Not surprisingly, the Syrian response to the American raid on Sunday promises violence and contradiction of their own policies:
“This administration … has proved to be irrational and they have no respect for international law or human rights. We expect a clarification, and of course Syria reserves the right to respond accordingly in the proper way,” Syria’s press attache in London, Jihad Makdissi, told the BBC.
The raid indicated the desert frontier between the two countries remains a key battleground, more than five years into the Iraq war. A U.S. military official, who confirmed the strike, said Sunday that the attack targeted elements of a robust foreign fighter logistics network and that due to Syrian inaction the U.S. was now “taking matters into our own hands.”
Makdissi condemned the attack, saying “if they (the U.S.) have any proof of any insurgency, instead of applying the law of the jungle and penetrating, unprovoked, a sovereign country, they should come to the Syrians first and share this information,” the BBC reported.
A top al-Qaida in Iraq operative killed during a U.S. raid on a Syrian compound just over the Iraq border was about to carry out an attack in Iraq, U.S. officials say.
The operative, known as Abu Ghadiyah, was the leader of the most prolific network that moves foreign fighters linked to al-Qaida into Iraq. He was the target of the Sunday afternoon raid on the compound in Sukkariyeh, Syria.
[...]
The attack was carried out to coincide with the customary late afternoon rest period. A ground attack was chosen over a missile strike to reduce the chances of civilian casualties.
Syria said troops in four helicopters attacked a building and killed eight people, including four children.
The raid capped nearly a year of debate among the CIA, U.S. special forces and commanders in Iraq about how to handle the Syrian tributary of the Iraq foreign fighter problem, according to a former intelligence official and a current U.S. military official who deals with Iraq.
So the U.S. took matters into our own hands and Syria was caught with their pants down. Now that the world knows, how will the Syrian government react?
Syrian state-run TV and witnesses said Sunday that American helicopters attacked an area close to the Iraqi border zone, killing at least nine people.
Local residents in a Syrian border town said that American forces killed seven men in a helicopter-borne commando attack inside Syrian territory. State-run TV later raised the number of dead to eight.
Doctors in the town of Al-Sukkariya, some eight kilometers from the Iraqi border, said seven corpses and four wounded had been delivered to a nearby clinic after the attack.
An official Syrian spokesman confirmed the attack.
The eyewitness accounts said that four helicopters were involved in the operation, with two of the helicopters landing in the town and eight American soldiers disembarking. The eyewitnesses said that the seven killed men were supposedly construction workers.
Ok, so I think the key here is that reports are coming from the Syrian state-run TV. I’ll keep an eye on this to see how it progresses.
UPDATE:
Holy shit. Interesting that Bush gave the green light on this one. Don’t you think it could have waited till, say, mid-next week?! Can someone smell that “international test” on the horizon?
A U.S. military official said the raid by special forces targeted the network of al-Qaida-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq. The Americans have been unable to shut the network down in the area because Syria was out of the military’s reach.
“We are taking matters into our own hands,” the official told The Associated Press in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.
Shame on us. With all the news focused entirely on the Elections and the economic crisis, we’ve completely lost sight on something very real, and potentially very dangerous, in the Middle East. The UN pact that is currently keeping U.S. and other allied troops in Iraq is set to expire, and the negotiations between the U.S. and the Iraqi government are hitting a few snags as to how we will keep troops there beyond the end of 2008.
There is a scheduled withdrawl (hear that Republicans? that dangerous magic word, withdrawl… ooooh… doesn’t that mean defeat? I mean, a scheduled withdrawl sounds an awful lot like a timetable, which we’ve been warned about so much and… ok, I’ll stop now) for U.S. troops in 2011 seems to be the goal that the Iraqis want to hold us to, but the current draft of the security pact leaves an opening to keep U.S. troops there longer if it’s deemed necessary (doesn’t exactly say who it would be deemed necessary by) and members of the Iraqi Parliament are off-put by this lack of finality in the agreement. They want a solid date of withdrawl and want us to stick to it.
Of course, our military leaders have other ideas and believe that by holding up the signing of this pact, the Iraqis are setting themselves up for dangerous times.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen has gone so far as to say that the Iraqi government and their military and police forces would not be able to keep control of the country should they continue holding up the signing of the pact. Iraqi spokemen have come out to challenge that statement and say that Iraq will not be bullied by the U.S. into allowing them to stay.
The current draft says that U.S. troops will begin moving out of Iraqi towns by June of 2009 as long as situation permits, with all forces removed by 2011. The big gripe the leaders of Iraq have is the “situation permitting” part, which they feel is too open ended, and could be used by the U.S. to stay longer than the Iraqis would like us to.
The security pact has to be signed by Dec 31st of this year, if it is not, all non-Iraqi forces will have to cease all operations within the borders, until a new agreement is made. Right now it’s playing like a game of chicken and neither side looks ready to swerve…
