Homs’s Al-Zahra neighborhood, dominated by members of the Shiite Muslim-linked Alawite sect to which President Bashar al-Assad and key members of his regime belong, is frequently attacked by antigovernment rebels armed with rockets and vehicle bombs.
A parked vehicle packed with nearly 440 pounds of explosives blew up Monday morning on a busy road in Al-Zahra.
A suicide bomber on foot hid among the crowd that gathered at the scene and detonated his bomb, according to Homs governor Talal Barazi, via a report on the official Syrian Arab News Agency.
The death toll remained unclear in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Mr. Barazi told SANA that 19 people had died and another 34 wounded.
But the U.K.-based opposition monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the bombings had killed at least 32 and injured 90.
The attack coincides with increased efforts by the regime and its allies to negotiate truces in several rebel-held areas across the country, including parts of Homs, which is largely under government control.
Mr. Assad’s government has also increased military force against groups rejecting the deals, backed by strikes from the Russian Air Force, which has been bombing rebel targets in Syria since late September.
“The cowardly and desperate terrorist bombings are a response to the growing spirit of national reconciliation in many Syrian areas in tandem with the grand victories of our heroic army,” Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi said in a statement.
Video footage aired by Syrian state television Monday showed firetrucks dousing flames that consumed several apartment buildings, shops and vehicles near the site of the bombings.
The dead and wounded could be seen lifted from underneath the debris of buildings and smoldering wreckage of cars.
“There is a woman still up there!” a man can be heard shouting frantically.
Earlier this month several hundred fighters were given safe passage out of the Homs neighborhood of Waer because they didn’t want to take part in a cease-fire with the Syrian regime.
Waer was the last rebel foothold in Homs, following a U.N.-mediated deal last year that allowed the exit of opposition fighters from the city’s historic center.
The deal involved the regime’s main regional patron Iran, along with Turkey, which supports several Syrian rebel groups.
A number of Homs neighborhoods, including those once dominated by members of the country’s Sunni Muslim majority, have been severely damaged and emptied of many of their inhabitants since the beginning of Syria’s conflict in 2011.
Residents say their removal was a deliberate campaign of sectarian cleansing by the Syrian regime and a key military ally, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
The majority of rebels fighting the regime are Sunni, while many Alawites, including those in Al-Zahra, joined militias loyal to Mr. Assad at the start of the conflict.
The rebel fighters who remain in Homs are largely concentrated in the countryside north of the city. Others have joined the Sunni extremist group Islamic State, which controls areas east of Homs including the ancient city of Palmyra.
