In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [97]
As rumors and reports of the blast circulated throughout Damascus the following day, comparing notes just led to more questions. A foreign marketing executive with Syria Today, who had been walking back from the Cham City Center Mall in Kfar Suseh to a nearby hotel at the time, actually saw the blast—including a ball of flame extending three or four stories into the air. There were peculiarities about how the story broke as well. The first to report the blast was an Iranian TV station, which showed grainy cellphone video of the fire. This was highly unusual, as the state theoretically controlled all satellite uplinks in Syria. For whatever reason, Iranian news agencies used their own satellite uplink, giving viewers in Iran, as well as the outside world, live coverage of the event.2
Then there were larger questions. For example, how could this happen in a country renowned for security? It wasn’t the first assassination by car bomb in Damascus, as an attempt had been made on the life of a Palestinian official a few years before, but it missed its target and was far too small to do the job. But if it was an outside power that organized this bomb, how could they have penetrated the security surrounding one of the world’s most-wanted men, who had a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on his head? And perhaps most importantly, what was Mughniyeh doing in Damascus?3
Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki visited Damascus the next day for consultations with the Assad regime. The following morning, Iranian deputy foreign minister Ali Reza Sheikh Attar announced that Mottaki had agreed with the Syrians to establish a joint Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah investigation to “look into the root causes and dimensions of the assassination to identify the perpetrators of this dirty crime.”4 Syria’s state-run Syrian Arab News Agency branded Attar’s announcement as “baseless,” however, indicating a growing rift between Syria and its patron, Iran.5
Other signs over the next few months seemed to reinforce this idea. A high-profile project to replace Damascus’s aging public-bus fleet with Iranian vehicles that ran on natural gas was mysteriously canceled and awarded to a Chinese company, even though the Chinese buses burned diesel fuel, of which Syria was running increasingly short.
The Syrian government continued to drag its feet on cutting import tariffs on two high-profile Iranian-Syrian joint ventures to assemble cars in Syria—the first in the country’s history. This was particularly hard to understand, as the Syrian government owned a 35-percent stake in one of the projects. Syria’s state investment office released statistics that put direct Iranian investment in Syria at $544 million, a mere 8 percent of total Arab investment in Syria. This contradicted earlier reports coming from Iran—citing Syrian government statistics—that put Iranian investment at 66 percent of all Arab investment in the country.6
In Washington, policy makers struggled to make sense of Syria’s moves, especially as tensions continued to rise in Lebanon. The renewed term of the country’s president, Émile Lahoud, had expired the previous November, leaving Lebanon in a constitutional vacuum. French president Nicolas Sarkozy launched a diplomatic initiative with Damascus to gain its support for the election of a successor. It bore early fruit: Lebanese parties and Damascus agreed on the commander of the Lebanese Army, General Michel Suleiman, to succeed Lahoud.
However, as the initiative unfolded, Hezbollah, with the support of Damascus, continued to insist on a “guaranteed third” of the deputies in the Lebanese