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A car bomb killed 17 people and left at least 14 more wounded in Damascus, in the deadliest such attack in the Syrian capital in decades.
All of the dead were said to be civilian passersby, killed when the bomb went off at a crossroads on a busy road leading to Damascus International Airport and near the popular Sayyida Zeinab shrine.
"This is definitely a terrorism attack [on a] crowded area. This is a cowardly attack," said the country's Interior Minister, General Bassam Abdel Majeed.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Lebanese media reported that the target was a senior intelligence official who was in a nearby secret service building.
Another possibility is that it was aimed at destabilising the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, either planted as a warning by Iran, which has been angered by Syrian peace overtures to Israel, or as a result of unrest in the country's Sunni Muslim majority, which now wields political power.
