Last updated: 11:36 am
September 30, 2008
Posted: 4:03 am
September 30, 2008
IS Syria preparing to seize the opportunity provided by the global financial crisis and the US presidential campaign to invade Lebanon?
For the last week or so, Syria has been moving heavily armed elite military units to the Lebanese border - with up to 25,000 massed there by early last week. Backed by tanks, armored vehicles and attack helicopters, the units were on "maximum war footing," eyewitnesses say.
Damascus says the build-up is a response to smuggling rings that run the black market in the Syrian capital and major provincial centers. My Lebanese contacts call that explanation "laughable" - noting that Syrian elite itself runs the black market in both countries through the security services.
The buildup covers only the northern portion of the Syria-Lebanon border, leaving the eastern portions in the hands of the Iran-financed (and thus Syria-allied) Hezbollah militia.
And Lebanese analysts say the type of force Syria is massing is better suited for a classical invasion than for chasing small and scattered groups of bandits along the border.
More ominously, the official Syrian media claim that the force could be used to "hunt down and eliminate fundamentalist terrorists linked to al Qaeda." This refers to a group called Fatah al-Islam (Conquest of Islam), which fought the Lebanese army in the northern city of Tripoli, close to the Syrian border, for months before being flushed out. Since then, the group has gone underground; it is suspected in a number of assassinations and suicide attacks.
In his meetings with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan last month, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad promised, without going into details, that he'd "play a more active part" in the War on Terror. The Lebanese see Syria's claimed intent to fight al Qaeda-linked terrorists as a ploy to "hoodwink the Americans."
"They want to present their invasion as part of the global War on Terror led by the United States," says a Lebanese analyst.
Indeed, evidence suggests that Syria assisted the emergence of Fatah al-Islam in the Tripoli area. Lebanon borders only two other nations, Israel and Syria. Since it's unlikely that Fatah al-Islam killers entered Lebanon from Israel, the assumption that they came through Syria can't be dismissed easily.
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