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Summary A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle near the revered the Sayyida Zeinab shrine in Syria.
14 people were wounded and the shrine was damaged, state media said Thursday.State news agency SANA said the vehicle exploded in a garage 50 metres (yards) from the Sayyida Zeinab shrine. There was substantial damage in the area of the blast and the terrorist who carried out the operation was killed, it said.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, citing anti-regime activists, said the bomb went off near security offices, damaging the apparent target as well as the shrine, as seen in a video posted on the Internet.A witness said a van drove at speed into the parking lot at 6 am (0300 GMT) and exploded among parked vehicles, including pilgrim buses. The vehicles and a nearby police station were damaged, an AFP photographer at the site said.The windows of the mausoleum were shattered and its air vents ripped out by the force of the blast, which left a three-metre (10-foot) crater. Tiles on the minarets were damaged.International peace envoy Kofi Annan has warned that Syrias 15 months of deadly unrest could turn into all-out sectarian war.Most of Syrias 22-million population are Sunni Muslims, while its minorities include Alawites, an offshoot Shiite community to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs.Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, mainly from Syrias ally Iran, travel each year to the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab, a granddaughter of Prophet Mohammed, in an area of south Damascus that is home to many Iraqi refugees.Also early Thursday, a car bomb in Idlib city in northwest Syria targeted a military checkpoint, the Syrian Observatory said, adding that an unknown number of soldiers were killed or wounded in the blast.At least 10 civilians and three rebels were killed in the latest violence across the country, it said.
