Al Qaeda intervening in Syria Crisis ?

  The Syria Crisis: Is al-Qaeda Intervening in the Conflict?


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2114788,00.html#ixzz1uy4i0odE

There are several elements in the ongoing violence in Syria. There is the use of security forces by President Bashar Assad's regime; there are the reprisals and counterviolence by hodgepodge mix of defectors and armed civilians constituting the Free Syrian Army; and then there are coordinated attacks like last week's twin car bombings near a military-intelligence branch in a Damascene neighborhood, which reportedly killed at least 55 and wounded hundreds.
Both sides blamed each other for the explosions, which the Interior Ministry said involved two cars laden "with more than 1,000 kilos of explosives and driven by suicide bombers," like the bombings that became near-daily occurrences in neighboring Iraq. An obscure, relatively new Islamist group, Jabhat al-Nusra li Ahl Ash-Sham, or the Support Front for the People of Syria, claimed responsibility for the blasts in a boilerplate al-Qaeda-like video message, just as it has for most of the handful of other major explosions that have rocked Syria in the past few months.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2114788,00.html#ixzz1uy4MtXBq