By the summer of 2007, Syrian Air had only six commercial jets remaining, which caused chaos for passengers traveling abroad. On a holiday trip to Milan, for example, I was unable to secure a confirmation for the flight, despite the fact that I had a ticket and a reservation to travel. Once onboard the aircraft, I saw that Bashar’s “reforms” had not made it to Syrian Air. Most of the material on the seat cushions was threadbare, and the stuffing inside most seats was lumpy and uncomfortable. The trays used to serve food were crude and clearly not intended for use on an aircraft. Upon return, I was once again unable to secure a reservation, so I was forced to show up several hours early for the flight. Luckily I was able to make it, but scores of passengers—many of whom were Italian tourists—were left angry and stranded.
A few days after the meltdown, Syrian prime minister Muhammad Naji al-Otari—under intense criticism for the outages—blamed it on US sanctions. This contravened the Assad regime’s public line that US sanctions had little or no impact on the country. According to Otari, as well as the deputy prime minister for economic affairs Abdullah Dardari, US sanctions had scared away the world’s top five powerplant manufacturers, thus causing a lack of generating capacity when demand skyrocketed during the heat wave. Syria was also forced to cut electricity exports to Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon, robbing itself of revenue and influence there.
At Syria Today, the staff didn’t buy Otari’s explanation. While the prime minister’s explanation possibly explained problems in generation, the failures they had witnessed in the Free Zone a few days earlier were due to transmission and grid problems. Othaina, working with a foreign freelance journalist, came up with the best quote to summarize Syria’s feeling on the meltdown: “The main problem for Syria is a total lack of planning for the future. Sanctions may be having an effect, but bad governance is the main factor, and we’re seeing none of our officials being held accountable for their mistakes.”20
Damascus in August is like Washington, DC: it’s hot, humid, and not much happens as people enjoy their summer vacation. While the electricity blackouts continued in some parts of the country, the much-hoped-for rapprochement between the United States and Syria not only failed to materialize, but this new “Cold War” began to affect relations between everyday Syrians and Americans.
The Syrian Ministry of Higher Education had failed to grant visas and residency permits to American teachers of the Damascus Community School (DCS). Known as the “American School,” DCS had been established in the 1950s with the help of former secretary of state John Foster Dulles. Unlike American schools elsewhere in the Middle East, the Syrian government didn’t grant DCS a formal license but allowed it to operate nevertheless. Over four decades, DCS educated the children of the Syrian elite who were destined for universities in America and elsewhere.
Instead of dealing with Syria’s perceived eagerness to engage diplomatically with the United States, America’s chief diplomat in Damascus, chargé d’affaires Michael Corbin, ended up spending the month of August negotiating with the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get the teachers’ visas granted. With only a few days to go before the September start of the school year, Minister of Foreign Affairs Moallem intervened to allow the teachers entry.
I arrived early to the offices of Syria Today the morning of September 6, 2007, trying to avoid the daytime heat as much as I could. Reading through the state papers, I was researching recent parliamentary discussions on the Syrian fiscal budget, which amounted to a record $4 billion. Nicholas Blanford, a good friend and the correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Beirut, called.
“The Syrians are saying they chased Israeli aircraft out of eastern Syria last night,” he said. “What could that be?”
The wheels started spinning in my mind. I had spent time in Washington the previous spring at various think-tank events concerning relations with Syria. At a particularly good seminar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, I was surprised that many analysts were predicting a possible war between Syria and Israel that summer. While they were not specific about the source of the tension, I assumed that Israel wanted to restore the psychological deterrence it had “lost” during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War.
Eastern Syria was not normally Israel’s area of operations, however. In 2003 Israel had bombed the Palestinian camp at Ain Saheb outside Damascus, and in 2006 Israeli jets had buzzed Bashar’s palace near the Syrian port city of Latakia. There was plenty of talk in the press and in op-ed pages about the likelihood of an Israeli raid on Iran’s nuclear program, especially in light of European attempts that had repeatedly failed to convince Tehran to stop its enrichment of uranium. So after I made a few phone calls, I gave Nick what I thought was the safe answer: “There seems to be a consensus here that the Israelis were testing Syrian air defense systems.”21
Downstairs in the newsroom, I found Othaina sitting at his computer terminal, reading the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) site and watching Al Jazeera on a TV set anchored to the wall above his desk. Othaina was from Deir Ezzor, a city in eastern Syria along the Euphrates River, so news of an Israeli incursion in northeastern Syria was a national and local concern for him. He motioned for me to step outside the office with him for a smoke.
“There are reports that people heard four or five jets around Tal al-Abyad on the Turkish border,” he said. “I’m hearing the jets were Israeli, and there were American jets, too. Some people heard loud booms as well. What the hell is going on?”
Over the next few days, the story took an unexpected turn.22 On September 7, SANA reported more details on the raid, saying that the jets had “infiltrated Syrian airspace through the northern border coming from the direction of the Mediterranean and headed toward the north-east territory, breaking the sound barrier…. The Syrian Arab Republic warns the government of the Israeli enemy and reserves the right to respond according to what it seems fit.”
Information Minister Bilal told Al Jazeera that Syria was “giving serious consideration to its response … to this aggression…. This shows that Israel cannot give up aggression and treachery.” Reuters quoted a Syrian official saying that the Israeli jets “dropped bombs on an empty area while our air defenses were firing heavily at them.” The next day, Turkey asked Israel for clarification on two fuel tanks that it had found in the Turkish provinces of Hatay and Gaziantep along the Syrian frontier. Prime Minister Olmert continued to deny all knowledge of the incident, telling reporters, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”23
After a few days’ lull, a US official stated on September 11 that the incursion was a raid that had been targeting weapons destined for Hezbollah. On September 13, the Washington Post reported, quoting a former Israeli official, that the attack had targeted “a facility capable of making unconventional weapons.” On September 15, there was another, much bigger bombshell. The same newspaper, quoting American sources, reported that Israel had recently provided the United States with evidence that North Korea was cooperating with Syria on a nuclear facility of some type. The evidence included “dramatic satellite imagery” but was restricted to senior officials.
The report also said—citing a “prominent US expert on the Middle East” who had interviewed Israeli participants in the raid—that the timing of the attack was related to the arrival of a ship from North Korea with cargo “labeled as cement” in the Syrian port of Tartous. The source added that the planes targeted an “agricultural research center … on the Euphrates River, close to the Turkish border.” Israel had been monitoring the facility in the belief that Syria was “using it to extract uranium from phosphates.”24 This report seemed to dovetail with known cooperation between 1986 and 1992 as well as between 1992 and 1997 by Syria with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which provided Syria with a “micro-plant” facility to enable yellowcake to be extracted from phosphoric acid produced at a plant outside of Homs—that is, extract uranium from Syrian phosphates.25
There were more reports
the next day, this time from the British press, that the raid—code-named Operation Orchard—had involved eight planes using five-hundred-pound bombs and that an Israeli commando team had gone into Syria before the attack to set targeting lasers for the jets. Although Israel continued to deny the reports, AFP (Agence France-Presse) reported that the head of Israeli military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, had told an Israeli Knesset committee that Israel had recovered its deterrent capability lost during its problematic showing in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. The same day, John Bolton—the former US ambassador to the UN, who, in 2003, while undersecretary of state for arms control, voiced concerns to Congress over Syria’s suspected WMD programs—said, “It will be very unusual for Israel to conduct such a military operation inside Syria other [than] for a very high-value target.”26
Because Israel remained silent as well, this seemed to confirm something out of the ordinary, but in Damascus there was no way to get to the bottom of the accusations. The Syrian government completely denied the charges, mostly by ignoring them. Eastern Syria is completely controlled by Syrian military intelligence, which closely monitors all people—especially foreigners—coming and going from the Euphrates Valley, heading east to the Iraqi border. So a trip to the alleged site was impossible without permission from the Ministry of Information, which was not being forthcoming, according to Othaina.
Just as the story started to die, another report brought it back to life. Ron Ben-Yishai, an Israeli reporter with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote a story on September 26 about his trip to the area of the “Syria operation.” It included a photo of him in front of a sign for the Deir Ezzor research station of the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD). Never before had an Israeli journalist filed a story from Syria, let alone from an area directly under the control of military intelligence. What made the story stick in my mind was that Yishai was allowed to interview local people, who told him, “There were a few Israeli planes here that made supersonic booms over the city and maybe even dropped something.” What was even stranger was that Yishai interviewed a Syrian journalist, who told him that “all this talk about supposed tensions following an overflight of fighter planes is only meant to intimidate Israel” and who also said that Israel caused the booms in order to “bait Syria into shooting down the planes, and thus giving Israel reason to declare war.”27
Given that Yishai didn’t speak Arabic, he could not have arranged an interview without a “fixer” who reported to Syrian intelligence, and all Syrian journalists speaking with foreigners had to report their conversations to their intelligence minders. I suspected that the Syrian government was going out of its way to cover something up very subtly.
Strangely, however, the nuclear story didn’t have much traction in the international press. One reason seemed to be the low credibility of the Bush administration. Most reporters I knew didn’t want to get burned supporting a US administration that got Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs so wrong. Despite lots of news of the incident from Washington and Israel, foreigners visiting Damascus and Beirut didn’t even mention the story after a few weeks. The story that the Bush administration was looking for—that could be used to put international pressure on the Assad regime—was somehow, mysteriously, allowed to fade away.28
In the summer of 2007, as the US surge in Iraq and their “awakening campaign”—working with local tribes to undermine al-Qaeda in Iraq—in Anbar Province rolled out in earnest, Democratic members of Congress demanded that General David Petraeus return to Washington and report on the operation’s progress. In full uniform, Petraeus testified before Congress on September 10, 2007, stating that the “military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met,” with violence levels declining to their lowest levels since June 2006.
Petraeus’s official comments on Syria consisted of only one line: “Foreign and home-grown terrorists, insurgents, militia extremists, and criminals all push the ethno-sectarian competition toward violence. Malign actions by Syria and, especially, by Iran fuel that violence.”29 But on the ground in Iraq, a new phase of the cold war with Syria was beginning. The following day, the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, coalition forces overran a tent camp in the desert near Sinjar, an Iraqi village close to the Syrian border. There they uncovered a collection of databases belonging to an al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) cell responsible for smuggling fighters from Syria into Iraq. The databases provided details of more than seven hundred fighters crossing the border between August 2006 and August 2007 along a two-hundred-mile stretch of the Iraqi-Syrian frontier from the Euphrates River north to the border with Turkey.
The databases, which became known as the Sinjar documents, showed that 90 percent of all foreign fighters entered Iraq through Syria. And while Syrians only made up 8 percent of all fighters, they ranked third after Saudis and Libyans. The documents were quickly released to the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point for analysis. What the CTC would eventually find, together with Israel’s bombing raid at what would become known as Al Kibar, would challenge basic assumptions about the Syrian regime that would detrimentally affect its relations well into the next US administration.30
8
WEATHERING THE STORM
The loud boom stopped me in my tracks in the evening of February 12, 2008, as I entered the bedroom of my apartment in the Damascus neighborhood of Jisr al-Abyad. In Beirut, explosions were common, be they fireworks or car bombs, but in Assad’s Syria, explosions were rare, as the regime kept a tight lid on security throughout the country. When I awoke the next morning, the news said that a car bomb in Damascus had killed Imad Mughniyeh, the senior Hezbollah operative.
Mughniyeh was perhaps the Middle East’s most shadowy figure. The US government held him responsible as the mastermind behind the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut, which killed sixty-three people. Washington also blamed Mughniyeh for the bombing of the US marine barracks at Beirut’s airport later that year. Mughniyeh was also indicted by a US court for the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, in which Navy Airman Robert Stethem was murdered onboard and his body dropped from the plane onto the tarmac at Beirut’s airport. Prior to the September 11 attacks, Mughniyeh was responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any other foreign national since World War II. As a good friend said to me on the day of his death, he was Osama bin Laden before Osama bin Laden.1 It was the end of an era, and, while I didn’t know it then, it signaled the beginning of the end of my time in Damascus.
The circumstances surrounding the blast were odd indeed. He had been killed in Kfar Suseh, a recently built upmarket housing development in Damascus where the country’s first two shopping malls were being built. The area is adjacent the headquarters of a number of the country’s seven security services. On the facade of the headquarters of the Palestine Branch of Military Intelligence—Syria’s most feared intelligence agency and the one closest to the blast site—two neon signs above the building’s main entrance read ASSAD FOREVER. If ever there was a geographic center of the dark side of the Assad regime, it was here.
As rumors and reports of the blast circulated throughout Damascus the following day, comparing notes just led to more questions. A foreign marketing executive with Syria Today, who had been walking back from the Cham City Center Mall in Kfar Suseh to a nearby hotel at the time, actually saw the blast—including a ball of flame extending three or four stories into the air. There were peculiarities about how the story broke as well. The first to report the blast was an Iranian TV station, which showed grainy cellphone video of the fire. This was highly unusual, as the state theoretically controlled all satellite uplinks in Syria. For whatever reason, Iranian news agencies used their own satellite uplink, giving viewers in Iran, as well as the outside world, live coverage of the event.2
Then there were larger questions. For example, how could this happen in a country renowned for security? It wasn’t the first assassination by car bomb in Damascus, as an attempt
had been made on the life of a Palestinian official a few years before, but it missed its target and was far too small to do the job. But if it was an outside power that organized this bomb, how could they have penetrated the security surrounding one of the world’s most-wanted men, who had a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head? And perhaps most importantly, what was Mughniyeh doing in Damascus?3
Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki visited Damascus the next day for consultations with the Assad regime. The following morning, Iranian deputy foreign minister Ali Reza Sheikh Attar announced that Mottaki had agreed with the Syrians to establish a joint Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah investigation to “look into the root causes and dimensions of the assassination to identify the perpetrators of this dirty crime.”4 Syria’s state-run Syrian Arab News Agency branded Attar’s announcement as “baseless,” however, indicating a growing rift between Syria and its patron, Iran.5
Other signs over the next few months seemed to reinforce this idea. A high-profile project to replace Damascus’s aging public-bus fleet with Iranian vehicles that ran on natural gas was mysteriously canceled and awarded to a Chinese company, even though the Chinese buses burned diesel fuel, of which Syria was running increasingly short.
The Syrian government continued to drag its feet on cutting import tariffs on two high-profile Iranian-Syrian joint ventures to assemble cars in Syria—the first in the country’s history. This was particularly hard to understand, as the Syrian government owned a 35-percent stake in one of the projects. Syria’s state investment office released statistics that put direct Iranian investment in Syria at $544 million, a mere 8 percent of total Arab investment in Syria. This contradicted earlier reports coming from Iran—citing Syrian government statistics—that put Iranian investment at 66 percent of all Arab investment in the country.6
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