ANALYSIS_ Analysis: was Syrian government behind attacks?

Analysis: was Syrian government behind attacks?

The two buildings targeted in yesterday's bombings are among the most heavily guarded in the country.


The wreckage of the car used by a suicide bomber in Damascus Photo: EPA

By Christine Marlow and Richard Spencer
7:32PM GMT 23 Dec 2011

The pressing question about the devastation is who was to blame. In any Arab country the civilian General Security Directorate and the Mukhabarat – military intelligence – are feared organs of state, likely to be controlled by men with personal connections to the rulers, in this case the Assad family.

On a visit this week by The Daily Telegraph, the extra sandbagged checkpoints locals said had been placed in the vicinity since the beginning of the nine-month uprising against the Assad regime were clearly visible.

But is that enough to substantiate opposition claims that only the government itself would have been able to get close enough to carry out the bombings?

“Two years ago I was in those buildings,” said a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army in Damascus by Skype last night. “You cannot get inside. There are guards and checkpoints every 50 metres before you get close to the outside walls.

“The gates are high, with heavy security all around. If you are not from inside the regime, it is impossible. Nobody else could do this.


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“Even the Free Syrian Army don’t dream of attacking these buildings. It could not have been an insider working for the FSA.”

The FSA argues that it conducts only defensive, not offensive operations.

It is now linked to the Syrian National Council, which is still holding out against the use of violence or international military intervention.

But it is also clear that neither the SNC, nor the broader opposition movement which has a number of other factions, nor the FSA is a unified body under central command.

Syria also has a long history of bombings dating back to the 1980s and beyond, in those days clearly the work of Islamist groups, leading some analysts to surmise that an anti-government group could have been behind the devastation.

“In my view it’s surprising this hasn’t happened earlier,” said Joshua Landis, an American academic with close ties to the country who early in the uprising predicted it could descend into civil conflict.

“There are lots of cells and groups that are working fairly independently.

That some of them would carry out this sort of jihadist type campaign is not unexpected.”

It is not impossible that the government is right — the attack does indeed bear similarities to bombings attributed to al-Qaeda’s wing in neighbouring Iraq in recent years. Al-Qaeda’s existence depends on the creation of failed states in which it can find an operating base.

But it has no record of operating inside Syria, which shares its anti-American ideology, while the name in parts of the Arab world is often little more than an umbrella term for jihadist terrorism whose real purpose is ever less clear.

“It’s very useful for the Syrian government to position itself as fighting against al-Qaeda — in the same way that every other government in the Middle East tries to position itself as fighting against al-Qaeda,” Prof Landis said.

Christine Marlow is a pseudonym for a Daily Telegraph journalist who reported from Damascus this week


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