A bomb attached to a car exploded early Saturday in the western part of the Syrian capital that is home to several diplomatic missions, killing one person and causing material damage, state media reported.
Damascus’ Mazze neighbourhood houses the Iranian consulate, destroyed last month in a strike blamed on Israel. The attack at the time killed seven people including two Iranian generals and a member of Lebanon’s militant group Hezbollah, and triggered a direct Iranian military assault on Israel for the first time, sparking fears of a regionwide war.
Several airstrikes have hit the tightly-secured neighbourhood over the past months, mostly targeting Iranian officials.
State news agency, SANA, didn’t say who the person killed was but said the blast set two other cars ablaze.
Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based opposition war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the man killed in the explosion was a Mazze resident who carried a card identifying him as a Syrian army officer. Abdurrahman said the dead man had close ties to the Iranians.
Hours after the blast in Damascus, an Israeli drone strike reportedly targeted a car and a truck outside the western Syrian town of Qusair, northwest of Damascus, close to Lebanon’s border, the Observatory and a Beirut-based pan-Arab TV station reported.
The strike hit the two vehicles near Dabaa air base. Qusair and its suburbs were struck several times over the past months by Israeli drones targeting Hezbollah fighters who have a presence in the area.
The Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen TV didn’t say if there were casualties, but the Observatory said two Hezbollah members were killed and several others wounded in the drone strike.
