Mortars rained down on a crowded marketplace in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Syrian capital, killing 21 people as regime forces and the opposition clashed on the southern outskirts of Damascus, activists said Friday.
“We don’t know where the mortars came from, whether they were from the Syrian regime or not the Syrian regime,” said Rami Abdul Rahman, director of the Observatory. He added they could also have been strays from the fighting in nearby Tadamon neighborhood.
The state news agency blamed the bombardment on “terrorist mercenaries” — a term the government uses for opposition fighters — and said they had been chased away by security forces.
An online video of the immediate aftermath of the Yarmouk attack showed bleeding and burnt bodies with people rushing about amid the smoke and the sounds of screaming.
Government troops, however, have in the past attacked the camp, home to nearly 150,000 Palestinians and their descendants driven from their homes by the war surrounding Israel’s 1948 creation. Palestinian refugees in Syria have tried to stay out of the 17-month old uprising but with Yarmouk nestled among neighborhoods sympathetic to the opposition, its residents were eventually drawn into the fighting.
