AT LEAST eight Syrians died in a suicide car bombing in a Damascus suburb yesterday.

Meanwhile, insurgent shelling killed a woman and three children in Aleppo, the day after Syria’s government urged the UN security council to condemn such attacks.

The Damascus attack occurred when a terrorist set off his explosives-packed vehicle at a military checkpoint at the entrance to the capital’s Sayyida Zeinab district, Syrian state television reported.

Video showed the twisted wreckage of the bomber’s vehicle and damage to nearby blocks of flats.

Syrian media put the death toll at five with 20 wounded, but other sources said as many as 12 had died.

Sayyida Zeinab is named after the daughter of the first Shi’ite imam Ali. Thousands of pilgrims visit her shrine there every year.

An Islamic State (Isis) bombing in the same suburb killed about 130 people in February.

In Aleppo, three shells fell in the al-Sulaimaniyeh district, killing three children and injuring 17 people. Twenty-one more were injured in other areas.

Earlier, rockets fired from the rebel-held Bani Zaid district killed a woman and injured five others. Heavy shelling has continued since Saturday, while the Syrian air force bombs insurgents in the city.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the US of failing to distinguish its favoured “moderate opposition” from the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front in Aleppo, preventing Russian jets from targeting the terrorists.

On Friday, US Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that sorting the “moderates” from the extremists was “harder than we thought.”