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   XPost: alt.conspiracy, alt.conspiracy.new-world-order, alt.america   
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   From: o@o.org   
      
   Robert Fisk: Seen through a Syrian lens, 'unknown Americans' are provoking   
   civil war in Iraq   
   Published: 28 April 2006   
   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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)