April 28, 2004

Police raided a militant hide-out hours after a mysterious attack in the Syrian capital's diplomatic quarter that killed four people and may have targeted a building once occupied by the United Nations.

Police found weapons including rocket propelled grenades and guns during the raid in the nearby town of Khan al-Sheih, the state-controlled SANA news agency said. Khan al-Sheih is about 18 miles southwest of the scene of Tuesday's clash and has a Palestinian refugee camp nearby.

The violence Tuesday was some of the worst in tightly controlled Syria since the 1980s, when the government put down an insurgency by Islamic militants. On Wednesday, residents swept away glass that was shattered by a bomb and small weapons fire during the attack.

Quoting a security source, the state-run SANA news agency called the attackers "a terrorist band," but government and witness accounts of Tuesday's battle shed little light on any possible motives.

An Interior Ministry official told SANA that four gunmen detonated a bomb placed under a car before firing bullets and grenades at Syrian security forces.

The government said two attackers, a policeman and a civilian were killed.

The target appeared to be a former United Nations office whose facade was blackened and scarred Wednesday, but witnesses said the gunmen appeared to have fired at random.
[...]
Across the street, evidence of the battle scarred the four-story building that once housed the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force, which monitors an agreement between Israeli and Syrian forces in the Golan Heights.
[Betcha the Israelis can tell us all about how these UN blue helmets have kept the Syrians in line!
And this agreement was part of the deal to get Arafat and the "Palestinians" out of Lebanon and into Israel and you know the rest of that story.--Jen]
[...]
All U.N. offices were closed in Damascus Wednesday, as was the U.S. Embassy, which is not in the neighborhood that saw Tuesday's violence.

Muslim extremists have portrayed the United Nations as a tool of the West,
[Looks as if nobody loves the U.N.! Whatta shame. Not.--J.T.
blaming the world body, for example, for the crippling international sanctions imposed on Iraq to punish Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait in 1990.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Syria's hard-line government fought a fierce war with Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was blamed for a 1980 assassination attempt on President Hafez Assad, the country's authoritarian leader who died from natural causes in 2000. Assad was succeeded by his son, Bashar Assad.
[Blaming the Islamic Brotherhood for trying to kill Pop Assad wasn't so strange--I think they offed Anwar Sadat in Egypt in 1981.--Jen]

In 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood staged a rebellion in the northern province of Hama. During the clashes, Syrian forces razed much of the city, killing as many as 10,000 people and finally crushing the Brotherhood after a five-year war.

Syria has been on the U.S. State Department's list of terror-sponsoring nations for its support of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah that attack Israel. Syria, though, says the anti-Israeli groups are not terrorist, and that it has an interest in fighting Islamic extremist groups like al-Qaida.

The GWOIT gets odder by the day...
It will be interesting to see which group did do this.
Baby Assad is clearly friendly to terror groups; they just have to be his terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
Surely, he's also sponsoring lots of Saddam's old Sunni Baathist buddies, too.
So, why would Al Queda target Damascus?
I heard Monsoor Ijaz talk about this on Fox News and he came up with 2 possible suspects for the blast: in his expert opinion, he said it could be either fellow Syrians who were trying to overthrow Assad's rule or Kurdish fighters who've been picking other fights with Syria before.
Even though we've all gotten used to a world since 9/11 where we almost automatically blame AQ, I'm thinking that Monsoor is right and that this time, it's not AQ but either one (or a combination thereof) of the groups he mentioned.
Of course, they could always owe allegiance to and have funding and support from Al Queda, the Mother of all terror groups...
We shall see (that is, if we can get any real news out of a hermetically sealed place like Damascus).