Ki-Moon: Al-Qaida Behind Damascus Attacks
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced Thursday that he believed al-Qaida was responsible for two suicide car bombs that killed at least 55 people in Syria a week ago.
"A few days ago there was a huge, serious, massive terrorist attack. I believe that there must be Al-Qaeda behind it. This has created again very serious problems," Ban told a youth event at UN headquarters in New York.
Two car bombers killed 55 people and wounded 372 in Damascus on May 10. The two explosions are considered the deadliest attacks in the Syrian capital since the beginning of the recent crisis.
The global body had previously played down the threat from foreign armed terrorists in the country, holding the Syrian regime responsibility for the ongoing violence.
Damascus has maintained all along that it is facing a terrorist conspiracy funded and directed from abroad, not least by resource-rich Gulf monarchies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have called for arming the fighters aiming to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Syria earlier this month sent the United Nations the names of 26 foreign nationals it said had been apprehended after coming to fight in Syria. It described 20 of those as members of al-Qaida members who had entered the country from Turkey.
There are 257 unarmed UN monitors in Syria to observe an unraveling five-week-old truce brokered by UN-Arab League peace envoy Kofi Annan.
"The deployment of monitors has some dampening effect, the number of violence has reduced but not enough, not all the violence acts have stopped," Ban said. "We are trying out best efforts to protect the civilian population."
He further stated that "more than 9,000, at least, maybe 10,000 people have been killed during the last 15 months. It has reached an intolerable situation now."
Source: News Agencies, Edited by moqawama.org
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