Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - ISIS claimed a series of bombings hit two Syrian regime bastion cities on Monday, killing at least 100 people.

Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said four blasts, at least one of them a suicide attack, hit the coastal city of Jableh.

Another three blasts, at least one of them a suicide bombing, hit the seaside city of Tartous, 60 kilometers to the south, in which at least 20 people were killed and several wounded, state media reported.

"Terrorist explosions in Tartous killed more than 20 people and wounded a number of others," the official SANA news agency quoted an interior ministry source as saying.

There was no immediate official toll for simultaneous blasts in the coastal city of Jableh to the north.

Abdel Rahman said the scale of the attacks on the two cities was "unprecedented".

State television broadcast footage of the damaged bus station in Tartous, where charred mini-buses lay on their sides while others were still ablaze.

The two cities targeted are both strongholds of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad whose family hails from the village of Qardaha, just 25 kilometers east of Jableh.

They have been relatively insulated from the war raging in Syria, which has killed at least 270,000 people since March 2011.

*AFP