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This same article appears on several of your links. Here's most of it translated from Le Figaro:

Syria: a corridor for Al Qaeda?
Charles Lambroschini
January 7, 2005

The border between Syria and Iraq is a sieve. To the point where George W. Bush is considering punishing Damascus with severe sanctions.

This is what Richard Armitage, assistant to Colin Powell in the State Department, is going to say to Syrian authorities. As a warning signal, Washington would be able to begin technical measures which would have the effect of cutting off the Syrian banking system from the world.
If they need to, the Americans could then pass some reprisals because Damascus isn't only accused of being in favor of transferring funds that finance the uprising in Iraq. According to Washington, Syria has become the back door for the resistance,

The relatives of Saddam Hussein, and some generals, and his former army have obtained the right of asylum constituting a kind of Iraqi government in exile. Above all, Syria has been transformed into a corridor of arms and fighters en route towards Iraq. Notably, Al Qaeda militants, who, running from all corners of the Muslim world, want to continue the combat that they've conducted for fifteen years against the "American Satan."

In the area of al-Qamechliye and al-Hasakah, northeast of Syria, the "procedure" of transit is particularly well broken in. The triangle that forms this passage at the borders of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq is a tribal zone where boundary lines are always being blurred.

From one country to the other the nomads come and go freely, the population is sparse, the Syrian military presence is light. Certain officers profit by rounding off their balances allowing the infiltration in Iraq by fools of God claiming to be Osama bin Laden.

According to American officials, as late as last November, four teams of three to four men passed disguised as merchants. The Syrian officers accompany them just until the border. Next, a guide helps them renter Iraq. Thousands of dollars (pass) in secret, the operation is very profitable for the military who, moreover, are convinced that they are acting as Arab patriots.

Certain officers, in particular the information specialists, pocket these sums and more importantly are able to supply arms and explosives to the camps of Al Qaeda's network that improvise in the no man's land of al-Qamechliye and al-Hasakah. It is in this almost deserted sector that before surrendering to Iraq the militants devote themselves to their last training session. ...

But the Syrian government hurries to add that its borders with Iraq run for thousands of kilometers of desert, it is too long and situated in regions too desolate to be able to hermetically seal them. An excuse that the Americans interpret obviously as a camouflage of complicity, at least passive, with their enemies. ...

Damascus has not appreciated that France, friend of the Arabs, votes for resolution 1559 of the Security Council of the UN which, sponsored by the United States, has asked that Syria pull its troops out of Lebanon. Since the Israeli evacuation in 2000 the only occupying foreign forces who remain in the country of the cedars are Syrian.