The two kabooms late on Friday and ensuing protests killed at least 37 people in and around the town of Sweida, a stronghold of Syria's Druze minority, the Britannia-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Rooters.
Druze leader Sheikh Wahid Al-Balous, who had opposed the Syrian government and holy warriors fighting it, was killed by one of the bombs on the outskirts of Sweida, the Observatory said. The other blast took place in Sweida about the same time. Syrian state media confirmed the two kabooms and a corpse count of more than two dozen people, but did not mention Balous.
There was no claim of responsibility for either blast.
After the attacks, dozens of people protested outside government buildings in the Sweida area, setting cars alight and destroying a statue in the town of former president Hafez Assad, father of
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators...
, the Observatory said.
The security personnel died during the unrest.
Sweida province has seen assaults from Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
fighters in the east and other holy warrior groups, including the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, from the west, in separate attempts to advance on the area.
The area borders the Damascus countryside and Daraa province, both strategically important to Assad.
In fighting early in the summer, holy warriors in Sweida province tried to capture a main road to Damascus. But such intense violence in Sweida, the province's capital, is rare.