News / Middle East

Blast Rips Through Syrian Capital

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VOA News
A car bomb exploded Sunday in central Damascus, killing 13 people in the Syrian capital as U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi pressed President Bashar al-Assad to institute a cease-fire later this week.

The explosion near a police station in the predominantly Christian Bab Touma neighborhood also wounded 29 people. There has been no claim of responsibility for the blast.

The president's meeting with Brahimi was held behind closed doors in another part of Damascus.  The international envoy has urged both the Syrian government and rebels opposed to Assad to support a cease-fire during the four-day Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, which begins Friday.

Brahimi said after the talks that he has discussed the truce plan with Syrian opposition groups, receiving "promises" but no "commitment" that they would honor the cease-fire.
 
Syria's state-run SANA news agency said Assad told Brahimi that Syria supports his efforts, and is open to a solution that respects the country's sovereignty.

The secretaries-general of the U.N. and the Arab League have also called for a cessation of violence during the religious period, as part of efforts to end the 19-month conflict.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put Syria's death toll at 118 on Sunday, including 53 civilians, 19 rebel fighters, 4 defected soldiers and 42 regular soldiers.

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by: naksuthin
October 22, 2012 9:38 AM
The situation in the middle east is a sectarian powderkeg with Chritians, Sunnis, Alawites, Shiahs, Kurds and other minor sects rushing to fill in power vaccums.
The US should not make the same mistake it made in Iraq when it assumed that deposing Sadaam would lead to a unified democratic government. Instead it lead to a 7 year civil war between rival Muslim Sunnis and Shiahs with the US caught in the crossfire and many US soldiers dying as they tried desperately to calm the situation.

The US needs to stay out of the complex religious hatreds in the region...that are over a thousand years old.

Let the people of the middle east find their own solutions. America has plenty of problems of it's own to deal with here at home


by: Jackson 19 from: USA
October 22, 2012 9:30 AM
God help the Christians as the Islamists roam the Arab world overthrowing non-Sharia /non- Sunni governments.

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Video Boston Bomber Spent 6 Months in Russia’s Most Violent Republic

The news of the Boston Marathon bombings circled the globe, and resonated here in Dagestan, a majority Muslim republic in Russia, on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Last year, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of two brothers suspected of the bombings and a long-time Boston resident, returned to Dagestan, where he had lived for a year during his youth. Dagestan was the land of his maternal ancestors. But in the last two years, this republic of 3 million people has gained notoriety as the region with the highest level of political and religious violence in all of Russia. VOA's James Brooke reports from Makhachkala, Russia.