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border town of Abu Kamal, the government seemed to be trying to undermine US arguments that foreign fighters were flowing across the frontier. At Abu Kamal, workers with heavy machinery were digging a three-foot-wide ditch along the Syrian-Iraqi frontier and piling the dirt in a four-foot-high mound beside it. Border guards dressed in Syrian uniforms, with red and white Bedouin headdresses and skin as rough as leather, followed us everywhere we went. They told us that the berm was designed to flip over fast-moving smugglers’ vehicles moving across the border. Standing beside the ditch and berm, it was apparent that a couple of men with shovels could fill in the ditch and breech the wall in thirty minutes or less—it was hardly an effective barrier to those wishing to wage jihad against US forces.

American forces had closed the Abu Kamal border crossing in the days leading up to our arrival. As our bus pulled up to the gate, the driver weaved the bus between 1970s- and 1980s-era GMC vans with raised rear axles, which made them look like hot rods or cars that clowns might jump out of at the circus. One of the Syrian journalists on the bus told us that the vans were used for smuggling fuel from Iraq. Each was equipped with heavy-duty truck suspensions designed to carry much weightier loads. When the vans’ extra fuel tanks were full, the rear end lowered, making it look like a van you might see driving around a normal US suburb.

At the guard station adjacent to the gate, Syrian soldiers in drab olive uniforms hid behind cement barriers, seemingly afraid of gunfire from the American side. As we approached the gate and camera operators from Syrian TV began filming, a patrol of US soldiers ran up a watchtower. Two peered through binoculars at us, while another seemed to be speaking incessantly into a radio. Syrian soldiers behind us warned us to take cover, saying, “Sometimes they shoot.”

Inside the border post, the commander told us that American forces were shooting indiscriminately across the border, seemingly at anything that moved. A few days before, he told us, a young boy was shot and killed while playing on the rooftop of his house. In the commander’s office, he pointed to a bullet hole in the window behind his desk. “This happened just yesterday. It nearly hit my head.”

PART II

4

PRESSURE YIELDS RESULTS

The explosion was fifty miles away in Beirut, but the political earthquake it caused could be felt at my desk in Damascus. Television news broadcasts of smoke billowing from a massive blackened crater in the Beirut neighborhood of Ain el-Mreisseh shook me. I had slept that night at my apartment in Beirut, where I spent most weekends. On my way out of town, I asked my driver to stop off at HSBC in Ain el-Mreisseh to use the ATM. Now onscreen I saw that the bank’s glass facade was shattered, and rescue workers were pulling bodies out of the rubble nearby. An hour later, the bad news was official: Rafik Hariri and six others had been killed in the blast. I suddenly remembered my dream of being bombed outside Hariri’s mansion. I returned to Beirut immediately.

A few days after civil defense forces put out the blaze and recovered all the remains, the “battle of the protests,” which would eventually lead to Syria’s decision to withdraw from Lebanon, began in earnest. At the first rally on February 18, 2005, several hundred thousand demonstrators poured into Ain el-Mreisseh to survey the damage for themselves. The demonstrators were organized according to sects, with Druze carrying Druze militia flags and Christians carrying Christian banners. But they all had one message: Syria, get out of Lebanon.

For the next ten days, the pro-Syrian Lebanese prime minister, Omar Karami, resisted widespread calls to resign. So the anti-Syrian opposition called for another rally for February 28, parliament’s first day back into session following the assassination. Since the Interior Ministry had refused to give permission for the rally, the Lebanese Army cordoned off Beirut’s central Martyrs’ Square, which had been destroyed