The ministry said Wednesday that a vehicle exploded at the Barzeh police station in the north of the capital, killing a lieutenant colonel and wounding four others, adding that an investigation was ongoing.

On Thursday it said that a second policeman had died, with his body transferred to the police hospital in Damascus.

Security incidents, including blasts targeting military or civilian vehicles, occur intermittently in Damascus.

The capital has been largely spared jihadist violence in recent years, especially since the government retook the last rebel bastion near Damascus in 2018.

In April, state media said an unclaimed car bombing rocked the Damascus district of Mazzeh, with the interior ministry saying two people were slightly injured.

In October 2022, a bomb attack on a Syrian army bus near Damascus killed at least 24 soldiers.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, attributed that attack to IS cells.

The IS group’s self-declared “caliphate” that once straddled swathes of Syria and Iraq shrank to its death in eastern Syria in early 2019.

The conflict in Syria has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country’s infrastructure and industry.

While the front lines have mostly quietened in recent years, large parts of the country’s north remain outside government control.