Is Syria going on the defensive against Al Qaeda-inspired militants?

Troops along Lebanese border may be intended to stop an attack from Sunni militants, analysts say.

By Borzou Daragahi
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

12:21 PM PDT, September 28, 2008

BEIRUT — When Syria deployed thousands of soldiers along its frontier with northern Lebanon this month, some here feared that the Syrians were preparing to retake a country their military had dominated until it was pushed out in 2005.

But now, after a bombing that was the deadliest in Syria since 1986, analysts are wondering if the troops were defensive -- meant to stop an imminent attack from Lebanon-based Sunni militants inspired by Al Qaeda and sometimes trained in Iraq.

"The handwriting has been on the wall for a while," Sami Moubayed, a political analyst in Damascus, said today. "There have been signs of trouble coming in from Iraq or Lebanon."

The bombing Saturday killed 17 people and injured 14 in a crowded residential neighborhood near an intelligence office as well as along the route to an important Shiite Muslim shrine.

It came as Syria performs delicate balancing acts in navigating the region's sectarian and political fault lines.

The Syrians have held peace talks with Israel while strengthening ties to Iran, the Jewish state's greatest enemy. They are simultaneously trying to improve ties with the West while maintaining what some describe as heavy influence in Lebanon, contrary to the demands of the United States and France.

Recently, Syria's Shiite-dominated allies in Lebanon won several political victories, angering Sunni Muslim militants who consider the secular government of Syrian President Bashar Assad an enemy.

Northern Lebanon has long been a bastion for extremist Sunni radicals, some of them veterans of the Iraq insurgency. Fatah al-Islam, a group with Al Qaeda ties, fought the Lebanese army last year in a months-long battle that left hundreds dead.

On Aug. 12, just hours before newly selected Lebanese President Michel Suleiman paid a landmark visit to Damascus, a roadside bomb struck a bus in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, killing at least 12 people, 10 of them soldiers of the Lebanese army, which is widely perceived as sympathetic to Syria. Dozens have died in clashes between Sunnis and Lebanon's Alawite community, which also has strong ties to Syria.

Lebanese scholar Ahmad Moussalli said he told several Syrian officials over lunch in Damascus three weeks ago to expect an attack on their soil. Saturday's bombing, he said, was unsurprising.

"This constitutes payback against Syria because it is anti-Islamist and is against the spread of such Islamism in the north of Lebanon," said Moussalli, a professor of political science and Islamic studies at the American University of Beirut.

Syria suffers strained ties to some Sunni Arab countries over its support for the Shiite political and military organizations Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories as well as its strategic alliance with Shiite-dominated Iran.

While diplomats all over the world, including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the U.S. State Department, condemned the Saturday car bomb explosion, Saudi Arabia, Damascus' biggest Arab rival, remained silent. The Saudi government strongly supports Lebanon's Sunni community and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement, which is violently opposed to Hamas.

Syrian officials and pundits throughout the Middle East have publicly suggested that groups in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia or Israel could have been behind the blast. But authorities investigating the explosion have been mum.

"You can always round up the usual suspects," said Moubayed. "It's too early to blame any particular group or organization."

In a report cited by Israeli media, London's pro-Saudi newspaper Asharq Al Awsat said the bombing took place near a building identified as the Palestine branch of Syria's military intelligence. It cited unnamed sources saying that one victim and perhaps the target was a high-ranking intelligence officer.

But a Syrian opposition group, the U.S.-based Reform Party of Syria discounted that possibility, saying that no high-ranking officials ever spent time at the particular intelligence office.

The privately owned Syrian newspaper Al Watan cited witnesses at the site, including a traffic policeman injured in the blast, who said they had seen two charred bodies in the black sedan that held the car bomb minutes after the explosion. Imad Habib, the policeman, said he found the car "totally burnt and in it were two burnt persons and another two outside it. They were all dead."

Another witness said the car blew up after crashing into a truck parked along a sidewalk.

The official Syrian government-run Al Thawra newspaper published an editorial calling for tighter restrictions on foreign visitors entering the country. Syria now lets citizens of other Arab countries enter without visas.

"We need to be very careful in whom we let in," said the piece. "We should ask, 'Why is he here and what does he want?' "