2nd LD Writethru: 8 killed, 20 injured in Damascus car bomb attacks
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E-mail Xinhua, July 2, 2017
DAMASCUS, July 2 (Xinhua) -- At least eight people were killed and 20 others wounded when three car bomb attacks hit Syrian capital Damascus on Sunday morning, a military source told Xinhua.
The residents of Damascus woke up Sunday to the rattling sound of three explosions, which later turned out to be carried out by three suicide cars.
The authorities suspected the cars and hunted them down, when two cars exploded near the airport road at the entrance of Damascus before reaching their targets inside the city, while the third one escaped and exploded at the Ghadir roundabout near the Tahrir Square in eastern Damascus.
The victims were reported in the third blast in Tahrir Square, where 56 cars were damaged as well as the facades of three residential buildings.
The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Xinhua that the terrorists had aimed to detonate the cars inside crowded areas in the capital, as people were back to work after a week-long holiday of Eid al-Fitr Feast.
Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor group said that 12 people were killed and 15 others wounded in the explosions, among which 10 were killed in the Tahrir Square blast.
The bombings happened at a time when intense battles have been raging in rebel-held areas in eastern Damascus between the Syrian army and the Failaq al-Rahman group, which has an alliance with the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front.
A day earlier, activists accused the Syrian army of carrying out an attack with chlorine gas in the Ayn Tarma area in eastern Damascus, a claim totally denied by the Syrian army, which said in a statement that the rebels were lying to cover their losses.
Failaq al-Rahman renewed the accusation on Sunday, saying the Syrian army launched a second attack with chlorine gas within 24 hours.
Rami Abdul-Rahman, the head of the Observatory, said the battles have been raging in Jobar and Ayn Tarma, both neighborhoods in the Eastern Ghouta region east of Damascus.
Battles in eastern Damascus started gaining momentum last month, when the army started an operation to retake Ayn Tarma and Jobar from the rebels, who have been excluded from the de-escalation zones' deal last May.
The deal brought in relative calm, but the al-Qaida-linked groups were excluded and the army wanted to expand the security perimeter around the capital by attempting to dislodge the militants from that part of the capital. Enditem
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