Syrians mourn next the bodies of their relatives who were killed yesterday in what the Syrian media reported as a deadly US military attack on the village of Sukkiraya, on the Syria-Iraq border. Iraq has said the deadly raid was targeting an area used by insurgents plotting attacks on its soil, as Damascus protested about what it branded a cold-blooded war crime by US forces.(AFP/Ramzi Haidar)
Syria-Iraq: Bloody Border, Messy Politics
-- Pajamas Media
-- Pajamas Media
Syria has played a dangerous game in Iraq with few consequences — until yesterday's U.S. Special Forces raid.
Late Sunday, U.S. Special Forces struck positions across the Syrian-Iraq border, inside of Syria, apparently killing nine people, most of whom were non-Syrian Arab fighters on their way into Iraq. Of course there is a great cry rising from the Syrians today.
For years, tons of explosives and a long line of foreign terrorists have streamed across the Syrian border into Anbar Province and Nineveh Province in Iraq. I must have spent a total of about nine months in Nineveh, about eight of which were in the capital of Mosul, and another month in Anbar.
Foreign terrorists were caught or killed on a regular basis, and they all had the same story: they came from an alphabet soup of Arab countries — Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen, to name a handful. They had come through Syria. I remember the day the Libyan was captured in 2005: Iraqis were trying to force him to wear a suicide vest to attack police in Mosul. I remember the night, a raid that I did not go on, when the Tunisians were captured in 2005, resulting in hand-to-hand combat that did not go well for the Tunisians. The owner of the safe house was captured with a diary listing dates and effects for years of attacks; that diary actually matched up perfectly with SIGACT reports of the same incidents. The Tunisians were captured with all sorts of documentation, as I recall, that chronicled their long journey by all modes of transport to get through to Syria and across into Mosul.
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