BEIRUT: A suicide car bomb killed at least 15 people and wounded 53 in the main business district of Damascus yesterday in what the Syrian prime minister said was a response to army gains against fighters around the capital.

The bomb near a school in the Sabaa Bahrat district, which also houses the Central Bank and Finance Ministry, set cars ablaze and damaged buildings, state television footage showed.

A Damascus resident who described the blast as the biggest she had heard in the capital during the two-year-old revolt against President Bashar Assad said large plumes of black smoke were rising from the Sabaa Bahrat district.

After the car bomb blast, Syrian television showed footage of seven bodies in the street, including at least two charred corpses in the wreckage of an overturned bus. Other vehicles were still on fire, lined up in what appeared to be a car park.

A woman with a blood-covered face was carried away on a stretcher. Panic-stricken women in long black dresses and headscarves ran towards the scene. Some children in school uniform were shown in bandages.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but each side blamed the other.

Fighters said the army had intensified attacks on villages in the opposition-held Ghouta area to the east of the city since mid-March, besieging some of them under siege to pin fighters back.

Osama Al-Shami, an activist from southern Damascus said Assad's forces had launched a big tank-led assault on eastern Ghouta from the side of the International Airport to the south. If successful, he said, the offensive would dislodge fighters from their footholds around the airport and cut their supply line to eastern Ghouta from the southern border with Jordan.

A Syrian human rights group says nearly 9,000 government troops have been killed in two years of fighting between President Bashar Assad’s forces and fighters trying to topple him.

At the start of the revolt, authorities published names of the fallen troops daily. As the uprising turned more violent and eventually became a civil war, reports of casualties on government side vanished from the public domain.

Meanwhile, a UN inspection team is in Cyprus and ready to deploy to nearby Syria to probe the alleged use of chemical weapons in the conflict there, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday.

“I can announce today that an advance team is now in Cyprus, the final staging point” before the mission heads to Syria, Ban said in The Hague. “We are ready.”

Iraqi authorities searched an Iranian jet on route to Syria yesterday but found only medical equipment, officials said, in the first inspection since Washington pressed Baghdad to help stop Tehran flying arms to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Checking Iranian flights is a politically delicate task for Iraq, which balances its own close ties to Assad’s key backer Iran against its relations with Washington and Gulf neighbors opposed to the Syrian leader.