No fewer than 22 people have been killed and 63 others wounded in a suicide bomb attack at a church in Damascus, Syria’s health ministry has said.
According to the interior ministry, a man opened fire with a weapon at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Prophet Elias in the Dweila district during a Sunday evening service before detonating an explosive vest.
It said the attacker was a member of the extremist group Islamic State (IS). The gang made no immediate claim.
Photos and video from inside the church showed a highly damaged altar, pews littered with broken glass, and blood spattered walls.
An eyewitness, Lawrence Maamari, told the AFP news agency that “someone entered [the church] from outside carrying a weapon” and began shooting. People “tried to stop him before he blew himself up”, he added.
Another witness who was in a nearby shop said he heard gunfire followed by an explosion that sent glass flying. “We saw fire in the church and the remains of wooden benches thrown all the way to the entrance,” Ziad said.
It was the first such strike in Damascus since Islamist rebels deposed Bashar al-Assad in December, bringing an end to 13 years of devastation.
In a statement, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch stated, “The treacherous hand of evil struck this evening, claiming our lives, along with the lives of our loved ones who fell today as martyrs during the evening divine liturgy.”
According to initial reports, the bomb blast occurred at the church’s entryway, killing persons both inside and outside the building.
The patriarchate called upon Syria’s interim government to “assume full responsibility for what has happened and continues to happen in terms of violation against the sanctity of churches and to ensure the protection of all citizens”.
Interior Minister Anas Khattab stated that specialised teams from his ministry had begun investigating the circumstances of what he called a “reprehensible crime”.
“These terrorist acts will not stop the efforts of the Syrian state in achieving civil peace,” he added.
Geir Pedersen, the UN special envoy for Syria, condemned the incident and asked Syrians “to unite in rejecting terrorism, extremism, incitement, and the targeting of any community”.
US Special Envoy Tom Barrack stated, “These terrible acts of cowardice have no place in the new tapestry of integrated tolerance and inclusion that Syrians are weaving.”
Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa has often claimed to protect religious and ethnic minorities. His Sunni Islamist party, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is a former al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria and has been recognised as a terrorist organisation by the UN, the US, and the UK.
In recent months, Syria has experienced two rounds of deadly sectarian violence.
IS routinely targets Christians and other religious minorities in Syria.
In 2016, the organisation claimed responsibility for a series of explosives near the Shia Muslim Sayyida Zeinab shrine in Damascus’s southern district, which killed over 70 people.
IS previously controlled 88,000 square kilometres (34,000 square miles) of land ranging from western Syria to eastern Iraq, imposing its harsh authority on around eight million people.
Despite the group’s military loss in Syria in 2019, the UN has warned that the threat posed by IS and its affiliates remains significant.
According to a February assessment, the group may use Syria’s transition to ramp up attacks and turn the country into a fresh recruiting ground for foreign militants.
It was estimated that IS had 1,500 to 3,000 fighters in Syria and adjacent Iraq, with the majority of them, including senior leaders, stationed on Syrian territory.
According to reports, some 300 fighters were stationed in the central Badia desert, which functioned as a hub for plotting exterior operations.
More than 9,000 IS fighters are being jailed in jails across northeastern Syria, while 40,000 other IS supporters, largely women and children, are being kept in various camps.
