An al Qaeda-linked group has claimed responsibility for an attack last week that killed at least 42 people. The al-Nusra Front, which has declared that the United States and Israel are enemies of Islam and is considered to be a terrorist organization by those countries, announced the group’s responsibility for the car bombing on an Internet forum. If substantiated, the claim will deepen concerns that the opposition forces fighting against the Bashar al-Assad regime are increasingly controlled by hard-line Islamist forces. The al-Nusra Front is committed to establishing a Sharia-based pan-Islamic state. Western analysts are expressing increasingly pointed concerns that jihadi groups – both Sunni terror groups such as al-Nusra and Shiite terror groups such as Hezbollah – may gain control of portions of Syria’s vast chemical and biological weapons stockpiles.

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