There have still been no official claims of responsibility for yesterday’s massive bombings against a government building in the Syrian capital of Damascus, but the growing use of al-Qaeda style bombing tactics against the regime has caused considerable concern.
Addressing this issue, the rebel Syrian National Council (SNC)’s leader Burhan Ghalioun is pushing his own pet theory, that the Assad regime is in league with al-Qaeda and that they are bombing their own buildings to make the rebels look bad.
The credibility of this claim is, needless to say, weak. Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has urged support for the rebels for months, and has been at odds with the Shi’ite Assad regime and their allies in Iran for decades.
Indeed, Jihadist organizations seem almost universally in the rebels’ camp, though it isn’t clear what formal links the various groups maintain with one another. Western officials didn’t seem to need the conspiracy theory anyhow, as they have uniformly condemned the regime for getting bombed in the first place.
