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BEIRUT. — Bomb blasts killed nearly 150 people and wounded at least 200 in Jableh and Tartous on Syria’s Mediterranean coast yesterday in the government-controlled territory that hosts Russian military bases, monitors and state media said.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks in the cities that have up to now escaped the worst of the violence in the five-year-old conflict, saying it was targeting members of President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 148 people were killed in attacks by at least five suicide bombers and two devices planted in cars. State media had said 78 people had been killed in what is Assad’s coastal heartland.
The attacks were the first of their kind in Tartous, capital of Tartous province and home to a Russian naval facility, and in Jableh in Latakia province, near a Russian-operated air base.
The Kremlin said the bomb blasts underscored the need to press ahead with Geneva peace talks after the collapse of a February 27 ceasefire in April due to intensifying violence in a war that has killed at least 250 000 people.
“This demonstrates yet again just how fragile the situation in Syria is. And this one more time underscores the need for new urgent steps to continue the negotiating process,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with journalists.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated his readiness to fight with the Syrian government against “the terrorist threat” and sent his condolences to Assad, the Kremlin said.
The Syrian foreign ministry sent a letter to the United Nations, state television reported, saying the blasts were a “dangerous escalation by the hostile and extremist regimes in Riyadh, Ankara and Doha”, referring to support given to the rebels by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attacks and a spokesman said Ban took “note with great concern of the escalating military activity in many areas in and around Damascus”.
One of the four blasts in Jableh happened when a man walked into a hospital emergency department and blew himself up. Another blast was at a bus station. The Tartous bombs also targeted a bus station, the Observatory and state media said.
Younes Hassan, a doctor working at the Jableh Hospital, said he heard an explosion at the bus station, followed less than a minute later by the blast at the hospital. — Reuters.
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