Deaths along frontier are part of escalating crisis between Bush, Assad

Globe and Mail
October 29, 2005
By Mark MacKinnon

From Areed Mohammed Aoussa's sandbagged machine-gun post at the Syrian border with Iraq, he can hear and see the war next door.

There's the thin rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire from the troubled Iraqi city of al-Qaim, visible on the horizon and a known hotbed of insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation. Those sounds are interspersed with the louder whump-whump of heavier weapons fire. An occasional plume of smoke can be seen rising amid the date palm trees of the otherwise idyllic Euphrates River valley.

These days, however, it's not just the sounds of war that drift across the 700-kilometre-long Iraqi-Syrian border. More and more often, the fighting comes right up to, and even over, the frontier.

In May, fire from a U.S. helicopter that was pursuing suspected insurgents fleeing into Syria fired across the line and killed Abdullah al-Hassaki, one of Mr. Aoussa's comrades at the Baghouz border post in the extreme southeast of the country, the Syrians assert. He was one of at least four Syrians, two soldiers and two civilians, killed by U.S. fire this year, they say. Six others were wounded, according to the Syrian security services, and those figures include just the southernmost third of the Iraq-Syria border.

"They shoot at us here every day, sometimes they're mistakes, sometimes they're not," Syrian security officer Ibrahim Brahim said as he stood on the roof of the concrete police station that is one of 557 such manned positions along the border. "The Americans want to show their power, to show us they're here. If we poke our heads up, they shoot."

U.S. officials have acknowledged that several Syrians have been killed by U.S. fire this summer, but said their forces have not crossed the border. Special-forces operations into Syria targeting suspected Iraqi insurgent bases are reportedly being considered, however.

The border incidents are part of a mounting and increasingly dangerous crisis between Washington and Damascus.

For Syria, the fighting heightens worries that the U.S. can and might resort to any means to force the country to bend to the will of the White House.

U.S. President George W. Bush yesterday called Syria, along with Iran, an "outlaw regime." His government has blamed it for meddling in Lebanon, funding suicide bombers striking at Israel and tacitly supporting the insurgency in Iraq by allowing arms and fighters to pass through this border.

On Monday, the United Nations Security Council will meet to consider a resolution jointly proposed by the U.S. and France that would threaten Syria with sanctions if it doesn't co-operate with an investigation that is examining whether the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri was planned in Damascus.

For the United States, there are worries that Syria could become to the Iraq war what Cambodia was to Vietnam -- a rear base and supply line for anti-U.S. forces that eventually devolves into a second combat theatre.

This is an area with strong sympathy for the insurgents and ties to the old Baathist regime in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, the country's deposed dictator, even hid in Abu Kamal briefly while on the lam before his Baath Party seized power in Iraq in 1968.

Some say the fighting is worse than either side publicly acknowledges. One resident of the nearby town of Abu Kamal, who didn't want his name used because of concerns about possible repercussions from the Syrian security forces, said Americans earlier this year bombed a nearby house, killing a six-year-old boy. "They killed five or six people this month, every month," he said. "But the media doesn't report it. I don't understand."

Though the Syrians delivered at least one complaint to the U.S. embassy in Damascus about the cross-border incidents, it has otherwise tried to keep a lid on the story, fearing news that U.S. troops had killed Syrian soldiers would provoke public outrage and demands for retribution that could lead to even worse relations with Washington.

"The government has kept this a secret because they don't want to be embarrassed," said Joshua Landis, an Oklahoma University professor currently living in Damascus as a Fulbright Scholar. "It's the ultimate sign of their weakness, because they can do nothing about this."

Since it invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, the United States has accused Syria of aiding the insurgency there by letting weapons and fighters flow across its borders into Iraq, and Mr. Bush has consistently refused to rule out military action against the regime of Bashar Assad.

One of the repeated complaints has been that Damascus has not done enough to secure the border. The Syrian government took foreign journalists to the line yesterday to show off what it has done: reinforce a sand wall running along most of the frontier and build more border posts like Baghouz. Major-General Amin Suleyman, the liaison officer for the southern section of the Iraq-Syria border said it's now almost impossible for insurgents to cross by day.

He admitted the Syrians struggle to control their border after dark because they lack night-vision goggles -- equipment that was promised to them by Britain but never delivered. But the bigger problem, he said, is the complete lack of any regular security presence, U.S. or Iraqi, on the other side of the sand wall.

"Syria did all that was required of it, and all that it was able to do," Major-Gen. Suleyman said. "But we've seen nothing from the other side."

Foreign diplomats based in Damascus admit Syria has stepped up its efforts, and say that the once-rapid flow of foreign fighters crossing from Syria into Iraq in the early days of the war has slowed to a trickle, estimated to be 35 a month.

© Copyright 2005 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.

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