Assad has never harbored al Qaeda terrorists. Besides, how much support can an apostate ruler really afford to offer al Qaeda, whose ideology is to kill infidels in the most gruesome ways? 40 years of Alawite rule and what you allege to be support for al Qaeda has yielded 0 terrorist attacks on American soil whereas less than 10 years of Sunni Islamist rule in Afghanistan yielded 1 attack on 9/11 that killed 3000 American, and dozens of attacks and plots since then.
The Syrian regime felt threatened and felt that it, too, might fall," Fares recalled. "So they had an agreement with al Qaeda to keep the road open to Iraq. The militants started coming from all over the world through Syria, under the eyes of the Syrian secret police, which are directly responsible for the killing of thousands of Iraqis in Iraq as well as Americans and coalition forces. "The secret police were encouraging enthusiastic young people in Syria to go for jihad in Iraq and join al Qaeda," Fares continued. "Bashar al-Assad and his security forces are directly responsible for the killing of thousands and thousands of Iraqis and coalition forces, because he gave al Qaeda everything it needed. He trained and provided shelter and he built safe havens for them to hide in." One of these "safe havens," Fares said, was the Syrian border village of al Sukariya, near the border city of Abu Kamal. In response to the accusations, a senior U.S. administration official said that Fares' claims about the Syrian government 's cooperation with al Qaeda during the war in Iraq are "broadly consistent with our understanding." "Since 2003, al-Assad allowed al Qaeda and associates to facilitate weapons, money and fighters to al Qaeda's Iraq-based affiliate, setting the conditions for those same elements to shift from Syria-based facilitation to active attacks -- this time focused against the al-Assad regime," the official said." - LINK