DAMASCUS: Two rockets struck the Russian embassy in Damascus on Tuesday sparking panic as several hundred people gathered to express their support for Moscow's air war in Syria , an AFP photographer said.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has said that the shelling on the embassy is an "act of terror".

According to the photographer at the scene, some 300 people had begun to gather for a demonstration thanking Russia for its recent intervention in Syria when the rockets crashed into the embassy in the Mazraa neighbourhood of the capital.

There was widespread panic, but it was not immediately clear if anyone had been wounded or killed.

Opposition fighters in the suburbs of the capital have targeted the embassy in the past but it was not clear if Tuesday's attack targeted the rally.

Al-Qaida's Syrian affiliate has, meanwhile, called for jihadists to attack Russia over its air strikes in Syria. "If the Russian army kills the people of Syria, then kill their people. And if they kill our soldiers, then kill their soldiers. An eye for an eye," Abu Mohamed al-Jolani, head of Syria's al-Qaida affiliate al-Nusra Front , said in an audio recording released late on Monday.

Russia began launching air strikes against insurgents in Syria on September 30.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the rockets were fired from the eastern edges of the capital, where Islamist rebels are entrenched.

The Russian embassy has been the target of rocket attacks before.

On September 21, just nine days before it began its air war in Syria, Moscow demanded "concrete action" after a shell hit the embassy's compound in Damascus.

In May, one person was killed by mortar rounds that landed nearby. Three were hurt when mortar rounds landed inside the compound in April.

