Damascus explosion: What is true and what is not

Al-Sharq Al-Awsat and other west­ern news­pa­pers reported that the tar­get is a nearby Syr­ian intel­li­gence office. This con­clu­sion is illog­i­cal because the secu­rity office is about 500 meters from the explo­sion while the “sui­cide bomber” [if the explo­sion was a sui­cide oper­a­tion and not remotely done] could eas­ily donate the bomb inside the secu­rity cen­ter or at least at the gate of the office.

Syr­ian Blog­ger Medad, who was at the explo­sion scene reported that a Syr­ian army base (patrol unite) [which the out­side wall totally col­lapsed] and noth­ing about intel­li­gence center.

Hariri sym­pa­thizer web­site Lebanon Now reported that an Iraqi linked to AL-Qaeda. The prob­lem with this report is that it is pub­lished yes­ter­day one hour after the explo­sion, a very short time for the “sources” to come with all these information.

Prob­a­bly the web­site wants to shift the atten­tion away from North­ern Lebanon Salafis con­nec­tion as reported here on the Guardian:

Syria dis­patched troops to the Lebanese bor­der in an oper­a­tion ini­tially described as an anti-smuggling effort, but actu­ally intended, accord­ing to senior Lebanese mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence offi­cials, to strike against Sunni mil­i­tants infil­trat­ing Syria and launch­ing attacks against the regime.

And the Salafis con­nec­tion to Saudi Ara­bia reported on the New York Times:

This month, Mr. Assad issued a warn­ing about the pres­ence of hard-line Sunni Islamists just across the bor­der in north­ern Lebanon, hint­ing that they were receiv­ing sup­port from Saudi Arabia.

Syr­ian source told Kuwaiti news­pa­per Awan that regional coun­tries involved in this oper­a­tion and he denied the tar­get­ing of a Syr­ian VIP person.