Bombers kill 20 outside Syria shrine – Islamic State claims responsibility

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AMMAN, June 11, (Agencies): Islamic State claimed responsibility for suicide and car bomb blasts that struck a Damascus suburb on Saturday near Syria’s holiest Shi’ite Muslim shrine, and a monitoring group said at least 20 people were killed. State television showed debris, mangled cars and wrecked shops in a main commercial thoroughfare near the Sayeda Zeinab shrine, in an area where at least three bomb attacks claimed by Islamic State have killed and wounded scores of people this year.

The ultra-hardline Sunni militants of IS, whose many foes are advancing on a number of fronts in both Syria and Iraq, are avowed enemies of Shi’ites, whom they consider a heretical group within Islam. State media said at least eight people were killed. But the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the death toll had risen to at least 20, including at least 13 civilians, with the other victims coming from pro-government militias.

It said the number was expected to rise because many of the scores of wounded people were in critical condition. Islamic State, also known as DAESH, said two of its suicide bombers had blown themselves up and operatives had detonated an explosivesladen car, according to the IS-affiliated Amaq news agency. US State Department spokesman John Kirby said Washington condemned the attack in the strongest terms.

“This terrorist act demonstrates once again the inhumanity and brutality of all that DAESH does and all it stands for,” he said. The Sayeda Zeinab shrine is a magnet for thousands of Iraqi and Afghan Shi’ite militia recruits who go there before being assigned to front lines, where they fight against the Sunni rebel groups trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad. Almost every Shi’ite militia fighter bears insignia on his combat fatigues with the words “For your sake, Sayeda Zeinab”.

The heavily garrisoned area near the shrine is also a well known stronghold of Lebanon’s powerful Shi’ite Hezbollah group, an Iranian-backed movement that is one of Assad’s chief allies. Non-jihadist rebels say Iran’s strong military intervention on the side of Assad, alongside its backing of other Shi’ite militias, is fuelling the sectarian dimension of the nearly six-year Syrian civil war by drawing even more radical foreign Sunni jihadists into the country.

Separately, US-backed Syrian forces made new territorial gains against Islamic State on Saturday, moving closer to another of its major strongholds in northern Syria, according to the monitoring group. The Observatory said the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), bringing together Kurdish and Arab fighters, were now almost 17 kms (10 miles) from the city of al-Bab, an Islamic State stronghold north east of Aleppo

. The SDF on Friday cut off the last route into the encircled town of Manbij from al-Bab after over a week of advances around that area, allowing it to lay siege to the large town from all directions, the monitor said. In other frontlines in northern Syria, two rebel sources said Russian and Syrian jets stepped up their relentless aerial bombing of their positions in the northern city of Aleppo.

They said fighters had overnight repelled a major Syrian army attack on the Malah front in an drive to reach the strategic Catello highway, which is the only route in and out of rebel-held areas. The army has for months sought to advance towards the highway to lay siege to rebel-held areas where over 400,000 people live.

A convoy of aid from the International Committee of the Red Cross entered the rebel-held city of Houla in the province of Homs, the third besieged area to receive supplies in the past 24 hours, aid workers said. On Friday, aid convoys reached two rebel-held towns near Damascus, marking the first delivery of food supplies to Daraya since 2012, after the government granted permission for the trips, the United Nations said. A siege by US-backed Kurdish and Arab forces of the key jihadist-held town of Manbij in northern Syria left tens of thousands of civilians trapped on Saturday.

Near Damascus, suicide bombings claimed by the Islamic State group outside a Shiite shrine killed at least 20 people, the latest deadly strike on the revered site. IS has fought back with deadly bombings despite coming under pressure on several fronts since it declared a “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq in 2014. The Syrian Democratic Forces alliance supported by US air strikes encircled Manbij on Friday, severing the jihadist group’s main supply line between Turkey and its de facto Syrian capital of Raqa. Manbij lies at the heart of the last stretch of IS-controlled territory along Turkey’s border, and it was a key point on the jihadists’ supply line.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said warplanes from a US-led coalition have carried out heavy bombing raids on and around the town held by IS since 2014. “Tens of thousands of civilians still there can’t leave as all the routes out of town are cut,” the Britain-based monitor’s head Rami Abdel Rahman said. He said at least 159 IS fighters and 22 SDF troops had been killed as well as 37 civilians, most of the last group in coalition air raids, since the alliance offensive against Manbij began on May 31. “Bakeries in the town haven’t been open since Friday and food is beginning to become rare,” Abdel Rahman said. This week thousands of people fled Manbij, which had a pre-war population of about 120,000 — mostly Arabs, but about a quarter are Syrian Kurds. Outside the town in areas reclaimed by the Kurdish-led alliance from IS, residents on Saturday expressed relief. “We’re so happy and we hope Manbij will soon be liberated as we have relatives there,” said Munzer Saleh, a resident of Jebb Hassan Agha village, 13 kms (8 miles) southeast of the city. “Our village was known for cigarette smuggling so DAESH was always after us,” he told AFP, using an Arabic acronym for IS which prohibits smoking.

Doha Hajj Ali, a young woman, cursed the jihadists and their strict rules. “They’d say, ‘Cover your eyes’… Make-up, parties, and weddings were not allowed.” But residents said the village has run out of bread and water, and an AFP reporter saw a young boy beg for bread from passing cars. “We haven’t eaten bread for two days,” he said, after the SDF seized the village at the start of the week. Dakish Fatimi, a Kurdish Red Crescent official, said his team had treated dozens of civilians wounded by landmines planted by retreating IS fighters. South of Manbij, pro-regime fighters backed by Russian air strikes on Saturday were 15 kms from the jihadist bastion of Tabqa’s military airport.

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