An explosion at a mosque in Damascus, Syria yesterday killed 42 people, including Sheik Mohammad Said Ramada al-Bouti, one of the most important religious leaders in the country and one of President Bashar al-Assad’s few Sunni supporters.
It is a devastating blow to Assad because al-Bouti, 84, a Sunni leader in a nation controlled by Sunnis, provided him with legitimacy among the Sunni population because he had long been a vocal supporter of Assad—and his father and predecessor, the late President Hafez Assad. The Assads are members of the minority Alawite sect, which is an offshoot of Shiite Islam and has been engaged in a centuries-old struggle with the Sunnis throughout the Arab world for supremacy. The majority of the Muslim population in the Middle East is Sunni.
Al-Bouti is easily the most important religious figure to die so far in a civil war that has thus far killed more than 70,000 people.
Syria state news media described the explosion at the Eman mosque as a suicide bombing carried out by “mercenary terrorists against the Syrians.” But the main armed insurgent group, the Free Syrian Army, said it was not responsible for the attack and would never target a mosque.
In addition to the 42 deaths, at least 84 people were wounded, some critically, in the mosque explosion, according to the official Syrian news agency, SANA.
“He was the most important Sunni clerical supporter of the Assad regime,” Joshua M. Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the author of the Syria Comment blog, told the New York Times. “It is a great blow to the regime and the remaining Sunni supporters of the president.”
Landis said the sheik had been reviled by some Syrian revolutionaries because he denounced the uprising early on, perhaps earning him an enmity that ultimately killed him. Al-Bouti, who was well known for his prodigious memory, was the author of at least 40 books and was ranked 23rd on a list by scribd.com of the most influential 500 Muslims in the world.
“This massacre adds to the crimes perpetrated by the mercenary terrorists against the Syrians,” the SANA agency quoted Assad’s Baath Socialist Party leadership as saying in a statement. “They target everything, including the mosques and houses of worship.”
Sheil Bouti was killed while giving a religious lesson to Muslim students.
“The malicious hands of traitors killed the great Scholar because he was the voice of Syria, the right of Syria and the image of Syria,” the agency quoted the ministry as saying.
Some Syrian fighters and anti-Assad activists reached by telephone by the Times said they would not be surprised if the government were responsible for the mosque explosion.
“I expect the regime to be involved in this assassination,” Abu Tamam, a member of an insurgent group called the Jundilla Battalion, told the Times. “He is just a religious figure and not a state figure. He used to have influence, but today he’s an extra burden on the regime.”
But others disagreed, saying Assad wouldn’t kill the imam or bomb a mosque in the heart of Damascus. “The regime will never get rid of such an important figure,” said an antigovernment activist in Turkey. “He’s like the spiritual father to Bashar.”
