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A welcoming friend to many a
terrorist
By B Raman
The
orchestrated campaign against Syria mounted by the
United States is more proof of what this writer has been
saying for weeks, namely, that neutralization of jihadi
terrorism directed against Israel and the US and not oil
is the primary motivating factor of US actions in the
Middle East.
Oil is a welcome and coveted bonus,
but the urge to wipe out all regimes, which have been
using or encouraging terrorism against the US and Israel
is the primary motive. And the US has been following its
objective with a doggedness and ruthlessness that could
be emulated with benefit by India, which has suffered
and continues to suffer more from foreign terrorists
than the US and Israel put together.
The
psychological and economic pressure that the US has
already mounted against Syria has two objectives - to
rid Syria of the terrorist infrastructure in its
territory, which used to be directed against Israel as
well as the West until 1993, and which is since directed
only against Israel; and to deprive jihadi terrorists of
yet another source of financial support.
Let us
understand it correctly - apart from providing funds and
political and moral support to all anti-Israel terrorist
groups and sanctuary to terrorist leaders such as Abu
Abbas of the Palestine Liberation Front, arrested by US
Special Forces in Baghdad on April 15, Saddam Hussein
had taken care not to encourage any terrorist
infrastructure in Iraqi territory.
In contrast,
Syria under President Bashar Assad has been the most
active hub of jihadi terrorism in the region, using its
territory as well as that of Lebanon to create, sustain
and protect terrorist groups. The groups of which Syria
was the godfather were not confined to just those
operating against Israel and killing dozens of Israeli
citizens. There were many others operating in other
countries with objectives unconnected to the Palestine
issue.
You name any terrorist group that has
spread death and mayhem in any part of the world since
the early 1980s, and they had a Syrian connection. The
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),
the International Front of Revolutionaries of Carlos the
Jackal, now in prison in France, the Baader-Meinhof and
the Red Army Faction of the then West Germany, the
Action Directe of France, the Red Army Faction of Japan,
the Kurdish groups of Turkey etc, etc.
The PFLP
trained Tamil terrorists of Sri Lanka in secret camps in
Lebanese territory run with the connivance of Syrian
intelligence. Until 1993, Carlos operated from Damascus,
where he was living under the cover of a Lebanese
businessman with the name Michel in a house and with a
fleet of Mercedes-Benz cars given to him by Syrian
intelligence. Johannes Weinrich, alias Peter, and
Magdellana Kopp, the wife of Carlos, both from the West
German Red Army Faction, also lived in Damascus. Many of
these terrorist-guests of Syria used to travel abroad
with genuine travel documents given by the Syrian
intelligence under different names. In some cases, Syria
even gave them well-forged diplomatic passports from
other countries.
If one analyzes many of the
major terrorist incidents of the 1980s and the early
1990s in West Europe, the trails lead to some group or
another living as the guests of the Syrian intelligence
in Damascus. It gave them houses, money and arms and
ammunition and helped them run their training camps in
"liberated" Lebanese territory. It did not want the
training infrastructure to be located in its territory.
Many of these groups spawned by the Syrian intelligence
did not even have an ostensible political objective.
They were pure and simple contract killers who were
prepared to undertake any act of terrorism against any
country for payment of huge sums. In the 1980s, the
International Sikh Youth Federation approached Carlos to
undertake for them a contract for killing Rajiv Gandhi,
then prime minister, but he declined.
In 1993,
under intense US pressure, the Syrian government ordered
its intelligence service to cut off contacts with
non-Arab terrorist groups. It asked Carlos and all other
dregs of Western and Japanese terrorist groups to leave
Syria. Carlos took shelter in Khartoum, Sudan, where he
was captured by the French intelligence in August,1994,
with the cooperation of the Sudanese government. Kopp
ran away to Latin America. Peter fled to Yemen, where he
was captured by the German intelligence with local help.
And so on and so on.
But Syria has not cut off
its links and support to Arab/Palestinian terrorist
groups killing Israelis. Syrian intelligence and
security forces have been largely responsible for the
destruction of Lebanon, once the most prosperous country
of the Middle East, and for the conversion of its
territory into a breeding ground of terrorists of
various hues.
In its creation and use of
terrorists against Israel and the West, the Syrian
intelligence cooperated closely not only with the
intelligence agencies of Iraq and Libya, but also with
Stasi, the intelligence agency of East Germany. The
records of the Stasi and those relating to the trial of
Carlos in France and of Peter in Germany should contain
a wealth of details on the role of Syria as a state
sponsor of international terrorism.
The only
point that can be made in favor of Syria is that there
has been no evidence of links to Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda and International Islamic Front. Bin Laden
himself kept away from the Syrian leadership, just as he
kept away from the Iraqi leadership, since he viewed
both of them as apostate because of their secular and
socialist policies. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of
Israel has been alleging links between the Arab
terrorist groups supported by Syria and al-Qaeda, but no
acceptable evidence has been forthcoming so far.
If the US acts against Syrian state sponsorship
of terrorism, India should not shed tears over it. Even
though the US action will mainly benefit Israel and not
India, it could have, in the long run, a beneficial
fallout for other countries in Asia which also face the
problem of jihadi terrorism, largely spawned in
Pakistan.
B Raman is Additional
Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of
India, and presently director, Institute For Topical
Studies, Chennai; former member of the National Security
Advisory Board of the Government of India. E-Mail:
corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the
counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
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