BRUSSELS, BEIRUT: Syrian President Bashar Assad has suspended special multiple-entry visas for EU diplomats to Damascus.
“We are continuing as the EU … to do whatever we can to avoid it having an impact on the important work we are doing on the ground,” a European Commission spokeswoman said on Thursday.
The special permission to use multiple-entry Syrian visas for access to Damascus was rescinded at the start of January with no explanation from the Syrian regime, complicating efforts to distribute humanitarian aid to civil war victims.
Explosion
Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded in a northeastern neighborhood of the Syrian capital on Thursday causing damages but no casualties, state media said, the third such blast in a city under regime control this week.
State news agency SANA said the bomb hit the Al-Adawi neighborhood just north of the central Old City district. A witness said the blast occurred near a hospital and security forces were examining a blown-up blue car in the street.
SANA reported “a terrorist bombing in the Adawi area with an explosive device planted in a car, causing material damage but no casualties.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the blast hit near the embassy of key government ally Russia.
The Britain-based war monitor said four people were lightly wounded. On Tuesday, a car bomb detonated in the coastal city of Latakia, near Assad’s ancestral village, killing one person and wounding 14, state media reported.
On Sunday, a bomb exploded near a highway at the edge of Damascus and authorities arrested one attacker. Syria’s war has killed more than 360,000 people and forced more than half its pre-war population from their homes since it started in 2011 with the bloody repression of anti-government protests that dragged in global powers.
Though Assad has regained control over most of Syria with Russian and Iranian help, attackers have struck in cities he controls with suicide blasts and car bombs.
Latakia and central Damascus have stayed in the military’s hands throughout Syria’s eight years of war, avoiding the airstrikes that battered other big cities.
The Syrian regime in May retook a final scrap of territory held by Daesh in southern Damascus, cementing total control over the capital for the first time in six years.
