Give them safe haven? The Taliban gave al Qaeda safe haven. Assad simply did not instruct his troops to fight al Qaeda. We rag on Pakistan all the time about providing safe haven for al Qaeda and the Taliban, but the fact is that 4,000 Pakistani troops have been killed fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban. Why would Assad risk thousands of troops to fight al Qaeda in Syria, when the Defense Department kept on hinting that the next stop after Iraq was Syria?
Then there's the issue of Assad's Sunni Arab troops getting riled up about being used to fight fellow Sunni Arabs who were - in the Sunni view - doing Allah's work by fighting the American infidel in Iraq. For Assad, it was perfectly logical for him to not interfere with foreign Sunni nutters and al Qaeda-ists moving into Iraq - (1) it provided a way for him to send Sunni Arab crazies in Syria to their deaths, (2) it kept American forces too busy in Iraq to even think about an invasion of Syria, (3) it made an invasion of Syria politically unthinkable because of the prospect of Iraq-scale costs in terms of casualties and dollars spent, (4) it saved him from taking up the thankless task of incurring even bigger casualties than US forces were taking in Iraq, given his antiquated equipment and badly-trained but sullen and potentially rebellious majority Sunni Arab conscripts.
As an infidel ruling over a Sunni Arab majority Assad's hands were tied. Even the Saudis, with a military budget 10x that of Syria, experienced a fair amount of leakage on their border into Iraq, such that our military people were complaining about it to the press until (call me a cynic) the Saudi PR people presumably started having the Pentagon brass muzzle the leakers. And of course, the Saudis had an incentive to cooperate, given that nobody at the Pentagon was talking about invading Saudi Arabia if the Iraqi campaign proved to be a cakewalk.
Here's the question - if the Saudis were so cooperative, how is it that the distribution of foreign fighters was as follows:
In July 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa. 50% of all Saudi fighters in Iraq come as suicide bombers. In the six months preceding that article, such bombings have killed or injured 4,000 Iraqis.[39]How is it that the Saudis did not prevent their crazies from fighting in Iraq? Was the Pentagon brass simply told to hold its tongue and toe the line? Just as we're not supposed to repeat the fact that Saudi troglodytes comprised 15 of the 19 terrorists on 9/11?