Syria bomb kills 9, Damascus blames foreign plot

BEIRUT (Reuters) - A car bomb blew up at a Syrian intelligence post in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor on Saturday, killing up to nine people, activists and state media said.

State television said the attack was the latest evidence that Syria is facing a foreign-sponsored Sunni Islamist conspiracy rather than a broad popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

The official SANA news agency said the blast had killed nine and wounded about 100, including guards, at what it called military installations. It said residences had been damaged. An activist said one man had been killed when the blast brought the roof of his house down.

State television broadcast footage of smoke rising over the city, pools of blood amid rubble, the damaged facades of buildings and twisted, smoking vehicles.

It said U.N. staff who are supposed to be monitoring an internationally brokered ceasefire, which has yet to take hold, had not yet inspected the site.

The U.N./Arab League peace plan drawn up by Kofi Annan aims to mark a political path out of violence in Syria, where an uprising that began 14 months ago as a mass protest movement inspired by the Arab Spring has turned into an armed insurgency.

"It seems like a well-planned attack. The explosion hit the least guarded rear gate of the Military Intelligence complex ... where the operatives keep their cars," said an opposition activist in Deir al-Zor.

State television called the blast part of a campaign funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, rich Sunni-led Gulf powers who have called for military assistance for the Free Syrian Army, a loosely organised force of defecting soldiers and protesters formed in response to Assad's bloody crackdown on the uprising.

SUICIDE BOMBINGS

Twin suicide bombings on security facilities in Damascus killed at least 55 people this month, the deadliest in a series of such attacks in the capital.

On Thursday Syria sent a letter to the United Nations saying members of al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood were using border areas of neighbouring Lebanon - where Syria has long influenced the security apparatus - to arm Syrian rebels.

It pointed the finger at a Sunni Muslim political movement led by Saad al-Hariri, son of assassinated former minister Rafik al-Hariri, and at Lebanese Sunni Muslim Salafist groups.

Last week Sunni Muslims in the Lebanese city of Tripoli fought street battles against Alawites, members of an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam to which most of Assad's Syrian ruling establishment belong, despite being in the minority in Syria.

Earlier this month, Syria sent the United Nations the names of 26 foreigners who it said were affiliated with the Sunni Muslim militant group al Qaeda who had been caught trying to enter from Turkey to fight.

On Saturday state television said security forces had thwarted two more such infiltration attempts, one in Idlib province, which borders Turkey, and one from Lebanon.

Members of Syria's main opposition grouping, the Syrian National Congress, have accused Assad of orchestrating the bomb attacks in order to discredit them and flesh out his account of a foreign conspiracy.

The head of the SNC, Burhan Ghalioun, told Reuters this week he was ready to step down after facing criticism that he has failed to strengthen ties between the exile-led organisation and anti-government protesters and fighters within Syria.

Critics also accuse him of failing to win international recognition as the voice of opposition to Assad and serving as a secular front for a body that they say is increasingly under the sway of Syria's Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

(Additional reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman; Writing by Joseph Logan; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

WhatsAppFacebookTwitterLinkedinBeloudBluesky