Damascus: Car bombing is 'Israeli state terrorism'
By ARIEH O'SULLIVANPosted on 09/26/2004 1:02:43 PM PDT by anotherview
Sep. 26, 2004 12:01 | Updated Sep. 26, 2004 20:45
Damascus: Car bombing is 'Israeli state terrorism' By ARIEH O'SULLIVAN
Hamas leader Izz El-Deen Al-Sheikh Khalil, in 1994
Car bomb in Damascus
Photo: AP (file)
Nine hours after a car bomb exploded in the Syrian capital on Sunday killing top Hamas terrorist Izz El-Deen Al-Sheikh Khalil, the Syrian government called the assassination "an Israeli act of state terrorism in the heart of Damascus", a statement by the Syrian government said.
The Syrian Interior Ministry said in a terse statement carried by the official news agency, SANA, that Khalil had not engaged in any activity inside Syrian territory, and that authorities were investigating the explosion. Ahmad Haj Ali, an adviser to the Syrian information minister, described the assassination as a "terrorist and cowardly action."
"This is not the first warning" Israel has tried to convey to Syria, Haj Ali said. "What happened indicates that Israel's aggression has no limits." The Israeli assassination, he said, "was meant to deliver a message to the entire world that says: 'We are capable of striking anywhere in accordance with the Israeli agenda."'
While not confirming or denying Israeli involvement in Khalil's death, Israeli officials said he was involved in the transfer of arms from Syria and Lebanon to Hamas hands in the Palestinian territories.
Khalil's white Mitsubishi Jeep exploded 10 meters from his home in al-Zahraa district at 10:45 a.m. (0745 GMT) almost immediately after he started it. Witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had been speaking on his mobile phone as he got in the car. Khalil, who is survived by two sons and a daughter, may have been an easier target than other Hamas leaders because he lived outside the well-guarded Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp. He had been living on the ground floor of the 10-story building in al-Zahraa with his family for about a year. The area is modest and heavily populated, with towering apartments with shops on their ground floors and old, single-story stone houses.
The Izz el-Deen al-Kassam Brigades, Hamas' armed wing, vowed to avenge Al-Sheikh Khalil by attacking Israeli targets overseas, the group said in a statement issued in the Gaza Strip.
"We have allowed hundreds of thousands of Zionists to travel and move in capitals around the world in order not to be the party that shifts the struggle overseas. But the Zionist enemy has done so and should bear the consequences of its actions," said the statement, a copy of which was faxed to the pan-Arab news channel Al-Jazeera, which broadcast the message.
"We announce an escalation in the fight between us and the Zionist enemy," Hamas spokesman Sami Zuhari said speaking on Al-Jazeera.
But another Hamas spokesperson, Osama Hamdan, denied the al-Jazeera report, saying Hamas would not change its strategy of striking at Israeli targets only within Israel and the Palestinian territories. "Our policy was and remains to conduct our struggle inside the Zionist entity," Hamdan said, speaking from Beirut.
Experts believe the retraction came about because Hamas does not want to be seen as another al-Qaida.
The Associated Press Jerusalem bureau reported that anonymous Israeli security officials acknowledged the Jewish state was involved in the assassination, a claim not backed up by sources in the Ministry of Defense, the Prime Minister's Office and the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel Radio reported that Israeli officials learned of Khalil's death through the media.
Israel has never taken responsibility for assassinations and other activities on foreign soil. Israel has a long history of tracking down terrorists abroad and settling accounts with them. In a persistent campaign in the 1970s and 1980s, Israeli agents killed 11 members of the PLO's "Black September" group responsible for murdering members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in 1972. Eleven athletes were killed in the hostage drama.
In 1988, Mossad agents killed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's right-hand man and PLO military chief Khalil Al Wazir in his bed in Tunis. In 1995, assassins on a motorcycle gunned down Islamic Jihad chief Fathi Shekaki outside a Malta hotel in a mission widely attributed to Israel.Sunday's action inside Syria was the first by Israel since October last year when Israel sent its warplanes to bomb a base of the Islamic Jihad. That air attack, the first in two decades, was retaliation for a Jihad suicide bombing at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa where 19 people were killed.
Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra expressed satisfaction at Khalil's killing, but stressed that he did not know if Israel was behind the assassination. "I cant confirm, and I can't deny, but I am not unhappy that he was killed," Ezra said.
Former Mossad head Danny Yatom told Army Radio that if Israel was behind the assassination, "then it was a justified act."
"Izz El-Deen Al-Sheikh Khalil had innocent blood on his hands. He was behind many terrorist acts inside Israel. I don't know if he was killed by the long arm of some country's intelligence agency or from a work accident, but he got what was coming to him," Yatom.
The explosion took place in the al-Zahraa district at 10:45 a.m. a media center in Damascus told AP. According to reports, Khalil got into the car, received a call on his cell phone, started the engine, and that is when the car exploded.
Radio Damascus said he was not involved in Hamas activities inside Syria, but Khalil's brother, Salame, was quoted on Arab TV as saying Khalil was the tutor of other Hamas bomb makers. The Radio also said three bystanders were wounded in the blast.
A top aide to PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said that the assassination in Damascus "is the beginning of a very dangerous period that will have negative consequences on everyone," Israel Radio reported.
A member of the Hamas political bureau, Mohammed Nazzal, told the AP in Cairo that a bomb had been planted in Khalil's car, which exploded as Khalil tried to start the ignition.
Police at the scene of al-Zahraa district explosion were seen retrieving pieces of the body of Khalil.
Khalil, 42, used to work for Hamas in the Gaza Strip and was deported by Israel to Lebanon from the Gaza Strip. He was one of the people who trained legendary Palestinian bomb maker Yehiya Ayyash, who was killed in 1996.
Israel has warned that it would target Hamas leaders anywhere. Vice Premier Ehud Olmert said the battle against Palestinian terror will reach "every place, every corner."
Olmert made the comments in a speech at a memorial service for soldiers killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and was not reacting to the car bombing.
Israel reinforced its warning to hunt Hamas leaders everywhere after the double suicide bombing on two Beersheba buses on August 31 that killed 16 people. Hamas claimed responsibility for that attack.
Israeli security sources have said that Hamas in Damascus was increasingly involved in guiding, funding and directing Palestinian terrorist groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Following the warnings, the senior Hamas leaders in Damascus, at the urging of the Syrian government, departed Syria.
With Joseph Nasr and AP
Fighting fire with fire. How do the car bombers like it now that they are targeted in the same despicable manner they target civilians.
Don't forget that the Syrian Baathists are harboring terrorists and Nazis war criminals.
It's amazing to see how these people invert the definition of terrorism to try to deflect it back onto those who are fighting it.
Hamas can't take it near as well as they dish it out can they?
You mis-understand. I like the fact that they are getting it in the manner they deliver it.
No, Hamas are cowards and they cannot take it.
Israel has already admitted it carried out the assassination. I'm sure we had help :)
I was thinking much the same thing.
What would happen if Israel started targeting innocent Palestinians after every attack against innocent Israeli men, women, and children? Don't give me the easy answer. LOL. I mean besides the world-wide outrage of the liberal press.
Let's say Israel told Yasser Arafat that there would be an eye-for-an-eye exchange for every attack against Israeli civilians. You kill twenty of ours, we bomb a school room with twenty students.
No civilized society would ever do such a thing . . . but one has to wonder if it might propel an empowering Palestinian public to do something to stop the outrages inflicted on Israel on a daily basis. The Paleo-terrorist-loving-citizens just stand idly by now . . . when they're not cheering in the streets BUT IF THEY KNEW THEIR CHILDREN WOULD BE KILLED EVERYTIME AN ISRAELI CHILD WAS KILLED one would think they might feel a bit differently.
Consensus achieved.
"Khalil got into the car, received a call on his cell phone, started the engine, and that is when the car exploded.... "
WHO could be behind this ??
It's Syria's turn now. What's your call Assad?
That must be why we fire bombed Dresden and nuked two Jap cities. All were full of non combatants. Innocents.
In fact, these three actions brought an end to WW2. Though Dresden was a contributing factor.
Only you are fixated. I am quite happy with the end result.
I wasn't advocating the position of killing the innocent. In fact, if you'd read my post instead of being so quick to call names, you'd see that I said "No civilized society would ever do such a thing." Perhaps the "superstitiously stupid" should read what's posted before they start flaming the poster.
Actually, I agree with you. I was simply posing the question to get some feedback on how the Palestinian populace might be coerced to see what it is their so-called "Freedom Fighters" are truly doing to their cause. No freedom-loving country will compromise when the lives of their innocent civilians are so at risk.
Do the Russians feel differently about Chechnya because of Beslan? Only in the sense that they want to murder all Chechens, slightly more than they did before. Killing their children is not only uncivilized, is doesn't work. It unites the target and strengthens their resolve, adds just men to their cause, etc. You wanted "feedback on how the Palestinian populace might be coerced". The answer is justice. Injustice is stupid and adds nothing.
I don't know why I have to repeat this nearly daily to otherwise sane and rational, informed conservatives. It is something about terrorists as enemies that seduces to mindlessness. You can see in your own heart what immoral tactics do to the resolve of an enemy - do they make you weaker and more likely to bow and scrap to them by attacking innocents, or more likely to want to hunt down the perpetrators and kill them? You know it is the second. So why would you think, even looking for "feedback", that the reverse would help?
"Because then they'd feel how we feel". And that would be progress? Are you feeling defeated or something? About ready to give up? If not, how would making them feel that way help anything? We don't want to make them feel righteously indignant and unified in their opposition to our unjust oppression. We want their guilty parties to feel nothing at all - or the fires of hell if that is your thing - and the rest of them to see swift and discriminating justice, that promises them safety if they behave and rapid death if they do not.
It is the fact that the terrorists do not offer safety to those who behave with justice that constitutes their criminality. This is all obvious, everyone should know it. Anybody who does, and still for some reason thinks he is giving something up and restraining himself from using a supposedly profitable tactic when he distinguishes between the guilty and the innocent, is being a muddle head.
It is perhaps understandable and you are by no means alone. But our enemy's propaganda is based on moral equivalence garbage that preys on this tendency, and we should be hyper aware of it and not give an inch.
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