Two improvised explosive devices detonated near the Four Seasons hotel in Damascus on Tuesday, wounding at least 18 people, hours into the second day of French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit to Syria The Guardian. Macron had stayed at the hotel the previous night and was meeting Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa at the presidential palace when the blasts occurred Al Jazeera. The Four Seasons sits on one of Damascus's major thoroughfares and functions as a de facto diplomatic compound, housing UN staff and foreign missions behind what is generally regarded as the tightest security perimeter in the capital BBC.

Video circulating from the scene showed Syrian police officers gathered around a bin moments before it exploded; four officers were wounded in that blast. The interior ministry said a second device had been placed in a parked car, and put the total wounded at 18. An investigation is underway, with no group having claimed responsibility as of publication The Guardian.

The attack did not alter Macron's schedule. Syrian state media released images of the two presidents embracing at the palace after the blasts, and Macron posted on X that "nothing can smother the aspiration of Syrian women and men to live in a fully sovereign, safe, pluralistic and united Syria." Notably, the previous evening the Syrian-French Business Council had hosted a reception at the same hotel, attended by Syrian Tourism Minister Mazen al-Salhani, underscoring how thoroughly the visit had been woven into the capital's diplomatic and commercial calendar before the security incident SANA.

Tuesday's bombings were the second to strike Damascus in a week. The previous Thursday, an IED planted in a busy café near the Justice Palace killed at least 10 people and wounded more than 20 — also unclaimed. Damascus had otherwise been comparatively insulated from the violence, kidnappings, and assassinations that have punctuated Sharaa's rule elsewhere in Syria since Bashar al-Assad's ouster in December 2024. That two attacks landed in the capital within days of each other, one coinciding almost precisely with a foreign head-of-state visit to one of the city's most fortified sites, invites scrutiny of whether Damascus's relative calm is eroding or whether the timing was designed to embarrass a government eager to project stability to Western investors.

Macron is the first major Western leader to set foot in Syria since Assad's fall, and the substance of the visit reaches well beyond symbolism. France severed diplomatic relations with Damascus in 2012 over the Assad government's crackdown on protesters; Tuesday's meetings produced an agreement to designate ambassadors, formally restoring ties after fourteen years. Sharaa's government is staffed heavily by figures who emerged from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group that grew out of al-Qaida's Syrian affiliate — a lineage that has shaped, and complicated, Western capitals' calculus on engagement. Paris has nonetheless positioned itself as Sharaa's most consistent Western advocate, lobbying Washington to lift sanctions on Damascus and mediating contacts between Syria and Israel.

The commercial dimension of the trip was substantial. Macron's delegation included Jacques Saadé, head of shipping group CMA CGM and himself of Syrian origin, and the chief executive of TotalEnergies. French firms signed more than a dozen agreements covering reconstruction of water and electricity infrastructure in Homs, technical assistance to Syria's central bank, and capacity-building work at Damascus airport tied to CMA CGM. A separate accord addressed the return of roughly £43.6 million in assets that Rifaat al-Assad, the late uncle of Bashar al-Assad, is alleged to have illicitly acquired before fleeing to France.

The juxtaposition of that agenda with two bombings in the same week frames the core tension of the post-Assad transition. Sharaa's government needs exactly the kind of foreign capital and diplomatic normalization Macron brought to Damascus to rebuild an economy gutted by over a decade of civil war and sanctions. Investors and returning diplomats need assurance that the security apparatus inherited from a fractured insurgent coalition can actually secure its own capital, let alone the country's periphery. Neither Thursday's café bombing nor Tuesday's twin IEDs has been attributed to a specific actor, which leaves open whether Damascus is contending with residual Assad-loyalist networks, rival jihadist factions unreconciled to HTS's governing turn, or something more localized. That ambiguity itself is a governance liability for Sharaa as he courts Western partners who will be watching closely for a pattern, not an anomaly, in the weeks ahead.