(MENAFN- Arab Times) A suicide car bomber dispatched by the Islamic State group struck near a police officers' club in the Syrian capital, killing at least 10 people and destroying a number of cars. Syrian state TV reported the toll and showed footage of the blast scene, including several damaged vehicles and a burnt-out car. The police officers' club was next to a vegetable market. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group that tracks the civil war, said the blast killed eight policemen and wounded 20. The IS group claimed the bombing in a statement circulated by its followers on Twitter, saying it was carried out by a fighter known as Abu Abdul-Rahman al- Shami. It vowed more attacks.
The blast came a day after an international rights group said Syrian government forces and the Russian military have been carrying out daily cluster bomb attacks over the past two weeks in Syria, killing 37 people. Hundreds of thousands of civilians could be cut off from food if Syrian government forces encircle rebel-held parts of Aleppo, the United Nations said on Tuesday, warning of a massive new flight of refugees from a Russian-backed assault. Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air strikes and Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, have launched a major offensive in the countryside around Aleppo, which has been divided between government and rebel control for years.
The assault to surround Aleppo, once Syria's biggest city with 2 million people, amounts to one of the most important shifts of momentum in the five year civil war that has killed 250,000 people and already driven 11 million from their homes. The United Nations on Tuesday urged Turkey to open its borders to tens of thousands of Syrians who have overwhelmed nearby emergency camps after fleeing a major government offensive. The main border crossing north of Syria's second city Aleppo remained closed, forcing huge crowds including women and children to sleep in tents or in the open. "There are no longer enough places for families to sleep," said Ahmad al- Mohammad, a field worker with medical aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF). "Most of the families left with just the clothes they were in," he told AFP, adding that the cold and the crowded conditions were causing health problems including diarrhoea. More than one million Syrians are living under siege after nearly five years of war, a new NGO report said Tuesday, warning the crisis was "far worse" than UN officials have acknowledged. "New data gathered by Siege Watch shows that there are well over 1,000,000 Syrians under siege in locations in Damascus, Rural Damascus, Homs, Deir Ezzor and Idlib governorates," said the report jointly released by a Dutch group and a US-based organisation. It listed 46 communities around Syria where it said a total of 1,099,475 people were besieged, with the overwhelming majority encircled by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
People in those areas had an "elevated risk of death" due to deprivation from lack of food as well as electricity and running water, the report said. "The scale of the crisis of besieged areas in Syria is far worse than the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has acknowledged," said the report from Washington-based The Syria Institute and PAX, a peace organisation based in the Netherlands. Pro-Kremlin Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has claimed spies from his region of Russia are being sent to infiltrate the Islamic State group and assist Moscow in its bombing campaign in Syria. Kadyrov, who has led the North Caucasus region of Chechnya since 2007, made the claims in a preview of a documentary set to air on state television on Wednesday. The documentary claims that "agents from special forces from Chechnya were embedded" in IS training camps to collect intelligence and help identify targets for Russian air strikes. Quoting Kadyrov, it said that the "best fighters" from mostly Muslim Chechnya have managed to create an "intricate agent network directly inside IS," although some have been killed.
Legal Disclaimer:
MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.