DAMASCUS - Syrian television aired much-awaited interviews on Thursday evening
with the terrorist cell responsible for an attack in Damascus in September that
left 14 people dead and 65 injured.
State television showed what it said were 12 members of the Islamist militant
group Fatah al-Islam, confessing that they had helped plan the suicide car
bombing.
The interview sent shivers down the spine of most Syrians, who were horrified
to hear that there was something called a "Syria branch" for al-Qaeda. These
people looked like ordinary Syrians. They came from places like Aleppo, Homs
and Damascus. One was a 24-year-old smuggler of gasoline between Syria and
Lebanon. Another was a dental expert, while a third was an
information technology expert. A fourth was a student at one of the private
schools that recently started operating in Syria. Some of them said that they
had baby children.
Originally it was believed that the terrorist who drove an automobile into the
premises of a security building on the road to Damascus International Airport
had come from Iraq. The license plate was Iraqi and most of the militants who
had carried out attacks in Syria since 2003 came from the wilderness of Iraq.
It was too abstract for Syrians to believe that their countrymen could plot
such a bloody crime against innocent fellow Syrians. The Thursday broadcast
proved them wrong.
The new information confirms that the terrorists were a mixture of Syrians,
Lebanese and Palestinians, operating not directly with al-Qaeda, but a sister
organization called Fatah al-Islam, which is based in neighboring Tripoli,
Lebanon.
The suicide bomber himself was a Saudi named "Abu Aysha", whose picture was
also shown on Syrian TV. This group wanted to "harm the Syrian regime" and had
several targets on their hit list, including the central bank of Syria. They
also had a hit list that included an Italian and a British diplomat, both based
in Damascus.
One of the men who appeared on TV was Abdul-Baqi Hussein, head of security in
the Syria-branch of Fatah al-Islam, and Wafa Abbsi, the daughter of Fatah
al-Islam founder Shaker al-Abbsi. They said the car was in fact stolen from
Iraqis and loaded with 200 kilograms of explosives at a farm on the outskirts
of Damascus.
Very troubling was the confession of Wafa, the only woman among the group, who
spoke with her husband Yasser Unad. They seemed the most disturbed among the
group of terrorists. Wafa said her father received money transfers to conduct
his military activities from the Future Movement of Lebanese parliamentary
majority leader Saad al-Hariri. Her father never trusted Hariri, Abbsi implied,
saying that he feared that the latter would "trade him" for a cheap price.
Wafa, whose first husband was a Syrian killed on the Syrian-Iraqi border, came
to Syria with her second husband - also a Syrian - and was arrested with the
terrorist team after September 27.
Wafa's tale takes us back to an earlier argument made by veteran US journalist
Seymour Hersh, who wrote in The New Yorker that Hariri, the US and certain
figures in Saudi Arabia were responsible for creating Fatah al-Islam. Speaking
to CNN International's Your World Today in May 2007, Hersh said that all three
parties wanted a Sunni military group in Lebanon to combat Hezbollah - which
was backed by Iran - in the event of an outbreak of Sunni-Shi'ite violence.
While Hersh was speaking, violence was ranging in the infamous Naher al-Bared
camp in northern Lebanon, between Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese army. Those
battles, which lasted for weeks, led to the killing of about 400 people.
Abbsi himself, the founder of Fatah al-Islam, was at first reported dead. These
reports were later challenged by his supporters, who claimed that he escaped
the violence of Naher al-Bared. In his CNN interview, Hersh added, "The enemy
of our enemy is our friend, just as the jihadi groups in Lebanon were also
there to go after [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah. We're in the business of
creating in some places, Lebanon in particular, sectarian violence."
He drew parallels between US-Hariri-Saudi backing of Fatah al-Islam with
American support for Osama Bin Laden when he was fighting the Soviets in
Afghanistan in the 1980s. With time, he turned against his creators and became
America's number one enemy. The architects of this policy - which calls for the
creation of parties like Fatah al-Islam - are US Vice President Dick Cheney,
Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams and former ambassador and
current Saudi National Security Adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
Hersh said, "The idea [is] that the Saudis promised they could control the
jihadis, so we [US] spent a lot of money and time ... using and supporting the
jihadis to help us beat the Russians in Afghanistan, and they turned on us. And
we have the same pattern, not as if there's any lessons learned. The same
pattern, using the Saudis again to support jihadis."
Origins of Fatah al-Islam
The group was reportedly founded in November 2006, emerging from a radical
Palestinian group called Fatah al-Intifada which in turn was inspired by the
Fatah movement of Yasser Arafat, currently headed by Palestinian leader Mahmud
Abbas.
Arafat's Fatah was born in Kuwait in the 1960s and is currently governing in
Palestine. It is pro-West today, however, unlike Abbsi's Fatah al-Islam. Abbsi
himself (born in Jericho in 1955) was a member of Arafat's Fatah. He joined
military units of Fatah and served as a MiG fighter pilot for Libya in its war
with Chad and fought Israel's occupation of Lebanon in 1982 as a warrior with
Arafat.
He grew too Islamic and became frustrated with Arafat's diplomacy and secular
nationalism, breaking with Fatah by the mid-1980s. The Israeli occupation of
Beirut in 1982 disenchanted millions of fighters in the Arab world, who turned
to the only remaining and reliable source of inspiration that could unite them:
Islam. Arab nationalism was abandoned for the sake of Islamic nationalism. It
seemed the logical thing to do by the 1980s. After all, Islam had triumphed in
combating the Soviets in Afghanistan. Islam had also led to the toppling of the
pro-Western Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran and the killing of Anwar Sadat in 1981.
Political Islam seemed the right - and logical - thing to turn to.
Abbsi moved to Syria to work against Arafat and rebrand himself. Contrary to
what anti-Syrian media outlets are saying in Beirut, the Syrians did not
tolerate him. On the contrary, they grew suspicious of his activities and
placed him behind bars for three years. On his release, he became close to Abu
Musaab al-Zarkawi, the terrorist leader of Iraq, who at the time was based in
his native Jordan.
Together they planned the assassination of Laurence Foley, a US diplomat based
in Jordan, in 2004. Both were sentenced to death in absentia by Jordanian
courts in July of that year. Abbsi then went to Lebanon, fleeing an arrest
warrant in both Syria and Jordan. His name resurfaced in Jordan this January
when two militants engaged in a gun battle with Jordanian police in the
northern city of Irbid. On arrest, they confessed that they had been sent to
Jordan by Abbsi to carry out terrorist operations.
Abbsi chose the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon, near the city
of Tripoli, to set up base and found his Fatah al-Islam. The new group, he
claimed, would be modeled after al-Qaeda and inspired by bin Laden. Its stated
goal was to establish Islamic law in Lebanon, and then destroy the United
States and Israel.
Speaking to the New York Times shortly before his battle with the Lebanese army
began, Abbsi said said, "The only way to achieve our rights is by force. This
is the way America deals with us. So when the Americans feel that their lives
and their economy are threatened, they will know that they will leave."
Naturally, the anti-Syrian team in Lebanon writes off the entire story as a
hoax. They claimed from day one that Fatah al-Islam was created by the Syrians.
That is difficult to believe, since his prison record in Damascus - along with
Syria's history of combating Islamic fundamentalism - would certainly prevent
it from engaging in such a risky scheme with such a notorious terrorist.
Additionally, the terrorist bombing of September 27 adds proof that if
anything, Fatah al-Islam is certainly not allied to Damascus. On the contrary,
it is bent on destroying Syria.
Those doubting the entire story will continue doing so, claiming that the
program aired on Syrian TV was doctored by the Syrians. That too is hard to
believe. These terrorists were watched by millions of people around the world
and in Syria. They gave out real names and appeared clearly on screen. If the
Syrians asked them to stage the entire operation, how can they continue with
their ordinary lives and not be spotted as frauds?
And if these were indeed the terrorists saying things to please the Syrians;
why would they? They are in Syrian jails after all and face the death penalty
for committing terror against Syrian citizens and government. The last thing
they would want to do as they face the hangman's noose, is please Syrian
authorities. The truth is that these people - Fatah al-Islam in Syria - were
for real and they are testimony to just how vulnerable Syria has become to
terrorists and fundamentalists.
They are the real wolves at the doors of Damascus and when they stand at the
gates of the Syrian capital - and can pull off a terrorist attack as the one on
September 27 - this means that they have already infiltrated more vulnerable
places like Beirut, Baghdad and Amman.
Sami Moubayed is Editor-in-Chief of Forward Magazine in Syria.
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