A suicide bomb attack in a Damascus court has left at least 31 people dead and 45 others wounded.
Another suicide explosion then struck a restaurant in the Syrian capital, killing several people.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, the second wave of deadly attacks in the capital in less than a week after twin bombings killed 74 on Saturday.
But they came with the rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime increasingly divided and dispirited after a series of battlefield setbacks.
Negotiations to end the conflict have meanwhile made little progress, with rebels this week declining to attend negotiations in Kazakhstan.
According to Damascus police chief Mohammad Kheir Ismail, the attacker at the court struck just after 1pm on Wednesday.
A man wearing a military uniform and carrying a shotgun and grenades arrived at the entrance to the palace, the police chief told state TV.
The guards stopped the man, took away his arms and asked to search him. At that point, the man threw himself inside the building and detonated his explosives.
Syria’s attorney general Ahmad al-Sayed said: ‘This is a dirty action as people who enter the palace are innocent.’
An AFP correspondent at the scene in the Hamidiyeh neighbourhood said security forces had cordoned off the area and roads leading to it were blocked as ambulances and firefighters rushed to the building.
A lawyer in the building said: ‘We were terrified because the sound of the explosion was enormous.
‘We took refuge in the library which is on a higher floor. It was a bloody scene.’
The second blast hit not long after in the city’s Rabweh area.
In that attack, the suicide bomber blew himself up in a restaurant.
The Ikhbariyeh TV channel said the attacker was being chased by security agents when he rushed into a restaurant and detonated his explosives’ vest. There was no immediate claim for that attack either.
Damascus had already been reeling from Saturday’s bombings, which mainly killed Iraqi pilgrims in the city to visit Shiite shrines.
That attack was claimed by former Al-Qaeda affiliate Fateh al-Sham Front, part of a rebel alliance that controls large parts of the northwestern Idlib province.
Rebel forces suffered a series of reversals during the sixth year of the war, including being forced from their onetime stronghold of east Aleppo in December.
The loss was an especially difficult blow to rebels who had imagined marching on Damascus in the early days of the civil war.
The conflict began in 2011 with peaceful demonstrations inspired by similar movements during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, calling on Assad to implement reforms.
They started on March 15 after the arrest and torture of a group of students from the southern province of Daraa accused of writing anti-Assad graffiti.
The protests were put down violently, prompting demonstrators to pick up weapons and causing the uprising to spiral into an increasingly complex and brutal civil war that has also drawn in regional and international players.
Rebel forces captured large parts of the country and several key cities. The Islamic State jihadist group emerged from the chaos to seize control of significant territory in Syria and neighbouring Iraq.
But a key turning point came in September 2015 when Russia began a military intervention in support of Assad’s government, which has since regained much of the ground it lost.
Under pressure from air strikes by a US-led coalition, IS has also retreated to bastions like its de facto Syrian capital Raqa.
The six years of conflict have killed more than 320,000 people, with over the half the country’s population displaced by the conflict either internally or becoming refugees.
The war has also ravaged the country’s infrastructure and set the economy back decades.
The brutality of the war has provoked international outcry, with the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein this week describing the country as ‘a torture chamber, a place of savage horror and absolute injustice.’
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