In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [96]
In the summer of 2007, as the US surge in Iraq and their “awakening campaign”—working with local tribes to undermine al-Qaeda in Iraq—in Anbar Province rolled out in earnest, Democratic members of Congress demanded that General David Petraeus return to Washington and report on the operation’s progress. In full uniform, Petraeus testified before Congress on September 10, 2007, stating that the “military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met,” with violence levels declining to their lowest levels since June 2006.
Petraeus’s official comments on Syria consisted of only one line: “Foreign and home-grown terrorists, insurgents, militia extremists, and criminals all push the ethno-sectarian competition toward violence. Malign actions by Syria and, especially, by Iran fuel that violence.”29 But on the ground in Iraq, a new phase of the cold war with Syria was beginning. The following day, the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, coalition forces overran a tent camp in the desert near Sinjar, an Iraqi village close to the Syrian border. There they uncovered a collection of databases belonging to an al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) cell responsible for smuggling fighters from Syria into Iraq. The databases provided details of more than seven hundred fighters crossing the border between August 2006 and August 2007 along a two-hundred-mile stretch of the Iraqi-Syrian frontier from the Euphrates River north to the border with Turkey.
The databases, which became known as the Sinjar documents, showed that 90 percent of all foreign fighters entered Iraq through Syria. And while Syrians only made up 8 percent of all fighters, they ranked third after Saudis and Libyans. The documents were quickly released to the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point for analysis. What the CTC would eventually find, together with Israel’s bombing raid at what would become known as Al Kibar, would challenge basic assumptions about the Syrian regime that would detrimentally affect its relations well into the next US administration.30
8
WEATHERING THE STORM
The loud boom stopped me in my tracks in the evening of February 12, 2008, as I entered the bedroom of my apartment in the Damascus neighborhood of Jisr al-Abyad. In Beirut, explosions were common, be they fireworks or car bombs, but in Assad’s Syria, explosions were rare, as the regime kept a tight lid on security throughout the country. When I awoke the next morning, the news said that a car bomb in Damascus had killed Imad Mughniyeh, the senior Hezbollah operative.
Mughniyeh was perhaps the Middle East’s most shadowy figure. The US government held him responsible as the mastermind behind the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut, which killed sixty-three people. Washington also blamed Mughniyeh for the bombing of the US marine barracks at Beirut’s airport later that year. Mughniyeh was also indicted by a US court for the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, in which Navy Airman Robert Stethem was murdered onboard and his body dropped from the plane onto the tarmac at Beirut’s airport. Prior to the September 11 attacks, Mughniyeh was responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any other foreign national since World War II. As a good friend said to me on the day of his death, he was Osama bin Laden before Osama bin Laden.1 It was the end of an era, and, while I didn’t know it then, it signaled the beginning of the end of my time in Damascus.
The circumstances surrounding the blast were odd indeed. He had been killed in Kfar Suseh, a recently built upmarket housing development in Damascus where the