Car Bomb in Damascus

[August1991]

The bomb explosion occurred near this mosque/shrine which is outside of Damscus on the road to the airport.

The explosion was apparently near a military/police/security base.

A powerful car bomb exploded near a Syrian intelligence agency office Saturday morning in Damascus, the Syrian capital, killing 17 people and wounding at least 14 in the worst attack the country has seen since the 1980s.

The bomb, which the authorities said included more than 400 pounds of explosives, detonated at 8:45 a.m. near an intersection crowded with pedestrians and close to a major Shiite shrine. All of the dead and wounded were civilians, the Syrian state news agency reported.

The bombing followed two unusual political assassinations this year in Syria, a police state that generally maintains a tight grip on security, and it contributed to a growing sense of alarm about the possibility of internal subversion or foreign interference.

NYT

This does not augur well. I think this may signal the start of some kind of war and in all likelihood, there will be more. A dictatorial regime such as Syria's survives on fear of the State. If people are capable of brazenly exploding a car bomb (and I'm assuming the State itself did not do this), then the State loses its power.

To understand Syria, imagine Ontario divided into two regions: the urban Golden Horseshoe around Toronto (which is Lebanon) and the rest of Ontario (which is Syria). In many ways, Lebanon and Syria are a single country where Lebanon is the fast-talking urban cosmopolitan centre and Syria is the slow-paced, provincial, rural periphery. The comparison is more exact with Quebec where Lebanon is Montreal and Syria is the rest of Quebec with Damascus like Quebec City.

With the exception of the Muslim Brotherhood and Assad's devastation of central Hama, ordinary Syrians have always considered themselves in relative peace compared to dangerous Lebanon.

Syria is now inundated with various refugees from Iraq and its president is not a strongman. A bomb could provoke a backlash. That is how the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975.