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Explosions kill scores of people in Syrian coastal cities Scores dead in Isis attacks on Syrian coastal cities
(about 3 hours later)
Bomb blasts have killed more than 100 people in the Syrian coastal cities of Jableh and Tartous, monitors said, in a government-controlled area that hosts Russian forces. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for a series of blasts that killed more than 120 people in a loyalist coastal enclavethat has remained the most tightly controlled part of Syria throughout the civil war.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks in the Mediterranean cities, which have up to now escaped the worst of the conflict, saying it was targeting supporters of President Bashar al-Assad. The attacks targeted Tartous, which hosts a Russian naval base, and Jableh, 50 miles to the north. Both cities had been spared the destruction that has laid waste to other parts of the country over more than five years.
Scores were wounded in at least five suicide attacks and two car bombs, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said – the first assaults of their kind in Tartous, where government ally Russia maintains a naval facility, and Jableh. Isis announced that the explosions were its work within hours of sending suicide bombers and car bombs into the area.
Four blasts, several carried out by suicide bombers, caused chaos in Jableh, killing more than 70 people, while three more detonated near a petrol station in Tartous, killing about 50 people and maiming scores more.
The terror group said it was targeting supporters of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and gatherings of the Alawite sect, to which Assad and many of Syria’s ruling class belong.
Assad has been heavily backed by Russia since the war began. Moscow’s backing had become more resolute over the past seven months, after Vladimir Putin launched a large-scale intervention last October against rebel groups and jihadis, which has since laid waste to many opposition-held areas in northern Syria.
The Russian naval base in Tartous has been Moscow’s largest naval fixture outside the former Soviet Union for more than 40 years. Moscow also maintains a large listening post in the area and has built an airbase near Latakia.
While Tartous and Jableh had previously been hit by rocket fire, neither Isis nor other jihadi groups, nor the mainstream Syrian opposition, had managed to launch a large-scale attack in the area. Isis has a small presence in the countryside near Hama to the immediate east of Tartous; however, it operates mainly to the east of Aleppo, several hundred miles away.
Much of Syria’s north-west coast, including Latakia, has remained loyal to Assad and he retains considerable influence there and in the adjoining Alawite heartland, from where many senior military officers and establishment figures have been drawn over the 45 years that the Assad family has ruled Syria.
The attacks are highly symbolic for Isis, which has been battered on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria over recent months, losing up to 30% of the territory it held in late 2014, after the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, anointed himself as the leader of a new Islamic Caliphate that straddled the borders of both countries.
A US-led air campaign has pushed the group out of much of northern Iraq, and a Russian-backed land offensive in March ousted it from the ancient city of Palmyra, north-east of Damascus. Despite the losses, Isis retains pockets of influence across the country, which it uses to spark clashes along the Lebanese border, in the southern suburbs of Damascus, near Hama to the west and close to Deraa near the Jordanian border.
Related: Three out of four Syrians believe a political solution can end the warRelated: Three out of four Syrians believe a political solution can end the war
State media confirmed the attacks but gave a lower death toll. As it has lost control of geographical areas, the terror group has increasingly tried to assert itself by launching co-ordinated bombings, which have been signature ploys throughout all the group’s incarnations. Attacks similar to the Tartous strikes have been launched in Shia neighbourhoods of Baghdad in recent weeks, where more than 200 people have been killed. Scores died in similar bombings in Damascus and near Homs earlier this year.
Fighting has increased in other parts of Syria in recent weeks as world powers struggle to revive a threadbare ceasefire in western Syria and after peace talks in Geneva this year broke down. Talks aimed at ending the fighting in Syria stagnated in Vienna last week. Earlier talks in Geneva met the same fate. A joint US and Russian effort to bring together warring parties, excluding Isis and a separate jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, has failed to generate momentum.
State media reported that a car bomb and two suicide bombers attacked a petrol station in Tartous. In Jableh, one of the four blasts hit near a hospital, state media and the Observatory reported. Opposition groups, which are nominally led by an exiled political administration, accuse the Assad regime and Russia of bombing communities controlled by opposition fighters with impunity, and paying scant attention to Isis.
Footage broadcast by the state-run Ikhbariya news channel of what it said were scenes of the blasts in Jableh showed several twisted and incinerated cars and minivans. Pictures circulated by pro-Damascus social media users showed dead bodies in the back of pick-up vans and charred body parts on the ground. Russia has claimed there is little distinction between jihadi fighters and opposition groups who are fighting to oust Assad.
The Syrian Observatory said at least 53 people were killed in Jableh, and 48 in Tartous.
The interior ministry said in a statement more than 20 people had been killed, and one state media outlet put the death toll at 45 people.
Bombings in the capital Damascus and western city Homs earlier this year killed scores and were claimed by Isis, which is fighting against government forces and their allies in some areas, and separately against its jihadi rival al-Qaida and other insurgent groups.
Russia, which intervened in the Syrian war in support of Assad last September, operates an air base at Hmeymim in Latakia and a naval facility at Tartous.
Latakia city, which is north of Jableh and capital of the province that is Assad’s heartland, has been targeted on a number of occasions by bombings and insurgent rocket attacks.