[Peace-discuss] Our war

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq,
desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in
order to reduce its own military casualties..."

   Seen through a Syrian lens, 'unknown Americans' 
   are provoking civil war in Iraq
   By Robert Fisk
   The Independent 04/29/06 

In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark
as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building
on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for
15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the
name given by American correspondents to their own powerful
intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative
of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.

His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody
sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war
around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties.
It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington's
best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents
with a ruthlessness that the United States wilfully ignores.
And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found shot dead in his
office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental
instability.

The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to
provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents
spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather
than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to
you that we have very good information," my source says,
finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man
told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in
Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive
and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come
back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile
phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque
and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the
right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he
received a better signal. Then his car blew up."

Impossible, I think to myself. But then I remember how many
times Iraqis in Baghdad have told me similar stories. These
reports are believed even if they seem unbelievable. And I
know where much of the Syrian information is gleaned: from the
tens of thousands of Shia Muslim pilgrims who come to pray at
the Sayda Zeinab mosque outside Damascus. These men and women
come from the slums of Baghdad, Hillah and Iskandariyah as
well as the cities of Najaf and Basra. Sunnis from Fallujah
and Ramadi also visit Damascus to see friends and relatives
and talk freely of American tactics in Iraq.

"There was another man, trained by the Americans for the
police. He too was given a mobile and told to drive to an area
where there was a crowd - maybe a protest - and to call them
and tell them what was happening. Again, his new mobile was
not working. So he went to a landline phone and called the
Americans and told them: 'Here I am, in the place you sent me
and I can tell you what's happening here.' And at that moment
there was a big explosion in his car."

Just who these "Americans" might be, my source did not say. In
the anarchic and panic-stricken world of Iraq, there are many
US groups - including countless outfits supposedly working for
the American military and the new Western-backed Iraqi
Interior Ministry - who operate outside any laws or rules. No
one can account for the murder of 191 university teachers and
professors since the 2003 invasion - nor the fact that more
than 50 former Iraqi fighter-bomber pilots who attacked Iran
in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have been assassinated in their
home towns in Iraq in the past three years.

Amid this chaos, a colleague of my source asked me, how could
Syria be expected to lessen the number of attacks on Americans
inside Iraq? "It was never safe, our border," he said. "During
Saddam's time, criminals and Saddam's terrorists crossed our
borders to attack our government. I built a wall of earth and
sand along the border at that time. But three car bombs from
Saddam's agents exploded in Damascus and Tartous- I was the
one who captured the criminals responsible. But we couldn't
stop them."

Now, he told me, the rampart running for hundreds of miles
along Syria's border with Iraq had been heightened. "I have
had barbed wire put on top and up to now we have caught 1,500
non-Syrian and non-Iraqi Arabs trying to cross and we have
stopped 2,700 Syrians from crossing ... Our army is there -
but the Iraqi army and the Americans are not there on the
other side."

Behind these grave suspicions in Damascus lies the memory of
Saddam's long friendship with the United States. "Our Hafez
el-Assad [the former Syrian president who died in 2000] learnt
that Saddam, in his early days, met with American officials 20
times in four weeks. This convinced Assad that, in his words,
'Saddam is with the Americans'. Saddam was the biggest helper
of the Americans in the Middle East (when he attacked Iran in
1980) after the fall of the Shah. And he still is! After all,
he brought the Americans to Iraq!"

So I turn to a story which is more distressing for my sources:
the death by shooting of Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan,
former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon - an
awesomely powerful position - and Syrian Minister of Interior
when his suicide was announced by the Damascus government last
year.

Widespread rumours outside Syria suggested that Kenaan was
suspected by UN investigators of involvement in the murder of
the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in a massive
car bomb in Beirut last year - and that he had been "suicided"
by Syrian government agents to prevent him telling the truth.

Not so, insisted my original interlocutor. "General Ghazi was
a man who believed he could give orders and anything he wanted
would happen. Something happened that he could not reconcile -
something that made him realise he was not all-powerful. On
the day of his death, he went to his office at the Interior
Ministry and then he left and went home for half an hour. Then
he came back with a pistol. He left a message for his wife in
which he said goodbye to her and asked her to look after their
children and he said that what he was going to do was 'for the
good of Syria'. Then he shot himself in the mouth."

Of Hariri's assassination, Syrian officials like to recall his
relationship with the former Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad
Alawi - a self-confessed former agent for the CIA and MI6 -
and an alleged $20bn arms deal between the Russians and Saudi
Arabia in which they claim Hariri was involved.

Hariri's Lebanese supporters continue to dismiss the Syrian
argument on the grounds that Syria had identified Hariri as
the joint author with his friend, French President Jacques
Chirac, of the UN Security Council resolution which demanded
the retreat of the Syrians from Lebanese territory.

But if the Syrians are understandably obsessed with the
American occupation of Iraq, their long hatred for Saddam -
something which they shared with most Iraqis - is still
intact. When I asked my first "security" source what would
happen to the former Iraqi dictator, he replied, banging his
fist into his hand: "He will be killed. He will be killed. He
will be killed."

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited