Last night in our flat in Beirut we watched the news and discovered that 24 hours earlier, the US military had raided a village in Syria and killed dozens of civilians. Like something out of a war movie, we saw pictures of wounded survivors recounting the tragic events, saying that US helicopters landed and 8 soldiers jumped out and started shooting every one around.
Today in the Daily Star of Lebanon I read: "Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem accused the United States on Monday of "terrorist aggression" over a deadly raid on a village in Syria near the border with Iraq. He vowed Syria would defend itself against any further attacks of the sort, and voiced hopes the next US president would learn from the "mistakes" of George W. Bush.
"We consider this criminal and terrorist aggression," Moallem said in his first comments on Sunday's attack in the village of Al-Sukkariya near the Iraqi border.
Al-Sukkariya is on the Euphrates River across the border from the Iraqi town of Al-Qaim, which, according to the US, is a stronghold of Al-Qaeda and other insurgents. US military officers have regularly said that the area in question is a transit point for foreign fighters. They claim that 20 fighters a day enter Iraq from there (a figure which was 4 times higher a year ago).
I wonder where they get such accurate figures? If the US knows that 20 fighters enter, it means they are counting them, which means they know which man is entering as a fighter and which man is entering simply as a trader or innocent citizen going about his daily affairs. I am always sceptical therefore of such figures. Interestingly enough, some military officers serving in Iraq have stated that the vast majority of insurgents seem to come from US-allied countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, rather than Syria. So what does this tell us? Perhaps the conspiracy theories which are going around the Middle East called the "October Surprise", 8 days before the US elections, are true. Bush has not been to one McCain rally since the day he endorsed him as Republican presidential nominee. Analysts in the region say that the Syria raid is an attemp to bring the ball back into the court of the Republicans and is just what McCain needs to boost support form undecided voters. However in my opinion, most of us who are not Americans and who follow these elections from outside the country, do not understand what US citizens actually vote for. Most of them are not concerned with international affairs or foreign policy and therefore take decisions based on internal US issues. From the outside, we seem to tend to forget that.
Al Jazeera reports today that the Syrians will retaliate if another such raid takes place. So what are the implications for the region and for Lebanon?
Well, this comes at a time when Syria, US and Israel were in a period of rapprochement. Moallem was in London at the time of the raid, another sign of further outreach and opening up to the West. The Iranian Foreign Ministery was also quick to publicly condemn the attack.
Worryingly, both the US government and President Assad have been silent until now. Al Jazeera just got a quote from an unnamed US official saying the target was a foreign fighter smuggling ring (to fuel Sunni insurgency against Iraqi government), whose leader (al Qaeda) had been killed and therefore the mission had been successful. This of course contradicts previous US statements about Syria having improved its border security.
Marc Sirois from the Daily Star in Lebanon has correctly mentioned that: "Unlike Iran's, Syria's options for responding to military action are few. It cannot risk a full-scale confrontation, since even a wounded and distracted America could probably knock off its leadership within weeks - if not days. Its economy is too fragile to sustain even a low-intensity conflict that drags on for any length of time, and while Damascus has also helped Hizbullah and Hamas, its leverage as a facilitator is nothing like Tehran's as a procurer".
For Lebanon, an unstable Syria is only trouble. Just recently, Syria had amassed its troops along its border with Northern Lebanon in an attempt to prevent terrorist infiltration and smuggling.
Following the US attack in Al-Sukkariya on Sunday, Syria could be pushed to beef up its military presence on all its borders including those with Lebanon in order to prevent further transborder terrorist movement. Lebanon is definitely not strong enough or mature enough to take such regional instability, especially with the upcoming elections which could witness pockets of violence between anti-Syrian March 14 (Hariri, Gemayel, Jumblatt) and pro-Syrian March 8 (Nasrallah, Aoun) supporters.
So some unstable times ahead.....
