Syria, US shrouded in the fog of
war By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Starting with what is fact,
four attackers and one security guard died in the
unsuccessful attack on the US Embassy in the Rawda
neighborhood of the Syrian capital Damascus on
Tuesday morning. And, contrary to some reports,
all of the attackers were Syrian, and not jihadis
from neighboring countries.
After this, it
all gets a bit murky.
Minutes after the
attack, Syrian opposition leader Ali Sadr al-Din
al-Baynouni of the banned Muslim Brotherhood spoke
from his
London
exile to Doha-based Al-Jazeera TV, saying the
attack was fabricated by Syrian intelligence. The
reasons, he said, were to score points with the
Americans and prove to Washington that Syria and
the US had the same enemy in radical political
Islam.
Then a senior Syrian government
official accused the United States of being behind
the assault on its own embassy. One unidentified
Ba'ath Party official was quoted in the media as
saying, "Only the Americans can succeed in
carrying out an attack just 200 meters from
President [Bashar al-]Assad's residence in the
most heavily guarded section of Syria."
The official claimed that Washington had
masterminded the attack to "prove Syria is filled
with terrorists and to put us in a weak position"
to extract political concessions - this despite
the US praising the Syrians. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said the US appreciated the
response of the Syrian security forces "to help
secure our territory" - and this at a time that
relations between the Syrian government and the US
are at their lowest point ever.
One would
be on safe ground to dismiss the theory of a US
plot out of hand. Baynouni's accusation of Syrian
complicity, though, bears closer scrutiny.
Baynouni points out that the Rawda
district is a heavily guarded neighborhood because
it borders the Presidential Palace and the homes
of high-level officials in the Ba'ath regime, in
addition to several foreign embassies. It would be
very difficult for armed terrorists to penetrate a
security zone like Rawda, he said, had they not
been helped by Syrian security. This argument,
popular among some in the Syrian opposition, is
difficult to believe for a variety of reasons.
Terrorists can, and have, previously
infiltrated heavily guarded compounds not only in
Syria but all over the world. In Syria, during the
heyday of tight security in the 1970s and 1980s,
the Muslim Brotherhood carried out a series of
armed attacks in similar heavily guarded
neighborhoods of Damascus, assassinating prominent
members of the Ba'athist regime. The most famous
Brotherhood attack was on army headquarters in
Omayyad Square in central Damascus, and another on
the Azbakiyye neighborhood, both conducted in the
1980s.
Former Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein once famously sent Palestinian militants
to seize the Semiramis Hotel in Damascus, in
September 1976, and they managed to take many
hostages. Nobody said then that the attacks were
staged by Syrian security.
More recently,
terrorists who had been to Iraq returned to Syria
and carried out a failed military operation in
Mezzeh, a posh residential neighborhood in
Damascus, facing the Ministry of Information. Two
people were killed in the gunfire.
In July
2005, terrorists preaching militant Islam were
arrested after a shootout with Syrian security in
Mount Qasiyoun, overlooking the Syrian capital.
Shortly afterward, a terrorist group was
apprehended in Mu'arret al-Nu'man village, and
another group was caught while preparing to
detonate a bomb at peak time inside the Damascus
Palace of Justice.
This year, a terrorist
group launched a failed attack on the Syrian
Television Compound, located in Omayyad Square and
surrounded by army headquarters, the Damascus
opera house, the General Customs Department and
the Assad National Library. The bottom line is
that terrorism can and does happen in Syria. Just
because Syria has a reputation for tight security
does not mean it can prevent Islamic
fundamentalists from striking inside the country.
Any person who saw the blood-stained
street in front of the US Embassy on Tuesday, or
heard and saw the gunfire, knows that the attack
was not a stunt by the Syrians.
The Syrian
regime has always boasted of the tight security it
imposes on the country, and it would be highly
unlikely to jeopardize its iron-fisted reputation
by stage-managing a terror attack.
But the
reason members of the opposition doubt its
authenticity is that in the past, particularly in
after 1982, the Syrians exaggerated the Islamic
threat in the country to justify tight security.
This was to show the world that if the Ba'athists
were removed from power, intolerant and radical
Islamists would take over Damascus.
Ironically, there is no need now to
exaggerate the claims - militant Islam has been on
the rise since the September 11, 2001, attacks on
the US and the subsequent invasion of Iraq.
In Syria, Islamists have been encouraged
by these events. They have been at war with the
Ba'athist regime since 1963 and have suffered two
heavy defeats, in 1964 and 1984. They are not
necessarily a part of the Brotherhood, more likely
former members or allies. They share a common
enemy in the Syrian regime and are equally opposed
to the secularism of Syrian society.
One
of the people to make headlines in recent years
has been Aleppo-based cleric Abu al-Qaqa, an
anti-American preacher whose students were accused
of staging the Omayyad Square attacks this summer.
The assailants were killed in that incident, but
they were carrying compact discs with Qaqa's
sermons.
In one of the sermons he is seen
screaming: "We will teach our enemies a lesson
they will never forget. Are you ready?" When the
crowds respond affirmatively with thundering
voices, he says: "Speak louder so George Bush can
hear you!" He then gets so worked up that he
starts to weep while preaching and says: "Guests
have come to our land ... slaughter them like
cattle. Burn them! Yes, they are the Americans!"
Qaqa denied that he had ordered the
Omayyad Square attack, but said some of his
disgruntled students might have taken matters into
their own hands without his blessing or knowledge.
The same scenario might apply to the
attack on the US Embassy. Syrians, anti-American
and deeply religious, might have wanted to send a
message to the Americans on the fifth anniversary
of September 11. Or they might have wanted to
embarrass the Syrian regime further with the US
administration. Or both.
Let us not forget
there are thousands of Syrians in the diaspora.
They fled the government's dragnet in the 1980s
and are affiliated with international political
and military Islam. Many of them are members of or
linked to al-Qaeda and certainly - no matter how
tight security is in Damascus - they still have
contacts in Syria.
Imad Yarkas is
currently in jail in Spain for providing logistic
support to al-Qaeda, training its members and
conspiring to commit murder on September 11. He is
Syrian. Since September 11, the names of several
other Syrians have appeared in the hunt for
al-Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East.
Among those accused of al-Qaeda ties are
Yarkas, TV journalist Tayseer al-Alouni,
businessman Ma'mun al-Darkazanli and the deadly
Abu Musab al-Souri, believed to be behind the
March 11, 2004, attacks in Madrid and possibly
involved in the July 7 attacks in London last
year. One of the top al-Qaeda men in Iraq is
Sulayman Khalil Darwish, known by his war name Abu
al-Ghadia. He, too, is Syrian.
But back to
the embassy attack. Syria has nothing to gain by
projecting the image that it is swarming with
Islamic fundamentalists. Such an attack is
devastating for investment and tourism.
It
also proves that Syria was not being dishonest
when it told the Americans after September 11 that
they should work together in preventing the rise
of fundamentalist Islam. The Syrians said they had
suffered for their secularism from radical Islam
long before the Americans did on September 11.
They helped track some of the attackers who had
been in Aleppo before September 11 and gave many
files and documents to US intelligence, leading
William Burns, the assistant secretary of state,
to say that "Syria has saved American lives".
Relations soured between Syria and the US
during the war on Afghanistan in 2001 and slipped
further during the Iraq war. They have been on a
downward slope since then, heightened by Syria's
support for military groups in Palestine and
Hezbollah in Lebanon and the assassination of
Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafik al-Hariri,
last year.
Perhaps this attack will prove
to the Americans that the Syrians are genuine
partners in the "war on terror". Washington might
disagree with Damascus on particular issues
related to Palestine, Iraq or Lebanon, but in the
"war on terror", Syria and the United States have
common interests.
Syria did not protect
the US Embassy to score points with Washington. It
thwarted the attack because it is in Syria's best
national interests to prevent the rise of
political or military Islam in the Arab world.
Perhaps it will be easier for the Americans now to
see Syria as part of the solution, rather than the
problem, to fundamentalism in the Middle East.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian
political analyst.
(Copyright 2006
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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