More on Attack

Um Tariq and I went to the site in the afternoon. Jaramana is not far from where car bomb went off, which is on my daily work commute. We walked there.

The bomb went off at the Saida Zeinab offramp of the highway, near the big signs for Tariq bin Ziad greeting cards. Even the earliest reports I saw fixated on how Sayda Zeinab is a Shi'i shrine and packed with Iranian tourists. It was early so news items were three short paragraphs, with one describing Sayda Zeinab and its significance and the type of pilgrims that usually come. The NYTimes for example, describes the bombing as "close to a major Shiite shrine". Then again they are reporting from Beirut, not Damascus.

Based on where the bomb actually went off, this doesn't seem that relevant to me. The offramp from the highway is still a couple miles away from Saida Zeinab. Riding a servees to Sitt Zeinab, you still have a good 15 minutes after taking this exit before actually reaching the town, with the shrine a bit further. But perhaps the American news is so used to reporting everything from this part of the world in terms of Shi'i, Sunni they thought it must be significant. The car bomb went off, geographically, much closer to Mughayyam Jeramana (Palestinian) and Jeramana (Druze and Iraqi) but none of that was mentioned in the reports.

At the site, all of the nearby apartments had busted out windows. There were a lot of parked cars around, most of which had busted out windows as well. There was glass everywhere and even little parts of car that had missed being swept up. The bomb warped nearby shops and destroyed part of a wall that apparently is a mukhabarat building, which workers were already rebuilding. The nearby school didn't look that damaged. There was a crowd of people standing around, one guy showing pictures of the smoke and fire afterwards on his cell phone to others. Um Tariq started talking to a woman who lives there. She said they first thought it was an earthquake this morning, then they saw the smoke.

Several people there said they saw the police arresting people on the site soon after the explosion. They said no one was in the car when it exploded.

Despite reading foreign reports that said the explosion happened at 8:45, the woman at the scene and all my neighbors and friends who heard it go off said it happened at about 20 to 8.

Syria news that night had an official statement from the president calling the terrorists cowards, which was repeated often throughout the broadcast. There were also interviews with the wounded in the hospital. One had been on his way to work and described seeing a car drive up onto the sidewalk, which he thought strange, and then it exploded. There were other wounded, one of whom called whoever did it "not human". It is stupid for some (ahem Daniel Pipes) in the West to criticize "moderate" Muslims for not denouncing terrorism. They are freaking denouncing! If your head wasn't up your own ass maybe you would hear! Some of the injured had been praying in the nearby mosque and got hit when leaving. It was Leilat al-Qadr, the celebration of the Quran's first relevation. Many people spend all night in a mosque, praying and reading the Quran (like Um Tariq. She invited me but I was sleepy. And not Muslim).

The report thanked God that it was Saturday, a sentiment repeated often as well. Saturday is weekend, not a schoolday, so the nearby technical and electrical engineering college and the very nearby school was closed. The school would have had something like 1000 students (I forget what the news said). While the damage was not apparent from the outside, TV cameras showed the inside, with doors knocked down, glass all over the floor, walls warped. Almost everyone interviewed, including the injured in the hospital thanked God it was not a schoolday.