Damascus Car Bomb Kills 17

A powerful car bomb ripped through a suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus yesterday, killing 17 people and injuring 17 more. The bloodiest attack in Syria in two decades threatened further to destabilize a region already tense following the deployment of 10,000 Syrian troops to the Lebanese border last week ahead of what may be a cross-border incursion.

The bombing comes as senior Lebanese military sources told The Observer that jihadis - some based in the Lebanese city of Tripoli - had launched a series of attacks against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

According to Syrian television and news agencies, the car, packed with about 200kg of explosives, was detonated at 8.45am close to the Shia Saydah Zeinab shrine, which is visited by pilgrims from Iran and Iraq. One witness reported Iranian pilgrims were among the casualties.

Syrian officials yesterday suggested they believed the attack was the responsibility of Islamist militants. Unusually for Syria, whose media is closely policed, details of the attack were reported immediately, with rolling updates on the casualties and investigation. The bombing - the third major attack this year - was similar to terrorist attacks launched by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Eighties before Assad's father, Hafez, launched a bloody crackdown.

The blast, which was swiftly condemned by the US, Russia and France, took place as Syria appeared to be emerging from international isolation following its peace talks with Israel and co-operation on Lebanon.

'This is definitely a terrorism attack that occurred in a crowded area,' Interior Minister General Bassam Abdel Majeed told state television. 'This is a cowardly attack.'

'Smoke filled nearby buildings ... I rushed to the street and found a burning car, fire and smoke,' a witness told state television. Another said: 'I was sleeping ... and then the doors came loose and I felt like I was in the street. Glass windows were destroyed and the ceiling's iron infrastructure was visible. We thought it was an earthquake.'

The attack was the first explosion in Damascus since the car bomb assassination of Imad Moughniyah, military commander of the Lebanese Islamist group Hizbollah, in February. Hizbollah blames Israel for that attack, although Israel denies it. Last month, a senior security commander who was the International Atomic Energy Agency's main Syrian contact, was shot dead at a beach resort near the port of Tartous in mysterious circumstances.

The bomb attack comes days after Syria dispatched troops to the Lebanese border in an operation initially described as an anti-smuggling effort, but actually intended, according to senior Lebanese military and intelligence officials, to strike against Sunni militants infiltrating Syria and launching attacks against the regime. Lebanese officials spoke of at least four such attacks in the past two weeks, in which at least one Syrian soldier was killed.

Although Syria is a majority Sunni Muslim state, the Allawite sect of Shiite Islam, which is considered heretical by fundamentalist Sunnis, controls its political class. Syria had been accused of turning a blind eye to the transit of fighters to Iraq across its border, a policy that had apparently changed in the past few weeks.

Several Lebanese political figures expressed fears that yesterday's attack, as well as the unpublicized attacks on Syrian positions by suspected Lebanese militants, could give Damascus an excuse to send its military into northern Lebanon.

'These attacks and troop movements are very serious,' said one senior Lebanese military commander after the arrival of the Syrian troops on the border but before Saturday's attack. 'The Syrians have long feared another rise in the Muslim Brotherhood, which gave them so many problems in northern Syria in the Eighties. They told us that they're going to stop radicals from Tripoli from infiltrating across the border into Hama and Homs, where they could receive significant support from the Sunni populations there.'

Both Hama and Homs were the scenes of fierce fighting in the early Eighties as the Brotherhood, which espouses Islamic governance, attempted to seize local power from the Syrian Baath Party regime.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly invoked the possibility of a Syrian intervention into northern Lebanon to prevent the area from being destabilized by Islamic radicals.

Although Lebanon's Sunni population is famously moderate and liberal by regional standards, Tripoli is a known to have a significant population of fundamentalists. The city sent dozens of fighters to assist al-Qaeda in Iraq fight the American and British presence.