A suicide bomber blew himself up as a bus passed in the Bab al-Saghir area, which is home to several Shia mausoleums. A roadside bomb was also detonated, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Several Shia pilgrims were among the dead.
“There are also dozens of people wounded, some of them in a serious condition,” Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in the country’s six-year-old civil war, mostly by the regime and its powerful allies, and millions have been displaced both inside and outside of Syria.
On the other hand, Shia shrines are a frequent target of attack for Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group (IS), not only in Syria but also in neighbouring Iraq.
The Sayeda Zeinab mausoleum to the south of Damascus, Syria’s most visited Shia pilgrimage site, has been hit by several deadly bombings during the war.
[Originally published by The New Arab. Reproduced here with permission.]