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More Than 40 Killed as 4 Bombs Strike Major Syrian City

The New York Times, Beirut, Lebanon, 3 Oct 2012 — Four huge explosions struck a government-held district of Aleppo, Syria, on Wednesday, shearing off the fronts of two tall buildings, killing more than 40 people and filling the streets with rubble in a square near the area’s public park, according to video, photographs and reports from the Syrian government and its opponents.
In an image released by the Syrian state news agency, men carried a body after multiple explosions in Aleppo, Syria, on Wednesday.
Three explosions, which both sides said appeared to be car bombs, struck Saadallah Jabri Square, near two government-owned hotels, which residents said had housed pro-government militiamen, and an officers’ club. A fourth explosion struck near the chamber of commerce in nearby Bab Jenine, both sides reported.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, which came after several days of heated battles in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. But the government blamed its opponents. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain and relies on a network of observers inside Syria, said most of the dead were from the security forces and that the explosions went off after clashes between gunmen and guards at the officers’ club. Citing medical sources, the observatory said 90 people were wounded.
An antigovernment group at Aleppo University posted a statement suggesting the target had been the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, who, according to reports in a pro-Syrian Lebanese newspaper, had visited Aleppo, in northwestern Syria, and ordered tens of thousands more troops to move there from the city of Hama. But official Syrian media did not mention a visit. The bombings coincided with a spike in fighting that has brought a new level of destruction to Aleppo and its treasured medieval old city. In recent days, a large part of the city’s ancient market was burned, and fighting spread to areas that had been stable, with rebels attacking the central municipal building and clashes erupting in once-quiet Christian and Kurdish neighborhoods.
The new fighting caused anguish for supporters and opponents of the government. The bombings on Wednesday hit a central square bordered by a graceful public garden, a downtown district full of hotels and offices, and the Christian neighborhood of Aziziyeh, where many people had sought refuge over the weekend.
Activists also reported that the al-Hal spice market near the site of the bombings was being shelled. Dozens were wounded and people were trapped there by the fighting, activists said.
The attack brought expressions of horror and bewilderment from people on each side of the conflict.
One female anti-Assad activist wrote on Facebook, “When I used to pass by this place wearing stylish clothes, curious eyes used to chase me. The area was full of shabiha” — pro-government gangs — “informers and intelligence,” she wrote. But she added that that was preferable to wholesale destruction, writing: “Oh God, I miss those days.”
Sham Daoud, a Syrian anti-regime activist living in Paris, wrote in a message on Facebook: “I don’t understand anything anymore. There is no excuse for such an operation whoever did it and this is not called a struggle against the regime or a war. This is, in very simple terms, called terrorism.”
Another Syrian activist, who uses the pseudonym Anonymous Syria, wrote on Twitter: “Whoever is behind those explosions is a terrorist if civilians were killed. Whether it is the regime, Al-Nusra brigade” — an Al Qaeda-affiliated insurgent group — “or the Free Syrian Army.”
A pro-government YouTube network posted a lengthy video of the damage, recorded by a man who narrated the scene as he trudged across piles of rubble to the brink of what appeared to be a six-foot-deep bomb crater. Gunfire could be heard nearby.
The facades had been sheared off four buildings, two about eight stories high, and two smaller ones between them. On the other side of an intersection, a building appeared to have collapsed. The man narrating the video said that a coffee shop and a cellphone store had been destroyed along with the hotel, and that several senior officials had come to the scene.
The video then cut to the bodies of two men wearing army uniforms.
“Those are the terrorists carrying explosive belts as we can see attached to the hand of this terrorist,” the cameraman says as the video zooms into to show a corpse’s mouth covered with blood.
In the background, someone shouts an obscenity. “Film the blowup device in his hand, film it!” It was unclear what was in the man’s hand.
Car bombs and suicide bombers have targeted numerous security agencies in Damascus but they have been less frequent in Aleppo. During the uprising that began in March 2011, the city, the commercial hub of Syria, had been seen as a bastion of stability and government support until February, when two suicide car bombers attacked security buildings.
In Damascus, activists reported that an explosion struck a checkpoint staffed by a pro-government militia. In the suburbs, live video showed shelling and gunfire in an area called Qadisiya.

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