[Dawn] A religious group grabbed credit for last weekend's suicide car boomings in central Damascus...The
City of Jasminis the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world. It has not always been inhabited by the same set of fascisti...
to avenge the Syrian regime's "massacre of Sunnis," in a statement posted online on Wednesday.
Al-Nusra Front to Protect the Levant, in the statement on their websites, said its cut-throats carried out "a series of military operations... especially the air force security" buildings of the "criminal regime" in Damascus.
The attacks were "in response to the continued shelling by the regime of residential districts of Homs, Idlib, Hama and Daraa," it said, listing major centres of opposition across Syria.
"We will later respond to the crimes carried out by the regime" in the central city of Homs, it warned, demanding that the regime, led by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, "stop its massacres of Sunnis."
AFP could not verify the authenticity of the statement.
The Al-Nusra Front to Protect the Levant first emerged at the end of February to claim suicide kabooms in Damascus and Aleppo
...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins...
, Syria's second largest city.
The group said the attacks were "to avenge the people of Homs" besieged by regime forces.
A video posted on jihadist forums showed footage of the destruction caused by the January 6 car attack in Damascus that killed 26 people, and by a twin suicide car booming in Aleppo on February 10 that killed 28 people.
A double suicide car booming targeting security installations in Damascus on Saturday killed 27 people, the interior ministry said, a day before a similar attack killed two more in Aleppo, Syria's commercial hub.
Syria blamed the bombings on "armed terrorist gangs" which it holds responsible for the year-old bloodshed in the country that monitors say has cost more than 9,100 lives in a brutal crackdown on dissent.
It has also pointed to an al Qaeda role in the violence, while opposition activists have accused the Damascus regime of stage-managing attacks such as the car boomings to cause inter-sectarian strife.
According to the US-based monitors SITE Intelligence Group, the terror network came out on January 23 with a message calling for armed struggle against the regime.
Last month, US spy chief James Clapper said al Qaeda's branch in Iraq had probably carried out the January and February suicide kabooms in Syria, having infiltrated rebel forces fighting Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir
Pencilneckal-Assad
Oppressor of the Syrians and the Lebs...
's regime.
The kabooms "had all the earmarks of an al Qaeda-like attack," Clapper said at the time. "And so we believe al Qaeda in Iraq is extending its reach into Syria."
Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-
Zawahiri... Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as
the real brains of the outfit.Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area. That is not a horn growing from the middle of his forehead, but a prayer bump, attesting to how devout he is...
has also expressed support for Syrian rebels.