Both Syria and Nigeria were struck by deadly mosque bombings this week, killing and injuring dozens of people. Both attacks were timed to coincide with prayer services to inflict maximum carnage.
The Syrian bombing struck the Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib Mosque in the city of Homs on Friday, killing at least eight and wounding 18. The mosque serves Alawites and is located in a heavily Alawite neighborhood of the city.
The Alawaites are a minority branch of Shiite Islam that became powerful and influential in Syria under the rule of dictators Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, who belonged to the sect. After Bashar Assad was overthrown in December 2024, the Alawites grew fearful of persecution and retaliatory attacks. Some factions in the Syrian government have accused the Alawites of remaining loyal to the Assad dynasty and plotting to overthrow the new government.
Syrian state media broadcast images of the Imam Ali bin Abi Talib Mosque after the attack showing bloodstains on the carpet, holes blasted in the walls, and windows shattered by the force of the bomb, which was evidently detonated inside the building.
“The blast appeared to have taken place in the corner of the mosque’s main prayer hall, leaving a small crater in the wall and scorching the surrounding area, with prayer carpets ripped and strewn with debris, and books and fragments scattered across the floor,” Al Jazeera News reported on Friday, quoting security officials who said the attack could have been a suicide bombing.
Local officials denounced the attack as one of many “desperate attempts to undermine security and stability and sow chaos among the Syrian people.”
“Remnants of the former regime, ISIS militants and collaborators have converged on a single goal: obstructing the path of the new state by undermining stability, threatening civil peace, and eroding the shared coexistence and common destiny of Syrians throughout history,” said the central government’s information ministry.
The New York Times (NYT) reported on Friday that a group called Saraya Ansar al-Sunnah (SAS), which is believed to be a splinter group of the Islamic State, has claimed responsibility for the attack in a social media post.
SAS also claimed responsibility for the devastating suicide bombing of a church in Damascus in June that killed 25 people. In its social media post on Friday, SAS claimed it worked with “jihadists from another group” to carry out the Homs mosque bombing.
According to counterterrorism experts, SAS once belonged to the alliance of insurgents and jihadists known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which deposed Bashar Assad in December 2024 and installed its own leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as “interim president.” SAS broke away because it considered HTS too soft on former Assad regime officials who were captured during the long civil war, and too tolerant of religions other than the SAS-approved version of Islam.
Meanwhile, another bomb detonated at the Al-Adum mosque in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri on Wednesday night, killing at least five people and injuring 35 more.
“Nobody knows what happened. It was during prayers that the bomb exploded. Allah has destined that this will happen but nobody can give details of how it happened,” an eyewitness told Reuters on Thursday.
Police officials from the state of Borno, where Maiduguri is located, said they retrieved fragments of what appeared to be a suicide vest from site of the attack. The police swept the market area around the mosque for additional “secondary devices,” but apparently did not recover any.
Nigeria is awash with violent Islamist groups, but the one most likely to carry out suicide bombings is Boko Haram which is very active in the northeastern part of the country.
Boko Haram, whose name means “Western learning is forbidden,” is an Islamist gang of terrorists and slavers that became world-famous after kidnapping almost 300 girls from a school in Chibok in April 2014. The weakness of the response to the attack from both the Nigerian government and the Obama administration became international scandals.
Boko Haram flourished after the audacious Chibok kidnapping and eventually swore fealty to the Islamic State, only to break away over leadership disputes. A new “official franchise” of ISIS known as the Islamic State-West Africa Province (ISWAP) has grown into another deadly terrorist threat in Nigeria.
Between them, Boko Haram and ISWAP have killed at least 40,000 people and displaced two million more since 2009 as they fought to establish a breakaway Islamic “caliphate” in northeastern Nigeria and neighboring sections of Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. Maiduguri was once at the center of this battle, experiencing daily terrorist attacks, although the city has been relatively calm since 2021.
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