Suicide bombers targeted Syrian troops and a hospital on Wednesday in the rugged Qalamoun hills north of Damascus, where rebels are struggling to reverse government gains that threaten to cut one of their chief supply lines, activists and officials said.
There was no immediate word on casualties from the attacks in Nabak and Deir Attiyeh. The towns belong to a string of communities along a route used by rebels to bring supplies from nearby Lebanon to opposition-held enclaves outside the capital and to the central city of Homs.
A suicide car bomber targeted a checkpoint manned by Syrian soldiers while another blew up near a security headquarters. Both were on the outskirts of Nabak, said Rami Abdurrahman from the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and another activist based near the town.
In Deir Attiyeh, two suicide car bombers detonated their explosives outside a hospital, killing the guards, Syrian state television said. It said the attackers were Saudi citizens.
State television also said that troops repelled the attackers, and that the attackers tried to vandalize hospital equipment. It was not possible to reconcile the two versions.
Abdurrahman said the rebels belonged to the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. He obtains his information from a network of activists on the ground.