Jaramana and regime aircraft striking back, according to the Observatory, which said at least 16 soldiers and 15 jihadists were killed.
UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos on Saturday called for a ceasefire in another embattled Damascus suburb, Moadamiyet al-Sham, where thousands of people were evacuated last week and where she said “the same number or more remain trapped”.
The southwestern district was one of a number of suburbs hit in an August 21 sarin gas attack, blamed by the opposition on the regime, which led to the deal to dismantle Syria’s chemical arsenal.
Fighting raged around Deir Ezzor city early Sunday. Activists of the Syrian Revolution Coordinators’ Union reported four air strikes on rebel-held areas of the provincial capital. In the north, the air force carried out new strikes on rebel fighters around Aleppo central prison, which they are trying to wrest from government control, the Observatory said.
Inmates issued “calls to the Red Crescent to bring food into the jail, after a prisoner died on Saturday as a result of acute malnutrition.”
