Bomb blast kills five at cafe in central Damascus

A bomb ripped through a crowded cafe in the Hijaz area of central Damascus, killing at least five people and wounding 16 others near the Palace of Justice and the road to the historic Hamidiye Bazaar. The Syrian Ministry of Health first reported four dead and 11 injured before emergency figures were revised upward. No group immediately claimed responsibility.

The blast landed in one of the capital’s busiest civic and commercial corridors, turning a routine public space into a scene of rubble and panic. That location matters because it sits far from any battlefield front, in the middle of a district where people move between courts, shops and transit routes as Damascus tries to project normal life after Bashar al-Assad’s fall in late 2024 and the rise of Ahmed al-Sharaa.

The attack adds to a short but troubling run of bombings in the capital since that political shift. On May 19, a car bomb outside a Defense Ministry building in Bab Sharqi killed one Syrian soldier and wounded at least 18 people. In that case, soldiers had found a separate explosive device near one of the ministry’s buildings and were moving to dismantle it when the vehicle exploded nearby. That attack also drew no immediate public claim of ownership.

Together, the two blasts point to a security environment that remains unsettled even after the formal end of Syria’s 14-year civil war. The July 2 bombing struck a crowded cafe in the heart of the city, while the May attack targeted a military site in another central Damascus neighborhood, showing that both civilian and state spaces remain vulnerable. The transitional authorities have not publicly identified a perpetrator, leaving open whether the latest blast was carried out by anti-government militants, criminal networks or another force exploiting gaps in security control.