Neither do I. Fighters and explosives both are "slipping" across their border.
They're trying to save face after being run out of Lebanon by terrorizing another neighbor. Notice how the bombings in Iraq have picked up now that the Syrian bad guys aren't employed elsewhere?
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Today: May 12, 2005 at 15:38:18 PDT
JAZIRAH DESERT, Iraq (AP) -
On the first day of a major U.S. offensive, two shells landed in Um Mazin's house. Grabbing what she could, she fled with four other women and 21 children.
They are now all sheltering in a single flimsy tent, braving sandstorms in the desert - one of scores of families who have fled the roar of fighter jets, shattering gunfire and artillery barrages near the Syrian border.
"We ran away from the American bombings," said Um Mazin, as the wind picked up, sending sand swirling around her. "The Americans do not hit the gunmen, they hit the houses of civilians."
More than 1,000 U.S. Marines, sailors and soldiers are sweeping through small desert outposts, searching for followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's most-wanted militant leader. The thundering offensive, which began late Saturday in the border town of Qaim, about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad, sent hundreds of people fleeing from surrounding villages.
Dozens of tents now dot a desolate highway running south through the desert to Jordan.
Um Mazin said no one was hurt when the shells landed in her house in the village of Karabilah. But her husband and his two brothers bundled their mother, wives and children into several cars and sent them south for safety. The husbands stayed behind.
The families left in such a hurry, she said, they did not bring all the supplies they need to survive in the bleak environment.
"We did not take enough food, water, medicine or clothes ... and we are tired of the sandstorms," Um Mazin said wearily. "No one can go back now, and we do not know what happened to our husbands."
With no aid agencies to help them, all they can do is wait for the fighting to stop. Trucks with water did reach some of the refugees.
About 60 people from seven closely related families were camped nearby, some sitting in the shade of their vehicles as temperatures climbed. Like Um Mazin, they were too afraid to give their full names.
Abu Riad, who appeared middle-aged, was fretting over his sickly month-old daughter.
"I do not know what she is suffering from," he said. "Maybe it's all the sand she is breathing, or that we are living off bread and salty water from a nearby well."
The family of 55-year-old Abu Moayad didn't even have a tent to shield them from the dust storms. "We are in a miserable situation," he said.
When the bombardments started, Abu Moayad's family tried to reach Qaim, but was blocked by Iraqis who had gathered there to fight the Americans.
"The city is filled with armed men," he said. He insisted, however, they were ordinary men trying to defend their town, not members of al-Zarqawi's terror network.
"The Americans always try to find excuses to attack our people," he grumbled.
Others disputed his account, saying foreign fighters had been slipping across the Syrian border into Iraq.
One elderly man interviewed by Associated Press Television News in Qaim blamed the foreigners for drawing the American assault.
"We are peaceful people who were in our homes," said the man, who feared being identified by name. "They came to us from all countries, and now the Americans have come."
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