In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [14]
The dirty Boeing 727 looked like something out of an early 1970s airport-disaster film—it provided a window into the era before US sanctions restricted sales of American aircraft to Syria. The décor inside the plane was timeworn, and the stuffing in the seat cushions was so compacted in the center that it felt like sitting on a toilet seat. As the plane took off and the weight of my body was thrust backwards, the back of my seat gave way and slammed into the knees of the passenger behind me. All over the plane it was the same story: the seats’ decades-old gearing was stripped bare from overuse.
Ideas started to race through my head. If the suspected attackers were part of a Sunni radical group led by a Saudi, and if they had links to similar terrorist groups who had been attacking Western tourists in Egypt, I began to wonder if the United States was betting on the wrong people in the Arab world. After all, didn’t the Syrian regime battle with the same groups in the 1980s?
Upon arrival in Damascus, almost everyone I spoke with asked me about my family. The driver from the airport asked about my “loved ones.” Checking in at the Cham Palace Hotel, a five-star hotel in Syria where I had basically lived for five months, the receptionist said she hoped “everyone was fine” as she handed me back my passport. When I called Leila, she invited me to come over to her apartment and have dinner with her parents. They were worried: Leila’s brother, Tarek, had just graduated from Tufts dental school and was now practicing in Boston. While they knew by now that he was safe, they didn’t know how it would affect the status of his green card in the United States. “Do you think they will kick him out?” Leila’s mom asked me. I didn’t know what to say.
The following morning, I met up with a few OBG analysts already in the country carrying out research. I told them about the response of Egyptians to the attacks and how much more sympathetic Syrians had seemed. Most agreed with me. The only sympathy for the attackers they had heard had been the previous morning in the SEBC’s kitchen. As the Syrian staff ate a midmorning breakfast and discussed the attacks, one OBG analyst said that he had heard an SEBC employee—who was rumored to be the former girlfriend of Bashar al-Assad before he married his wife, Asma—say the attacks “made her proud to be an Arab.” According to the analyst, the other SEBC employees hurriedly averted their eyes before changing the subject.
Of everyone I met, Rola seemed the most sympathetic. She sat me down in her office and asked me if my family and friends were safe.
“It’s just unbelievable,” she said, and she launched into a diatribe against “Sunni fundamentalists” and in favor of “our war” against the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s. “We have a common cause now,” she said. “Maybe we always did, but some other factors got in the way.”
This message was almost exactly the one that the Syrian government gave to Washington. The Syrian ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, contacted US security agencies immediately and offered Syria’s help, saying, “We have been fighting against al-Qaeda and other extremist fundamentalist groups for the past thirty years, and we have a wealth of information.”10 Washington accepted the offer. In the year following the September 11 attacks, Damascus provided to American security forces information on Mohammed Haydar Zammar, later identified as a planner in the September 11 attacks, who had been taken into Syrian custody after he was extradited from Morocco. Damascus also gave