In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [105]
The following morning, however, US sources quietly confirmed the death of someone far more complex and lethal: Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih, an Iraqi national sanctioned by the US Treasury Department back in February for “facilitating and controlling the flow of money, weapons, terrorists, and other resources through Syria to al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).” A US military official said the raid demonstrated that US forces were “taking matters into [their] own hands” to shut down the networks of al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters moving between Syria and Iraq and using the former as a safe haven.3 In the coming days, reports emerged that the attack was one of a dozen of previously undisclosed US special-forces raids on al-Qaeda militants in Syria and Pakistan.4 The details of the raid differed from the line that Syrian members of the US-Syria Working Group had sold in Washington the previous summer. If Syria’s primary interest now focused on Iraq—over fears of sectarian strife in that country spilling into Syria—what were al-Qaeda fighters still doing camped out on its territory?
Damascus responded by closing the Damascus Community School—the American academy attended by Damascus’s elite that had remained formally unlicensed since its establishment in 1957 as part of a general effort to keep Syria out of the Soviet camp in the Cold War.5 The state also closed the American Cultural Center, which was housed in a building adjacent to the US embassy in Damascus and which organized community outreach and hosted the weekly and very popular “American movie night.” The center was preparing for a US election party, scheduled for the early hours of November 5 as the polls closed in the United States. The regime also closed the American Language Center (ALC), which is associated with the US embassy.
The center’s closure was also the preemptive end of my relationship with Syria. I had planned to travel from Beirut to Damascus to attend the event and write about people’s reactions—a natural scene to conclude this story and set the stage for what I thought would be a reconciliation between Damascus and Washington. Following the attack, however, the regime clamped down on visas for Americans, and I stayed in Beirut. I never had a chance to say good-bye to my friends in Damascus or my colleagues at Syria Today.
A little over a week later, on November 4, the American people elected Barack Hussein Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States. His early campaign promises to engage unconditionally with Iran and Syria led many close to the Syrian regime to believe that the new president would quickly come knocking on the doors of Damascus. Two days later, Syria’s state-run newspaper Al-Thawra ran an article saying that Syria “extends its hand” to president-elect Barack Obama. Sami Moubayed—the editor in chief of Forward, the English-language monthly magazine, and a member of the US-Syria Working Group—also penned the piece “Abu Hussein’s Invitation to Damascus.” He wrote that Damascus would “use its weight in the region to moderate the behavior of non-state players like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, and find solutions for the US standoff with Iran over its nuclear program.” In return, Moubayed listed ten things that Obama had to do to be “greeted with open arms in Damascus, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.” While Moubayed later insisted that his article reflected only his own views, journalists and analysts widely regarded them as reflecting those of the Syrian regime.6 The requirements included the following:
The appointment of a US ambassador to Syria. This would be accompanied by greater room to maneuver for Syria’s ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha,