Militants Attack Diplomatic Area in Syrian Capital

Explosions and gunfire roared in this city’s diplomatic quarter Tuesday night as militants damaged a onetime United Nations building and battled security forces in a rare burst of violence in this tightly controlled country.

The gunmen apparently targeted the former offices of the U.N. peacekeeping force monitoring the Golan Heights. Police returned fire, and a rain of grenades and bullets spread over the Mazza neighborhood, home to the Iranian and Canadian embassies as well as the British ambassador’s residence.

Early details of the fight were sketchy and contradictory. Some residents and security sources said a car bomb exploded in front of the former U.N. building, which caught fire, sending plumes of dark smoke into the sky. With electricity cut, residents cowered in the dark while the shooting continued for more than an hour.

“A subversive armed group opened fire at random this evening in the Mazza area and was confronted by the relevant security apparatus,” the state news agency SANA quoted a Syrian security official as saying. “The situation is totally under control.”

Syrian television made a terse announcement that security officers had taken charge of the situation.

The attack comes at a time when violence is on the rise throughout the region. A week ago, Islamists stunned Saudi Arabia by setting off a suicide car bomb outside a police headquarters in Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital.

And this week, Jordanian television aired video of militants who confessed to planning chemical bomb attacks in Jordan’s capital, Amman. The conspirators hoped to kill as many as 80,000 people, the state-run television station said.

“This is a terrorist act,” Syrian political analyst Mohammed Borhan said. “We have seen an escalation of terrorist cells in Iraq’s neighboring countries. This is a form of pressure on the coalition to tell them to get out of Iraq.”

Security sources said that at least three of the attackers had been killed and that a fourth was wounded and arrested. A Syrian policeman and a female bystander also were killed, SANA reported.

“The Syrian Arab Republic, which has confronted all forms of terrorism and continues to do so, condemns this terrorist act,” SANA quoted an Interior Ministry official as saying. “[Syria] reiterates its position in confronting terrorist acts that aim to shake security and stability and spread chaos.”

Hours after the shootout, authorities raided a makeshift weapons warehouse used by the militants, Syria’s state-run police television station reported. The channel aired footage of a room with rocket-propelled grenades, gas cylinders and bags of yellow powder.

Attackers targeted the former U.N. offices, which had been abandoned but were still popularly known as the organization’s headquarters, Imad Moustapha, Syria’s ambassador to Washington, told Associated Press. “There was a random exchange of fire, and probably every building in that area was hit by a grenade or a bullet,” he said.

The United Nations withdrew from Iraq last year after insurgents devastated the organization’s headquarters in Baghdad with a car bomb. The U.N. had been widely derided in the Arab world for failing to prevent the United States from invading Iraq. Many people had dismissed the organization as a tool of the U.S.

After Tuesday’s violence, dozens of Syrian demonstrators massed in the streets, waving pictures of President Bashar Assad and chanting anti-U.S. slogans.

“Syria is usually a very stable country,” Lebanese analyst Edmund Saab told the Arab satellite TV channel Al Arabiya. “It looks like the situation in Iraq is not going to spare a single Arab country.

“If the threat [of terrorism] has reached Syria, it will be difficult to stop it from getting to other places,” he said.

Some analysts took the violence as a sign of growing weakness in the Syrian government. Amid intense pressure from the United States to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and oust Palestinian militant organizations such as Hamas, the absolute control formerly enjoyed by the Syrian government has been showing signs of weakening.

This year, soccer-inspired riots escalated into days of looting and killing as ethnic Kurds took to the streets throughout Syria and clashed with security forces. Tensions are sharp between the ruling Baathists and minority Syrian Kurds inspired by the promise of autonomy for their Iraqi brethren.

Despite the recent decades of police-enforced quiet, Syria’s secular Baath regime has a painful history with Islamists.

Hafez Assad, a notorious autocrat and father of the current president, survived an attempt on his life -- and exacted revenge by ruthlessly crushing an Islamist insurgency in the early 1980s.

The bloodletting reached a notorious peak in 1982 in the province of Hama. The Muslim Brotherhood rose up in rebellion against the regime there; the elder Assad sent in troops to raze the city of Hama and slaughter as many as 10,000 people. The brutality shocked the region -- and squelched Syria’s Islamists.

There was no immediate word on who might be responsible for Tuesday’s attack; speculation swung from Kurds to Islamists.

Even the target of the attack remained in doubt: Witnesses in the security forces said gunmen fired grenades in the direction of the Canadian Embassy.

A neighbor who gave her name only as Sylvie said that she was startled by a series of explosions, followed by the wail of sirens as police rushed to the street, and that machine-gun fire rattled the night.

“We were working in the library and heard lots of gunfire and explosions,” said a foreign student in Damascus who was close to the scene of the explosions.

“Everyone was terrified and we ran out of the building to see what was happening,” he told Reuters news service. “We saw some big puffs of smoke, but things are closed off now.”

The U.S. Embassy in Damascus, the capital, reported hearing “explosions and gunfire,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. “But we don’t know what it is. Other embassies heard it too, but who is attacking whom, we don’t know yet.”

A senior State Department official said embassy personnel had been ordered to stay home today until Washington could assess who carried out the attacks, who was the target and what the implications were for the security situation in Syria.

The official, who asked not to be named, said the Syrians had been in touch with the U.S. ambassador in Damascus.

“The embassy will be closed tomorrow,” the official said Tuesday. “Because it happened at night, because we weren’t in a position to know what was going on, we thought it was better to keep everybody home until we know what the situation is.”

Times staff writer Stack reported from Riyadh and special correspondent Saleh from Damascus. Times staff writers Mary Curtius in Washington, John Daniszewski in London and Jailan Zayan in Cairo contributed to this report.