Bomb in Syrian capital kills or wounds 20 troops

A car bomb targeting a checkpoint near a military airport in an upscale neighbourhood of the Syrian capital has killed or wounded more than 20 soldiers, activists said today.
The attack, which took place late Sunday in the Mazzeh district in western Damascus, comes as President Bashar Assad's forces press ahead with an offensive to regain territory they lost to the rebels trying to topple his regime.
The army has scored major victories in key battlefields in western and central Syria in the past weeks, and is now setting its sights on the country's largest city, Aleppo, in the north, parts of which have been opposition strongholds.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said today there were 20 casualties in the attack in Mazzeh. The upscale neighborhood houses several embassies and a military airport.
The Observatory, which relies on a network of informants inside Syria, did not state how many were deaths or how many were injuries.
Syrian state media confirmed there was a blast near the military airport late yesterday but did not release any casualty figures.

At least 93,000 people have been killed in Syria's conflict since it erupted in March 2011, according to a recent UN estimate.
Millions have been displaced and the civil war is increasingly being fought along sectarian lines, pitting Sunni Muslims against Shiites. It is also threatening the stability of Syria's neighbors, including Lebanon and Iraq.

Sunnis dominate the rebel ranks while the Assad regime is mostly made up of Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam.
Sectarian divisions deepened in the conflict a few weeks ago, when Lebanon's Iran-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah joined the fight inside Syria on the regime's side.
Earlier this month, Assad's troops dealt a major blow to the opposition forces after they pushed the rebels out of the strategic town of Qusair near the Lebanese border, largely with Hezbollah's help.
The battle for Qusair shifted the balance of power on the battlefield in favor of the Damascus regime, which is now looking to keep the momentum and aims to take back control of Aleppo, the country's commercial hub. The rebels captured parts of the city last summer during an offensive in the north along the border with Turkey.

While the rebels had been able to capture territory from the government in the past month, they have been unable to hold on and govern it effectively because of the regime's superior firepower.