Bomb Kills 26 peoples in Damascus, Stoking Suspicions

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A bomb tore through a crowded neighborhood in Damascus on Friday, killing 26 people and wounding dozens more, unleashing scenes of chaos and underlining the growing confusion and complexity of the Syrian uprising, officials and residents said.

The bombing was the second in two weeks in the fortified capital, though no one has claimed responsibility for either. An uprising that

began relatively peacefully in March has grown markedly more violent, with Friday’s bloody episode and bolder insurgent attacks punctuating a landscape roiled by antigovernment protests that again showed new momentum.

In style at least, the bombings themselves recalled a revolt in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when an Islamist insurgency marked by bombings and large-scale killings posed a sweeping challenge to the rule of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current president, Bashar al-Assad.

“A known political party was behind the attacks in those years,” said Louay Hussein, a prominent opposition figure in Syria, who was reached by telephone. “Today, we don’t know who is behind these attacks, and this represents a great danger.”

Mr. Hussein’s fears illustrated the prevailing sense of suspicion that reigns in Damascus, which had until recently been so sheltered from the uprising that some diplomats had taken to calling it Syria’s equivalent of Baghdad’s Green Zone.

As with the bombings on Dec. 23, which were aimed at security installations in the capital and killed 44 people, the government blamed “terrorists.” The Syrian state news agency, SANA, carried an Interior Ministry statement saying the attack “had the fingerprints of Al Qaeda all over them” and cast it as another escalation in what the government has consistently described as an armed uprising by Islamists financed from abroad.

“We will strike back with an iron fist at anyone who is tempted to play with the security of the country,” Syrian state television quoted Interior Minister Ibrahim al-Shaar as saying.

But in a climate where virtually everyone’s intentions are questioned, many dissident figures asserted that the government itself had carried out the attack to sully the opposition’s image and validate its own argument that it was fighting terrorists. In a statement, the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposes Mr. Assad, said it held “the regime, its agents and its gangs fully responsible for this crime.”

Evidence was scant for either the government’s or the opposition’s narrative, but the bombing seemed to underline each party’s version of events: a dictatorial government so cynical as to kill its own people or a religiously inspired opposition bent on sowing anarchy in an increasingly combustible country.

“We’re expecting more of these bombings in the coming days,” said Col. Ammar al-Wawi, an army defector reached by phone who works with an insurgent group called the Free Syrian Army that is based in Turkey near the border. “This regime is seeking to spread chaos in Syria.”

American officials stopped short of suggesting government involvement, but said the attack pointed to a state whose authority was beginning to crumble. “Today’s blast in Damascus is yet another indicator that this regime is losing control of parts of the country,” an Obama administration official said on the condition of anonymity. “Even its security forces are thugs who at times appear to be operating outside state control.”

Government news media said the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber at a busy intersection, and Syrian state television broadcast images of a wrecked police bus, asphalt smeared with blood and littered with glass and the shattered windshields of other vehicles. It said that “a powerful explosion” struck the restive neighborhood of Midan and that both civilians and people in the security forces had been wounded or killed.

State television quoted the Interior Ministry as putting the number of wounded at 63.

Sirens of ambulances and police vehicles were heard as government forces poured into the neighborhood, where hundreds of loyalists to Mr. Assad soon gathered. They chanted for the Syrian president, held aloft his portraits and carried wooden clubs. Checkpoints proliferated across the capital, residents said, making travel difficult.