Twin car bombs in Syrian capital kill dozens

BASSEM MROUE

Asso­ci­ated Press

DAMASCUS, Syria — Twin sui­cide car bombs exploded out­side a mil­i­tary intel­li­gence build­ing and killed 55 peo­ple Thurs­day, toss­ing man­gled bod­ies in the street in the dead­liest attack against a regime tar­get since the Syr­ian upris­ing began 14 months ago.

The bomb­ings fueled fears of a ris­ing Islamic mil­i­tant ele­ment among the forces seek­ing to oust Pres­i­dent Bashar Assad and dealt a fur­ther blow to inter­na­tional efforts to end the bloodshed.

The first car bomb went off on a key six-lane high­way dur­ing the morn­ing rush hour, knock­ing down a secu­rity wall out­side the gov­ern­ment build­ing and draw­ing peo­ple to the scene, wit­nesses said. A much larger blast soon fol­lowed, shak­ing the neigh­bor­hood, set­ting dozens of cars ablaze and send­ing up a gray mush­room cloud vis­i­ble around the capital.

Syr­ian state TV video showed dozens of bod­ies, some charred or dis­mem­bered, strewn in the rub­ble or still inside dam­aged cars. An Asso­ci­ated Press reporter at the scene saw medics in rub­ber gloves pick­ing through the site for human remains amid the two craters that were blasted into the asphalt.

The Inte­rior Min­istry, which over­sees the police and secu­rity ser­vices, said 55 peo­ple were killed and more than 370 were wounded. Offi­cials said sui­cide bombers det­o­nated explo­sives weigh­ing more than 1,000 kilo­grams (2,200 pounds).

“The house shook like it was an earth­quake,” Maha Hijazi said, stand­ing out­side her home nearby.

World pow­ers seek­ing to halt Syria’s unrest con­demned the attack and urged all sides to adhere to a cease-fire bro­kered by U.N. and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion con­demned the attack and expressed con­cern that al-Qaida may be increas­ingly tak­ing advan­tage of the country’s pro­longed instability.

Defense Sec­re­tary Leon Panetta told reporters that U.S. intel­li­gence indi­cates “an al-Qaida pres­ence in Syria,” but said the extent of its activ­ity was unclear.

“Frankly we need to con­tinue to do every­thing we can to deter­mine what kind of influ­ence they’re try­ing to exert there,” Panetta said. He also lamented that a month of efforts to imple­ment a U.N. cease-fire plan haven’t worked.

British For­eign Sec­re­tary William Hague said “the onus is on the Syr­ian author­i­ties to imple­ment a full cease-fire and begin the polit­i­cal dia­logue required by the Annan plan,” while the U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil said in a state­ment that “any acts of ter­ror­ism are crim­i­nal and unjus­ti­fi­able regard­less of their motivation.”

Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, the Nor­we­gian head of a team of observers over­see­ing the cease-fire, toured the site and said the Syr­ian peo­ple do not deserve this “ter­ri­ble violence.”

“It is not going to solve any prob­lems,” he said. “It is only going to cre­ate more suf­fer­ing for women and children.”

Annan, too, appealed for calm.

“The Syr­ian peo­ple have already suf­fered too much,” he said in a statement.

The blast was the largest and most deadly yet in a series of bomb­ings tar­get­ing state secu­rity build­ings since last Decem­ber. Most of these have been in Aleppo and Dam­as­cus, Syria’s two largest cities, which have gen­er­ally stood by Assad since the pop­u­lar upris­ing against his rule broke out in March 2011.

The gov­ern­ment blamed the attack on armed ter­ror­ists it says are dri­ving the upris­ing, which has grown into the strongest threat to the Assad fam­ily dynasty in its four decades in power.

The Syr­ian For­eign Min­istry sent let­ters to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the head of the Secu­rity Coun­cil, ask­ing the body “to take steps against states, par­ties and media out­lets that prac­tice and encour­age ter­ror­ism,” Syria’s state news ser­vice said.

Syria’s U.N. ambas­sador, Bashar Ja’afari, told the Secu­rity Coun­cil that a sec­ond bomb­ing in Aleppo on Thurs­day also killed civil­ians and dam­aged property.

The Britain-based Syr­ian Obser­va­tory for Human Rights said five intel­li­gence offi­cers were killed when a bomb tar­geted their car in Aleppo. It was unclear if this was the same event.

A leader of the Free Syr­ian Army, an umbrella group of anti-regime mili­tias through­out the coun­try, con­demned the Dam­as­cus attack and denied the group was involved. Capt. Ammar al-Wawi accused the gov­ern­ment of stag­ing the attack to turn the world against the uprising.

There was no imme­di­ate claim of respon­si­bil­ity, but a shad­owy mil­i­tant group call­ing itself the Al-Nusra Front has claimed past attacks through state­ments on mil­i­tant web­sites. Lit­tle is known about the group, although West­ern intel­li­gence offi­cials say it could be a front for al-Qaida’s Iraq branch.

Ja’afari, Syria’s U.N. ambas­sador, argued that the bomb­ings were evi­dence of “ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties” by “groups and orga­ni­za­tions affil­i­ated with al-Qaida.” He also claimed Syria has a list of “12 for­eign ter­ror­ists” killed in Syria, includ­ing one French cit­i­zen, one British cit­i­zen and one Bel­gian cit­i­zen and he offered the list to the 15 Secu­rity Coun­cil members.

In Wash­ing­ton, Defense Sec­re­tary Leon Panetta said he had “no infor­ma­tion” that al-Qaida was involved in Thursday’s attacks, although he repeated pre­vi­ous state­ments that intel­li­gence indi­cates the group does indeed have a pres­ence in Syria.

The scope and mys­tery of the bomb­ing raised fears that Syria’s unrest is trans­form­ing from an Arab Spring-inspired call for change into a bloody Iraq-style insurgency.

The upris­ing began with protests call­ing for polit­i­cal reform. The gov­ern­ment swiftly cracked down, deploy­ing tanks and troops to quash dis­sent, and many in the oppo­si­tion took up arms. The U.N. said weeks ago that more than 9,000 had been killed. Hun­dreds more have died since then.

Annan’s peace plan calls for a cease-fire to allow for dia­logue by all sides on a polit­i­cal solu­tion. But daily vio­lence has under­mined the plan since the truce was sup­posed to begin April 12, with regime forces still shelling oppo­si­tion areas and rebels attack­ing troops.

The bomb­ings appeared to be beyond the capa­bil­i­ties of the known rebel groups, mostly made up of army defec­tors with light arms. One orga­nizer denied that the rebels have the means or the will to plot such attacks.

“If we had the power to do this, we would have changed the equa­tion a long time ago,” said the orga­nizer, who iden­ti­fied him­self only as Abu Mustafa, speak­ing by phone from north­ern Syria. “We built bombs with fer­til­izer and now we have a hard time even get­ting fertilizer.”

Some in the oppo­si­tion blamed the Assad regime.

“It wants to con­vince the world that if the regime falls, only ter­ror­ism will remain,” said al-Wawi, of the Free Syr­ian Army.

Oth­ers said the size of the attack set it apart from pre­vi­ous bombings.

An activist who gave only his first name of Lawrence for fear of gov­ern­ment reprisal said he heard the booms and felt his build­ing in Dam­as­cus shake. While pre­vi­ous bomb­ings in the cap­i­tal made him sus­pect that the gov­ern­ment some­how staged them, Thursday’s blast was different.

“Today, there is no doubt. This was not fab­ri­cated,” he said, adding that although he didn’t know who was behind the attack, he wor­ried it would harm the opposition.

“This will cer­tainly affect us, media-wise and inter­na­tion­ally,” he said. “This is not to our advantage.”

The attack was the fifth to hit Dam­as­cus since Decem­ber 2011, when a car bomb killed 44 peo­ple out­side an intel­li­gence compound.

On Jan. 6, an explo­sion at a Dam­as­cus inter­sec­tion killed 25 peo­ple, many of them police. Two car bombs on March 17 killed at least 27 peo­ple, also near intel­li­gence and secu­rity build­ings. On April 27, an explo­sion killed nine secu­rity offi­cers. Syr­ian offi­cials said all were sui­cide attacks.

Posted by AP News on May 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.