Bombs in Syria kill 34

DAMASCUS, Syria — Two suicide bombers detonated their explosives-packed vehicles near a cluster of commercial buildings in a suburb of Damascus on Wednesday, killing at least 34 people and covering the street with debris and pools of blood.

The latest carnage to hit an area populated by religious minorities who support President Bashar Assad further raises concerns of a growing Islamic militant element among the forces seeking to topple him.

In the country’s north, rebels claimed to have shot down a Syrian air force fighter jet, providing further evidence of their growing effectiveness and improved military capabilities. It was not immediately clear how the MiG-23 was downed, although activists and the Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency said it was most likely brought down by a missile.

The morning rush-hour bombings in the suburb of Jaramana, just a few miles southeast of Damascus, were the latest to hit the overwhelmingly pro-regime town.

Witnesses said the second explosion went off after people rushed in to help those injured from the first blast, a tactic often used by al-Qaida in Iraq and elsewhere.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, but Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida-inspired extremist group that has become one of Syria’s most potent and organized rebel groups, has claimed numerous suicide bombings in the past, mostly targeting regime forces and security installations.

Wednesday’s bombs went off in a parking lot near commercial buildings as groups of laborers and employees were arriving for work, killing 34 and injuring 83 people, staterun news agency SANA said.

Several commercial buildings were damaged, and dozens of cars were reduced to smoldering wreckage.

Ismail Zlaiaa, a 54-year-old resident of the neighborhood, said the area was packed with rush-hour passengers when the suicide bombers struck.

“God will not forgive the criminal perpetrators,” he said.

Syria’s conflict started 20 months ago as an uprising against Assad, whose family has ruled the country for four decades. It quickly turned into a civil war, with rebels taking up arms to fight back against a bloody crackdown by the government. According to activists, at least 40,000 people have been killed since March 2011.

Opposition fighters are predominantly members of the Sunni Muslim majority. In their push to take Damascus, they have frequently targeted state institutions and troops. Car bombings have also often hit districts around the capital where members of Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, predominate, as well as other communities with religious minorities.

Wednesday’s twin bombings are the latest targeting Jaramana, a Christian and Druse area mostly loyal to Assad.

The rebel groups, with an increasing number of Islamist extremists and foreign fighters among them, have found difficulties winning over the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, including Christians and Kurds, as well as other groups that remain wary of an alternative to Assad.

Bombings such as Wednesday’s are likely to rally his support base among those vulnerable groups, reinforcing their concerns that the uprising against Assad is being driven by Islamic extremists.

The Assad dynasty has long tried to promote a secular identity in Syria, largely because it has relied heavily on its own Alawite base in the military and security forces in an overwhelmingly Sunni country.

Assad blames the revolt on a conspiracy to destroy Syria, saying the uprising is being driven by foreign “terrorists” — a term the regime uses for the rebels — and not Syrians seeking change.

The majority of those fighting Assad’s regime are ordinary Syrians and soldiers who have defected. But increasingly, foreign fighters and militants adhering to an extremist Islamist ideology are turning up on the front lines. The rebels try to play down the Islamists’ influence for fear of alienating Western support.

In northern Syria, a rebel group claimed it downed a Syrian MiG-23 fighter plane near the rebel-held town of Daret Azzeh and captured its pilot, according to activists. A report by the Anadolu news agency quoting rebels in the area said the jet was shot down, most likely by a missile.

Amateur video posted online by activists shows what appears to be the wreckage of the plane still on fire.

“O Bashar, this is your plane, it has become wreckage at the hands of the Free Army,” says the video’s narrator, who adds that it was shot down with a missile.

Another video showed a wounded man wearing what appeared to be an aviator’s uniform being carried away. “This is the pilot who was shelling the homes of civilians,” said the voice on camera.

The videos appeared to match activists’ reports of what went on in the area.

Opposition fighters have shot down helicopters and claim to have shot down warplanes in the past, although the rebels repeatedly complain that their arsenal is no match for the regime’s fighter jets and attack helicopters.

But Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials say Syrian rebels have acquired as many as 40 shoulder-fired missile systems in recent weeks to counter assaults by Syrian military aircraft.

Intelligence officials who closely track the flow of arms into Syria say rebels have acquired dozens of the devices in recent weeks and are using them with increasing effectiveness against Syrian helicopters and military jets.

At least some of the missiles were supplied by Qatar, which has supplied most of the weapons smuggled to Syria’s rebels across the Turkish border, according to two Middle Eastern intelligence officials briefed on the matter. The officials, along with others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.

While the missiles are seen as a potential game-changer in the fight against Assad, their arrival has evoked fear and dismay among Syria’s neighbors as well as Western countries. In the hands of terrorists, the easily concealed missiles could be used to blow up commercial jets, weapons experts and intelligence officials say.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is said to be considering deeper intervention to help push Assad from power.

While no decisions have been made, the administration is considering several alternatives, including directly providing arms to some opposition fighters or inserting CIA officers or allied intelligence services on the ground in Syria, according to government officials involved in the discussions.

The most urgent decision, likely to come next week, is whether NATO should deploy surface-to-air missiles in Turkey, ostensibly to protect that country from Syrian missiles that could carry chemical weapons.

A NATO team assessing possible sites for the missiles inspected military installations Wednesday in southeast Turkey, the state-run news agency reported.

NATO member Turkey asked allies to deploy the missiles as a defense against any aerial attack from Syria after mortar rounds and shells from Syria struck Turkish territory, killing five people.

Syria is believed to have several hundred surface-tosurface ballistic missiles capable of carrying chemical warheads.

The NATO team visited military facilities in Malatya province, some 124 miles from the Syrian border, the Anadolu agency reported. The province is already home to an early warning radar that is part of NATO’s missile-defense system, which is capable of countering ballistic missile threats from Iran.

The visit came as NATO said it would “favorably examine” Turkey’s request for the air-defense missiles but was awaiting the team’s report on where to base them.

NATO spokesman Carmen Romero said the NATO team was expected to finish its work in the next few days and would feed its proposals to NATO’s military authorities.

Also on Wednesday, a newly formed opposition coalition started talks in Cairo on how to pick a transitional government to replace that of Assad.

The coalition, whose official name is the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, was formed at a meeting in Qatar earlier this month, and it has already been anointed with official recognition from Britain, France, Turkey and the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Information for this article was contributed by Albert Aji, Zeina Karam, Suzan Fraser and Slobodan Lekic of The Associated Press; by Christine Hauser, Hala Droubi, Alan Cowell, Sebnem Arsu, Hania Mourtada, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times; and by Joby Warrick of The Washington Post.