by Jay Solomon
The Assads’ progressive, Western-friendly veneer, however, was belied by the presence in Damascus of key players in the Axis of Resistance. Senior members of the Qods Force and Hezbollah, who coordinated the supply of arms into Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, kept military offices in the city. The political leaderships of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both designated as terrorist organizations by the United States and the European Union, were based in nondescript homes in the quiet backstreets of Damascus. North Korean engineers and arms traders were active in the Syrian capital, intimately involved in developing the Assad regime’s ballistic missile and chemical weapons programs. The North Koreans were also secretly building a nuclear reactor in the eastern deserts of Deir Ezzour province, behind the backs of the Western powers. The plant was a virtual carbon copy of the heavy water plant North Korea built in the city of Yongbyon to secretly produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Bashar al-Assad’s leadership was characterized by his desire to court and bridge two distinctly different worlds. An ophthalmology student in London during the 1990s, Bashar took power at just thirty-four and fueled hopes of modernizing and opening up Syria. During the short-lived Damascus Spring of 2001, Bashar took steps to free up Syria’s media and political parties, and later he allowed foreign companies to take ownership stakes in local banks and finance firms. He also flirted with pursuing a peace agreement with Israeli leaders, which would have given control of the Golan Heights back to Syria and lifted U.S. economic sanctions on the regime. In return, theoretically, Bashar would end Syria’s support for Hezbollah and other militias fighting Israel and sever Damascus’s ties to Iran. Israeli officials, however, were skeptical he would ever follow through.
Despite these overtures, Bashar soon proved to be as brutal as his father, and even more erratic. Many Arab leaders were stunned to see the new Syrian leader proudly photographed alongside Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, and Hamas’s political boss, Khaled Meshaal. Hafez al-Assad, they said, had viewed such militia commanders and politicians as below his status and purposely kept them at arm’s length. Bashar also deepened Syria’s relationship with Iran beyond what his father had desired. The presence of the Revolutionary Guard and its Qods Force grew much more pronounced in Damascus. On posters, Bashar appeared next to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, while his father had sought to balance his relationship with Iran and Syria’s Arab neighbors, maintaining his unique regional influence. The younger Assad, in contrast, appeared reliant on the members of the Resistance Axis for his security and regional influence.
The older Assad had had a clear understanding of Israel’s red lines and had never sought to recklessly cross them. He was at times admired, ironically, by the international community for sticking to the commitments his government made, even as he ran one of the world’s most repressive states. But Bashar, unsure of his political footing, pursued a schizophrenic policy of growing more dependent on Iran for his security needs while concurrently trying to appear as a reformer to attract Western support. He wanted it both ways.
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A MAJOR THREAT TO Bashar al-Assad’s nascent leadership and regional power, as well as Iran’s, emerged in the mid-2000s in neighboring Lebanon under the leadership of Rafik al-Hariri, a billionaire businessman and on-and-off prime minister. A close ally of both Saudi Arabia and France, Hariri was Beirut’s richest man, having earned billions of dollars from construction contracts in Saudi Arabia, building hotels and office towers for the royal family. His success made him a force across the Arab world. Hariri returned to Lebanon in the early 1980s, entered politics, and became the leader of the Sunni community, overseeing the rebuilding of central Beirut following the end of Lebanon’s disastrous fifteen-year civil war. By 2004, the politician had redirected his energies from business to an aggressive challenge of Syria’s political and military domination of Lebanon, which had grown suffocating to most Lebanese. Beirut’s thriving financial sector fed the Syrian economy and made Assad uncomfortably dependent on Hariri. The mustached politician grew to become a symbol of Lebanon’s cultural and economic rebirth, as well as its independence.
The Assad family, like virtually all of Syria’s elite, never accepted Lebanon as an independent country, thinking of it as an integral part of a “Greater Syria” that was disbanded following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Damascus believed its writ extended to precolonial borders that included Lebanon and parts of Turkey and Israel. The Assads saw pro-Western governments in Beirut, Baghdad, and Jerusalem as existential threats to their country, while Hariri saw the Europeans and the United States as his natural allies. The two men were on a collision course.
Hariri’s plan was to regain power in Beirut by winning legislative elections scheduled for summer 2005 and pushing initiatives to weaken Syria’s hold on Lebanon. This included an international agreement, known as the Taif Accords, which called for the withdrawal of thousands of Syrian troops stationed across Lebanon as well as Damascus’s omnipresent intelligence service. To do this, he needed to block the reelection of Lebanon’s pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, to another three-year term. Assad saw Lahoud as Syria’s de facto viceroy in Beirut; his removal would undermine Syria’s entire power structure in Lebanon.
Hariri also aggressively worked to weaken Assad by plotting with his close friend Jacques Chirac, the French president, and with the Bush administration in 2004. This included passing UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which required Syria to withdraw its remaining seven thousand troops from Lebanon. Hariri sought to use the UN resolution to force Hezbollah to disarm and disband its militia, which was deployed across Lebanon and backed by Syrian and Iranian intelligence. Such moves, many American and European officials believed, would cripple Assad’s ability to maintain control of Lebanon—and possibly Syria—just four years after replacing his late father. U.S. officials didn’t believe Bashar al-Assad had consolidated power among the Syrian military and the ruling Baath Party and thought he could be vulnerable to a coup d’état if he lost Lebanon. The Bush administration was still in regime-change mode.
The White House also believed Syria’s loss of Lebanon could cripple Iran’s regional ambitions. Tehran used Lebanon as its military front against Israel and Syria and as a land bridge to move weapons to Hezbollah. Iranians viewed Syria and Lebanon as providing the Revolutionary Guard with the “strategic depth” required to pursue its campaign against Israel and the West. The pipeline of Iranian arms and influence into the Levant could be shut down if Hariri succeeded with his plan.
President Assad responded brutally to the political moves against him in Lebanon. From his presidential palace in the hills above Damascus in the summer of 2004, he told Hariri he would “break Lebanon over Hariri’s” head if he continued to fight the reappointment of President Lahoud. In the months that followed, a string of car bombings targeted anti-Syrian politicians, such as the parliamentarian Marwan Hamadeh and a number of prominent journalists. No one doubted who was responsible.
Two months later, a team of Hezbollah operatives initiated a conspiracy to plot the assassination of Hariri and his political allies, according to Lebanese and UN investigators. It was an attack that could fundamentally alter the politics of the Mideast, not unlike the 1995 murder of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. U.S. officials believed the operation was closely coordinated with both Iran and Syria.
The leader of the Hezbollah team was well known to U.S. intelligence agencies. Mustafa Badreddine had been active in terrorist plots going back to the early 1980s and was the brother-in-law of one of the United States’ most wanted men, Imad Mugniyah. The FBI had placed a $5 million bounty on Mugniyah for his alleged role in overseeing the Marine Corps bombing twenty years earlier, among other terrorist acts.
Badreddine had actually been captured in Kuwait in 1984 while overseeing yet another plot to bomb the U.S. and French embassies there. He was held for nearly a decade in a Kuwaiti prison before Saddam Huss
ein’s forces unwittingly freed him in 1991 as they emptied the country’s prisons at the start of the Gulf War. The Hezbollah operative quickly returned to Beirut to team up with Mugniyah and strengthen the organization’s power in Lebanon.
Both men had trained in military camps established by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and were devout followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran’s revolution. Under their leadership, Hezbollah became a virtual unit of the Revolutionary Guard. Iranians named a street after Imad Mugniyah to honor his role in fighting Israel and its backers.
In December 2004, Badreddine and three other Hezbollah men began regular surveillance of Hariri as he moved between his home, Lebanon’s parliament, and the offices of his political allies. Four logistical support teams were established to back up the assassins.
In January 2005, Badreddine’s team purchased a Mitsubishi minivan from a showroom in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. They loaded it with a massive bomb and recruited a local Sunni youth and militant to publicly claim credit for the forthcoming attack and to falsely link it to al Qaeda sympathizers. Badreddine’s team trained and instructed a suicide bomber to position the Mitsubishi at a key intersection on the corniche road in West Beirut. At close to 1:00 p.m. on February 14, the unidentified bomber detonated the explosives-laden Mitsubishi just as Hariri’s six-car convoy passed the St. George Hotel, a Beirut landmark that had stood since the days of French colonial rule. The blast left a twenty-foot crater in the road and was estimated by Lebanese police to have contained roughly 2,200 pounds of TNT. Twenty people, in addition to Hariri, were killed instantly, and nearly three hundred were injured.
Hariri’s assassination led to massive street protests across Lebanon that fomented the so-called Cedar Revolution (referring to the cedar tree on the country’s national flag). Bashar al-Assad, under intense international scrutiny for his suspected role in the bombing, pulled his remaining soldiers out of Lebanon, and Rafik al-Hariri’s son Saad was elected prime minister in Beirut. The UN followed by establishing a special court to investigate the attack, which ultimately led to the indictments of Mustafa Badreddine and other Hezbollah leaders. Imad Mugniyah was assassinated in 2008 outside Syrian intelligence offices in Damascus in a car bombing for which no one claimed responsibility. Badreddine was killed in Syria in 2016.
But Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian backers took the tumult as only a temporary loss. Hezbollah’s monthlong war with Israel in the summer of 2006 solidified the militia and political party as the kingmaker in Lebanon. And Iran and Syria quickly resupplied Hezbollah with tens of thousands of rockets after the conflict with the Israelis ended. The international community, while convinced of Assad’s role in the Hariri murder, never moved to indict him or his top generals.
The conflict between the United States, Iran, and their respective allies was spreading like wildfire as the Middle East quaked in the years following Saddam Hussein’s removal. The Bush administration sought to remake the region into a pro-Western bulwark in response to the extremist threat. But Tehran, Damascus, and their Axis of Resistance weren’t lying down, as evidenced in Lebanon. They were going to reshape the region on their own terms. As the battle in Iraq continued, the flow of jihadists and foreign fighters intensified, with the majority coming through Syria—under the close watch of the Assad regime.
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IN LATE 2007, THE Pentagon captured a massive cache of al Qaeda’s logistical files in the Iraqi city of Sinjar, which sits on the country’s northern border with Syria. Two al Qaeda affiliate groups operating inside Iraq, called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Mujahidin Shura Council, compiled the documents. They catalogued the travels of nearly seven hundred foreign nationals who had entered Iraq to fight coalition officials between August 2006 and August 2007. Most of the men, who ranged in age from seventeen to fifty, were logged as “martyrs”—suicide bombers—in al Qaeda’s files. Only a small number were categorized as regular militia fighters or men performing logistical or clerical jobs for the insurgency.
They came to fight from across the Arab world. The largest contingent—more than 40 percent—hailed from Saudi Arabia. But another 20 percent came from Libya, and others were recruited from Morocco, Yemen, Syria, and Algeria. The arrival of North Africans into Iraq particularly worried Western intelligence agencies because of their original proximity to Western Europe. There was a concern these fighters would become more radicalized in Iraq and then take their fight to France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, a fear that became all too prophetic.
The journeys of these fighters into Iraq were remarkably uniform. A seventeen-year-old Libyan national named Muhammad Anwar Rafiia’a Yahiya was among those who made the trip to Iraq through Syria to conduct a suicide bombing mission, according to a file compiled by the Islamic State of Iraq in April 2007. The high school student came from the Libyan coastal city of Dernah, which was one of the largest recruitment centers for foreign fighters joining the Iraq jihad. The Libyan traveled to Cairo and then flew to Damascus, where he was assigned to an al Qaeda coordinator named Abu Abbas. He left home with just 700 Libyan dinars—about $508—but then deposited his funds with one of his al Qaeda handlers before heading over the border to Iraq to fight.
Almost all of the fighters flew into Damascus International Airport, where they were met by al Qaeda recruiters or coordinators, normally referred to by Arabic honorifics, such as Abu Umar or Abu Abbas, rather than formal names. The jihadists then made their way by bus to Iraq, mainly through the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzour. Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups preferred this route because the Arab tribes in the province had relatives on the other side of the Syrian-Iraqi border and largely sympathized with the campaign against the United States, easing the movement of the fighters. Once at the border, the fighters were forced to surrender their passports and cellphones to the al Qaeda smugglers and travel with only the equivalent of a few hundred dollars to the front.
Pentagon and counterterrorism experts who monitored the Assad regime’s interactions with al Qaeda and its foreign fighters realized it was a tense and suspicious relationship at best. Unquestionably, Syrian intelligence officials sought to penetrate these groups and utilize them to bleed American forces inside Iraq. But Damascus also wanted to track the fighters and make sure they didn’t stay inside Syria, where they could potentially turn against the Assad regime itself. Syrian officials knew there was latent support for Sunni fundamentalists inside their country.
“Syria has an interest in keeping the U.S.-backed regime in Iraq off balance, but it must also fear a backlash from jihadi groups, many of which despise Alawite ‘apostasy’ as much or more than the United States,” West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center wrote in a detailed 2007 report on the Sinjar documents. “For Syria, supporting jihadi groups is at best a double-edged sword.”
Al Qaeda leaders themselves detailed their conflicted attitudes toward the Syrian regime in a multitude of writings posted on jihadi websites after 9/11. Many described their accounts of the war in Iraq and their travels through Syria to the front, where they established training camps along the Syria-Iraq border. The onetime commander of al Qaeda’s overall operations in Iraq, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was among those based in this border region, according to these accounts. Zarqawi and other al Qaeda leaders described their wariness about cooperating with Syrian intelligence officials, questioning their true commitment to the Islamist cause.
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SYRIA’S ROLE IN PROMOTING the insurgency fueled conflicting policy responses from the Bush administration. A number of Middle East strategists in Washington continued to hold out hope that Damascus could emerge as an ally against al Qaeda and be weaned off its alliance with Iran. They cited Hafez al-Assad’s decision to join the U.S.-led international coalition that drove Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait in 1991, heralded by the George H. W. Bush administration as a landmark development that strengthened the Arab-Israeli peace process that had begun that same year.
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And at times Syria’s intelligence services even cooperated with the United States. In the year following the September 11 attacks, Damascus had provided American security forces with information on Mohammed Haydar Zammar, later identified as a key planner of the al Qaeda strikes on New York and Washington who had been taken into Syrian custody after he was extradited from Morocco. Damascus also gave information to U.S. authorities on an al Qaeda plot to bomb an American naval unit in Bahrain, which proved so useful that a senior administration official told a congressional panel in 2002 that “the cooperation the Syrians provided in their own interest saved American lives.” What Washington gave Damascus in return was never clear, but when Syria was nominated that year for a rotating seat on the UN Security Council, the Bush administration did nothing to block it.
In February 2005, Damascus also secretly handed over Saddam’s half brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, to Iraqi security forces. He had been playing a major role in financing the insurgency from his safe haven inside Syria, according to U.S. officials. The Bush administration said at the time that his capture provided a windfall of intelligence on the role Iraqi Baathists and Saddam’s confidants were playing in destabilizing Iraq. They hoped they could build on Damascus’s help to further improve U.S.-Syrian relations.
The improving relations early in the Iraq War were short-lived, however. Just two months later, in April 2005, Syrian officials announced they were cutting off all military and intelligence cooperation with Washington. Damascus’s ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha, privately fumed that the Bush administration had reneged on a commitment to Syria not to make public the Assad government’s role in Tikriti’s capture. The diplomat said this disclosure risked fueling instability inside his country because of the vast domestic opposition to the occupation of Iraq. American officials, however, believed Damascus’s decision was mainly driven by Syria’s anger over the White House’s decision to pull its ambassador to Damascus, Margaret Scobey, in protest over the assassination of Rafik al-Hariri in Beirut.
