At least 60 people were killed on Thursday in violence across Syria, including 10 in the central province of Homs, and as car booms went kaboom!in Damascus
...Capital of the last overtly fascist regime in the world...
and the northwest city of Idlib, monitors reported.
The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said regime forces killed 60 people across the country, among them four children, two women and a rebel Free Syrian Army commander.
Nineteen people were killed in the Damascus suburbs of Douma, Zamalka and Hammouriyeh, 19 in Homs, nine in Daraa, five in Idlib, three in Deir Ezzor, two in Aleppo
...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins...
, two in Hama and one in Latakia, the LCC said.
A jacket wallah detonated an explosives-packed vehicle in a suburb of the capital, wounding 14 people and damaging one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines, state media and witnesses reported.
State news agency SANA said the vehicle went
kaboom!in a garage 50 meters (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."
The Observatory reported widespread raids by troops later in the capital.
A car boom in Idlib city targeted a military checkpoint, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that a number of soldiers were killed or maimed.
Eight people, including three opposition fighters, were killed during festivities between troops and rebels in the central city of Homs, it said, while also reporting renewed regime shelling of Rastan in the province of the same name and of Daraa in southern Syria.
Two opposition fighters, including Ahmed Bahbouh -- head of the rebel military office in Rastan and a leading dissident -- were killed at the entrances of the rebel-held town, which the regime has been trying to overrun for months.
Troops bombarded Rastan "using helicopters and mortars, killing and wounding a large number of rebel fighters," the watchdog reported.
The Observatory accused the U.N. observers of "silence," saying that they "do not move until after a city is defeated by regime troops, as happened in al-Haffe."
That was a reference to a town in Latakia province that was bombarded for eight days before troops moved in.
In the city of Daraa, five people were killed before dawn in the neighborhood of Tareek al-Sad, which was heavily shelled, the Britannia-based Observatory said.
"Government forces have surrounded the neighborhood of Tareek al-Sad in preparation to storm the area," it said.
Six people were killed in the central province of Hama, including three soldiers, two officers and a girl, while another civilian was killed in Damascus province, according to the Observatory.
At least 77 people were killed across Syria on Wednesday, including 49 civilians, 21 soldiers and seven rebels, the watchdog said.