AMMAN, Jordan — A car bomb ripped through Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, on Sunday, killing at least 17 people and wounding 40 in one of the main battlegrounds of the country’s civil war, state-run media said.
Al-Qaeda-style bombings have become increasingly common in Syria, and Western officials say there is little doubt that Islamist extremists, some associated with the terrorist network, have made inroads in the country as instability has spread. But the main fighting force looking to oust President Bashar Assad is the Free Syrian Army, a group made up largely of defected Syrian soldiers.
Sunday’s blast came hours after Mohammad al-Shalabi, a Jordanian militant leader linked to al-Qaeda, warned that his extremist group will launch “deadly attacks” to help the rebels in Syria topple Assad.
The warning fueled concern that Syria’s civil war is providing a new forum for foreign jihadists, who fought alongside Iraqi Sunni insurgents after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and are sending fighters to help the Taliban in Afghanistan.
State-run TV aired footage of firetrucks trying to extinguish the blaze in Aleppo and rescue workers digging through rubble left by the car bomb. Aleppo’s governor, Mohammed Wahid Akkad, was quoted by Syria’s official news agency, SANA, as saying the 17 dead were civilians.
At least 58 people were reported killed across Syria on Sunday and scores wounded, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group. That figure excluded the car bomb.
