Last Thursday, there were 16 bomb blasts in Baghdad (72 people killed, 217 injured). On Friday, two big car bombs in Damascus killed 40 people and injured 150. Even for Iraq, where there are suicide bombs every week, that is impressive. For Syria, these were the first terrorist attacks after eight months of non-violent protests. In both cases, however, perfectly sane people suspect that the government itself was behind the attacks.
Iraq's Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi accused Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of planning the attacks. "This style of terrorist attack, it's well beyond even al-Qaeda to do it," he said. "Those who were behind all these explosions and incidents [were] part of the [government] security forces. I'm sure about that."
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