[FreedomNeocon]

Back even further (for historical context)... off to 2003




Syria’s Pivotal Role in Iraqi Resistance Is Glossed over in Washington
June 15th, 2003
http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=506

The cat was out of the bag - almost - as a result of Operation Peninsula Strike, the massive US crackdown against a lethal brew of anti-American resistance forces which have been bedeviling US troops north of Baghdad. A substantial quotient of foreign combatants from Arab countries - Saudis, Yemenis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians and Palestinians from Syria or Lebanon - was discovered to be mixed in with the Fedayeen Saddam, Baathists and former Republican Guards officers mounting lethal ambushes against US troops in and around Baghdad. At the same time, no one says where they are coming from.

No central command structure directing those ambushes has been detected inside Iraq. So the question is where do the resisters gather for action, train and jump off? Who pays them? And who is funneling them into Iraq in a steady stream since the early days of the war, that is four months ago?

The answer, according to DEBKAfile’s intelligence and military sources, is quite simply the head of the only Baath regime extant after Saddam Hussein’s downfall: Syrian president Bashar Assad, along with chiefs of his military intelligence which runs Syria’s terrorist connections and Firas Tlas, son of defense minister Mustafa Tlas. Last week DEBKAfile named Firas Tlas for the first time as the organizer of the clandestine removal and concealment of Iraq’s unconventional weapons.

The makeup of the “foreign Islamic legion” Syria is pumping into Iraq to fight against the American presence strongly resembles the al Qaeda combat force deployed on northern Iraq’s Afghan border, in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Dubai and Chechnya, as well as Syria and Lebanon.

Syrian military intelligence is raising this combat force in three places:

1. South Lebanon where several Qaeda operatives have foregathered as guests of Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist groups.

2. The hundreds of medressas springing up in the poor districts of Damascus. Some Middle East intelligence sources estimate that at the speed they are sprouting, by the end of the year Damascus will become the Middle East Peshawar, the Pakistani city whose Islamic academies were Osama bin Laden’s main manpower reservoir in 2000.

3. The Muslim tourists crowding into Damascus to take advantage of the only Arab city with no entry controls for Islamic traffic, whether it hails from the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Far East. Today, Damascus international airport bustles, a travel hub for Muslim travelers worldwide and the perfect crossroads for the use of al Qaeda, Taliban and radical Islamic groups from Morocco to the Philippines who prefer their movements to be unobserved. According to DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources, the Syrian government recently turned down a discreet request from Washington to control some of this traffic; the pretext was that the Damascus authorities have no way of telling from a traveler’s papers whether he is a bona fide tourist or a terrorist.

However, Syrian military intelligence has no difficulty in making this distinction for the recruitment of volunteers for its anti-American legion in Iraq. Additional troops are mustered from among Syria’s Sunni Muslims who are glad of temporary employment especially when it comes with insurance for their families if they come to harm.

In mid-April, when DEBKA-Net-Weekly exposed the despatch of Syrian fighters to Iraq, US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Damascus against sending foreign fighters into Iraq. The Bush administration was then on the verge of attacking Syria but pulled back at the last moment and the subject dropped out of the headlines. It cropped up again this week when the influx of anti-American combatants from Syria into Iraq turned out never to have been interrupted, any more than the smuggling of weapons, cash and maps marked with US targets – despite the Asad government’s promises to US secretary of state Colin Powell.

The units going across, no more than five or six men at a time, are often equipped with large quantities of arms, mines, explosives and rocket propelled grenades for distribution among Iraqi groups fighting in the northern, western and central regions of Iraq.

They cross through two main routes. One is the borderland west of Mosul, an area populated by nomadic Sunni tribesmen who have been roaming for hundreds of years between Iraq and Syria, some wandering into Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well. The other route goes through the al Qaim region of western Iraq which is still not fully under US military control.

The Syrians have thrust their foot through the Iraqi door partly with an eye on a spot in the oil-rich Mosul region and the prevention of an American presence being established along the Iraqi-Syrian frontier; partly to curtail the spread of Kurdish influence in this strategic region. However, a less known motive, discovered by DEBKAfile’s military sources, is that Bashar Assad, stripped by the Iraq war of his main source of foreign revenue, is exploiting the same smuggling routes serving him and Saddam Hussein for their contraband trade of weapons and oil, to replace his lost source of revenue with a new one.

There is evidence of money continuing to flow from Iraq to Syria. The new money-spinning venture for the Assad regime is run by the same Firas Tlas. In May, American forces intercepted two trucks laden with gold bullion worth hundreds of millions of dollars heading for the Syrian border – one west of Mosul and the second at al Qaim. DEBKAfile’s sources report that the treasure came from hideouts in which Saddam Hussein and his sons and agents salted away their cash and other valuables before the war broke out. There is every reason to believe that most of the gold trucks went through to their destination and the amount captured by US forces was a pittance in comparison.

The same sort of surreptitious traffic is being conducted by Syrian intelligence from Syria and Lebanon to the Palestinian areas of the West Bank. A steady trickle of fighters, funds, weapons and explosives was revealed in the past by DEBKAfile as streaming from the meeting point of the Syrian, Jordanian and Israeli borders through the Golan Heights and the deep dry gullies cutting through the West bank from Wadi Haramiya up to the environs of Ramallah, Yasser Arafat’s stronghold. There, the incoming men are taken in and sheltered by his Fatah and al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades militias and other groups under his command.

DEBKAfile’s intelligence reveal that, shortly before the Aqaba summit of June 4, the Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas secretly sent a high-ranking aide to Damascus to ask Syrian officials to put a stop to this flow of fighters and weapons to Palestinian areas controlled by Arafat. He was rebuffed.

American and Israeli intelligence, like members of the Abu Mazen administration, are certain that Syria is the primary source of weapons and explosives nourishing the hard-line Palestinian terrorist organizations. This source is complemented by contraband deposited on the Gazan coast by sea and brought in through illicit tunnels from Egyptian Sinai.

All these smuggling routes are under Arafat’s exclusive thumb. This fact tends to render the efforts resumed by Israeli and Palestinian security officials Saturday night, June 4, to put a stop to Palestinian terrorist strikes, more or less pointless. It is in Arafat’s power to torpedo any agreements reached, particularly since he also retains control over the bulk of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces. The same fate awaits the mission the US monitoring force headed by State Department official John Wolf begins on Sunday, June 15. When they put their heads together on ways and means of halting terrorism, the Americans, Israelis and Palestinians will be aware that Arafat is calling the shots and that he is fully equipped for this role with the supplies delivered from Damascus.

While Syria’s involvement in Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can no longer be denied, it is hard to understand why the Bush administration refrains from fingering a regime that continues to covertly send combatants to join the Iraqi resistance threatening US servicemen and actively sabotages Washington’s plans for a new Middle East.

“Foreign fighters” has been uncovered by Peninsula Strike in the Sunni enclave along the Tigris River delimited by Fallujah, Tikrit and Balud north of Baghdad. Seventy-four people captured near the northern town of Kirkuk are suspected active al Qaeda members. Many of the 82 people killed in a combined US air and land assault on a “terrorist training camp” near Balud were non-Iraqi.

Army Lt.Gen. David McKiernan, US ground commander in Iraq, reported cagily that while no sign of a central command has turned up in Iraq, “There’s certainly the probability that there are financial trails that lead to other parts in Iraq, and there might be communications that go to other parts.”

On March 21, DEBKA-Net-Weekly revealed the existence of a massive guerrilla army created by Saddam’s eldest son Uday in almost a year of preparation for the American invasion, made up mainly of Baath militias and Fedayeen Saddam. The speed of the US advance took Uday’s army by surprise. Only now, are these units that kept their heads down in the first part of the war coming out to strike the US presence, acting on directives from outside the country – Syria the obvious location.

Yet Washington still hopes against hope that relentless economic and diplomatic pressure on Damascus will have the effect to disarming the Syrian-Hizballah front in the event of a US-Iran showdown. The Bush administration is also banking on the same deterrents to hold the Syrians back from meddling in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Thus far, those deterrents have had as much effect as water off a duck’s back; Assad continues to stir both pots. The most likely explanation for US patience with the Syrian ruler is the perennial tug of war in the Bush team between the pro-diplomacy secretary of state on the one hand and vice president Richard Cheney and Rumsfeld, who are pressing for a tough line against both Syria and Iran, on the other.

[FreedomNeocon]

Almost at the source.. this one from May, 2003





Powell Confronts, Assad Prevaricates
May 4th, 2003
http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=482

Syria is reported by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources as having secretly disposed of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction by moving them into eastern Lebanon for burial in the Beqaa Valley. Iraq’s biological weapons may be there too. They were interred deep under the heroin poppy and cotton fields in two of the most fertile regions of Lebanon: the valley stretching between Jabal Akroum, the town of al Qbayyat and the Syrian border, and the land lying between the towns of Al Hirmil and al Labwah between the Orontes River and the Syrian frontier.

On February 14, about a month before the start of the war in Iraq, DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue 97 ran an article captioned “Is Iraq’s WMD cache in Lebanon available to Al Qaeda?”

Now, our intelligence sources can disclose exclusively that the relocation of Iraq’s WMD systems took place between January 10 and March 10 and was completed just 10 days before the US-led offensive was launched against Iraq. The banned arsenal, hauled in giant tankers from Iraq to Syria and from there to the Bekaa Valley under Syrian special forces and military intelligence escort, was discharged into pits 6-8 meters across and 25-35 meters deep dug by Syrian army engineers. They were sealed and planted over with new seedlings. Nonetheless, their location is known and detectable with the right instruments. Our sources have learned that Syria was paid about $35 million to make Saddam Hussein’s forbidden weapons disappear.

Before US secretary of state Colin Powell arrived in Damascus on Saturday, May 3, the Syrians made the placatory gesture to Washington of speeding and upgrading the handover of Iraqi fugitives from the Saddam regime sheltering in Syria

DEBKA-Net-Weekly has learned from its most exclusive sources that on Monday, April 28, Dr. RihabTaha, a microbiologist known as Dr. Germ, was turned over to the Americans in Iraq. She had directed Iraq’s biological weapons program. Also turned over was Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, who headed Iraq’s anthrax project. No announcement was made of their capture. However, the surrender 24 hours later of Taha’s husband, General Amir Muhammed Rasheed, director of Iraq’s missile development program and best known by his nickname “The Missile Man”, was announced.

The United States is therefore fully apprised of the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of unconventional weapons and has taken custody of the scientists who developed them.

But DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources say Washington was nevertheless far from placated and Powell’s meeting with the Syrian president Saturday was a confrontation. The secretary of state laid down the following demands:

1. A map with the coordinates of the pits holding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

2. Surrender of Saddam’s most senior insiders who fled to Aleppo and Latakiya. After DEBKAfile blew the whistle on April 3, the group staying at the Cote D’Azur De Cham Resort in Latakia was whisked away leaving their families comfortably ensconced there.

3. Handover of the two senior Al Qaeda members now in Damascus. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military and intelligence sources say their names and whereabouts were uncovered by US intelligence units in Iraq.

4. An explanation of Syrian motives in allowing two British terrorists, Assif Hanif, who blew himself up in Tel Aviv on April 30, and Omar Khan Sharif, who ran away, to transit Damascus en route to Israel. (One of the duo spent four months of preparation in the Syrian capital with the Hamas operations officer and associate of Hizballah Imad al-Alami, as reported exclusively by DEBKAfile.)

5. An immediate stop to the military-terrorist activities of the Lebanese Hizballah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Syria and Lebanon. Failure to do so, Powell explained, will result in a painful tightening of economic pressure on Syria, after the loss of $1b in oil revenues from Baghdad.

Powell suggested that Assad invite Abu Mazen, the new Palestinian prime minister, to Damascus. This step would further underline Yasser Arafat’s state of isolation in view of his never having been received in Damascus. It could lead to an invitation from the Bush administration to invite the leaders of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq’s new regime and the Palestinians to a regional conference that would set the stage for Syrian and Palestinian peace negotiations with Israel.

Powell told Assad bluntly to choose between confrontation and negotiations.

At the same time, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Middle East experts stress that Powell’s stance was tough yet exploratory. The Bush administration is still in option-weighing mode, pondering how best to proceed in the post Iraq war era to achieve its two main objectives: One is to advance America’s long-range strategic goals in the Middle East. The second is to get Bush re-elected as President in November 2004.