Syria and the Insurgency

Syria is knee-deep in the shiznick that is the Iraqi insurgency. When leftists speak of 'the right of Iraqis to resistance', exactly which Iraqis are they talking about? Are they the Kurds in the North that won't let American GIs pay for anything? Are they the Shia majority which now controls the country though its first democratic elections ever? No, says Darleen Click,

they are less the French Resistance and more representative of the German Resistance -- the Werewolves who launched attacks, post WWII, against Americans and other Germans.

In addition, much of the Iraq insurgency doesn't even involve Iraqis, but a myriad of Islamists from well outside Iraq's borders.

Both she and Glenn Reynolds point us to this Washington Post article on the connection of Salaafists in Syria to the jihad in Iraq. Very informative in that it makes clear that Wahabism is just a small subset of Salaafism, and it is Salaafism which is the bigger problem, that the 'insurgency' is just part of a larger global jihad set on restoring the global caliphate, and that at least some segment of the Syrian military has aligned their interests with the jihadis:

Syria's role in sustaining and organizing the insurgency has shifted over time. In the first days of the war, fighters swarmed into Iraq aboard buses that Syrian border guards waved through open gates, witnesses recalled. But late in 2004, after intense pressure on Damascus from the Bush administration, Syrian domestic intelligence services swept up scores of insurgent facilitators. Many, including Abu Ibrahim, were quietly released a few days later.

In the months since, the smugglers have worked in the shadows. In a series of interviews carried out in alleyways, a courtyard, a public square and a mosque, Abu Ibrahim was being visibly followed by plainclothes agents of the security service, Amn Dawla. In December, the service confiscated his passport and national identity card. His new ID was a bit of cardboard he presented each month to his minders; the entries for April and May were checked....

At a private Saudi production company that specialized in radical Islamic propaganda, he said, he learned video editing and digital photography. The work channeled the rage of young Arab men incensed by the situation in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, angered by U.S. foreign policy and chafing under the repression of secular Arab rulers.

Their goal, he said, is restoration of the Islamic caliphate, the system that governed Muslims before the rise of nation states. Abu Ibrahim said he regarded Afghanistan during the Taliban rule as one of the few true Islamic governments since the time of Muhammad.

"The Koran is a constitution, a law to govern the world," he said...

Jihad was being allowed into the open. Abu Ibrahim said Syrian security officials and presidential advisers attended festivals, one of which was called "The People of Sham Will Now Defeat the Jews and Kill Them All." Money poured in from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.

"We even had a Web site," Abu Ibrahim said.

The young men around the cleric found themselves wielding a surprising amount of power. They were allowed to enforce their strict vision of sharia , or Islamic law, entering houses in the middle of the night to confront people accused of bad behavior.

In a dictatorship infamous for its intolerance of political Islam, such freedom made some of the cleric's lieutenants suspicious.

"We asked the sheik why we weren't being arrested," said Abu Ibrahim. "He would tell us it was because we weren't saying anything against the government, that we were focusing on the common enemy, America and Israel, that beards and epaulets were in one trench together."

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