Damascus Blasts Kill 59; Assad-Maleki Links Seen.

Two powerful explosions in Damascus on May 10 killed over 55 people and injured 372 others in the bloodiest of a wave of bombings the Assad regime and its opponents blamed on each other. Kofi Annan, UN envoy and author of the increasingly ragged plan to end Syria's long-running conflict, condemned the violence as arguments raged over responsibility for the attacks. The mystery over the intense bombing campaign, which has lasted nearly five months, plays to both sides' narratives, with the stretched UN peace monitoring team ill-equipped to investigate who is responsible. Assad's regime said al-Qaeda was behind such bombings.

Talking to the Saudi-owned pan-Arab TV network al-Arabiya on May 11, opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) member Bassam Is-haq said the May 10 blasts were the work of the Assad regime's intelligence services. He pointed to a recently released Wikileaks cable dated February 2010 in which Syrian General Intelligence chief Ali Mamluk told a top US diplomat Assad's regime had infiltrated al-Qaeda and that, as a result, Washington should reward Damascus by giving it a preferential status in return for co-operation against the Neo-Salafi terrorist group. Al-Arabiya on May 11 quoted Iraqi Shi'ite theologian Iyad Jamal ud-Din as saying Iran's theocracy had got Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maleki and Assad to have special links involving both the Ba'thists and al-Qaeda (see rim5IrqSistaniMay14-12).