حزب الإصلاح السوري

Syria: Jihad without Borders

Foreign fighters have been traveling to Iraq via Damascus

Washington DC, October 31, 2004 /Tom Masland – Newsweek/ - Ali's sense of outrage moved him to sign up. The thought of U.S. troops around the holy shrines of Karbala and Najaf "made me sick," says the 25-year-old Lebanese Shiite. So a few months ago he joined a group of 50 or so men from the town of Baalbek, in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, who had decided to fight in the Iraqi resistance. They traveled to the battlefield by way of Damascus.

Ali rode in the back of a pickup from the Syrian capital across the Iraqi border with five other enlistees, all of them carrying false Iraqi IDs issued to them in Syria. Later the group hid in the secret compartment of a meat truck, for the journey's final leg down the highway to Karbala. After 10 days' training with 200 other newcomers, Ali was issued an AK-47, a black headband and a green uniform. He spent the next month serving against the Americans as a member of the Mahdi Army, headed by the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Who sent the Lebanese contingent to Iraq? Ali says it's no mystery: "Baath Party people."

Saddam Hussein's Baath Party was supposedly abolished after the fall of Baghdad. But the Pan-Arabist political group has another branch that's anything but defunct: the ruling party of Syria. Hawks in the Bush administration used to dream aloud of pushing on from Baghdad to Damascus. Now, according to some administration officials, the Syrians may be doing their bit to make sure the Americans remain bogged down in Iraq. "The Americans captured the old leadership, like Saddam Hussein," says Assem Kanso, a member of the Syrian Baathists' National Command. "But what about the others? Many of them like to go to Syria." You might call it their home away from home.

The Syrian government, which denies aiding the insurgency, purports to have clamped down on its Iraqi border. But smugglers don't seem intimidated. In Lebanon's biggest Palestinian-refugee camp, Ein Hilweh, a veteran Palestinian fighter, displays 15 falsified Iraqi passports. He says he has visited Iraq three times since the war began, escorting new recruits for the insurgency. They traveled from Damascus to Baghdad via commercial bus. Each passport goes for $1,000, he says. Who pays, and who organizes the trips? "Don't ask," he says. "It's better for you and it's better for me."

Two months ago, after the shooting stopped in Najaf, many of the Lebanese fighters volunteered for service against the Americans in Fallujah. As insurgents, they were earning $800 a month—three times an Iraqi policeman's salary. Instead, Ali went home to the Bekaa Valley. "I got scared," he says. "Some local people were friendly, and some were not. It was like you had one enemy in front of you and one behind you." He has one regret, he says, about his time in Iraq: "I didn't have the good fortune to shoot any Americans." Tragically, some of Ali's friends may have better luck.

Reform Party of Syria