Introduction
The Syrian Government has not been implicated directly in an act of terrorism since 1986. Nonetheless, the Syrian Government has continued to provide political and limited material support to a number of Palestinian groups, including allowing them to maintain headquarters or offices in Damascus. Some of these groups have committed terrorist acts, but the Syrian Government insists that their Damascus offices undertake only political and informational activities. The most notable Palestinian rejectionist groups in Syria are the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS). Syria also continued to permit Iranian resupply, via Damascus, of Hizballah in Lebanon.
At the UN Security Council and in other multilateral fora, Syria has taken a leading role in espousing the view that Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist groups fighting Israel are not terrorists; it also has used its voice in the UN Security Council to encourage international support for Palestinian national aspirations and denounce Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories as “state terrorism.”
The Syrian Government has repeatedly assured the United States that it will take every possible measure to protect US citizens and facilities from terrorists in Syria. In times of increased threat, it has increased police protection around the US Embassy. During the past five years, there have been no acts of terrorism against US citizens in Syria. The Government of Syria has cooperated significantly with the United States and other foreign governments against al-Qaida, the Taliban, and other terrorist organizations and individuals. It also has discouraged any signs of public support for al-Qaida, including in the media and at mosques.
In 2002, Syria became a party to the 1988 Protocol for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts of Violence at Airports Serving International Civil Aviation, making it party to five of the 12 international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism.
Since independence, Syria's police and internal security apparatus have undergone repeated reorganization and personnel changes, reflecting the security demands of each succeeding regime. During the relative political stability of the 1970s and 1980s, police and security services were credited with having grown and become professional, but in 1987 only the bare outlines of their institutional makeup were known.
The largest intelligence-gathering and internal security organization was the National Security Directorate, employing about 25,000 personnel. Other security organizations were under the supervision of the Ministry of Interior. These organizations included a national police force, responsible for routine police duties. It incorporated the 8,000-man Gendarmerie, which had originally been organized by the French Mandate authorities to police rural areas. During the 1960s, the civil police forces were believed to have been used extensively to combat internal security threats to the government, but during the 1970s and 1980s these forces assumed a more conventional civil police role; this change in role coincided with increased professionalization and the parallel development of an effective and pervasive internal security apparatus. Nevertheless, the police continued to receive training in such functions as crowd and riot control.
In the 1980s the internal security apparatus consisted of myriad organizations with overlapping missions to gather intelligence concerning internal security and to engage in activities (largely covert) to apprehend and neutralize opponents of the regime. According to Amnesty International, there were several security force networks in Syria. Each had its own branches, detention cells, and interrogation centers, located throughout the country, and each also had its own intelligence service. Each organization was directly responsible to the president and his closest advisers. The organizations operated independently with no clear boundaries to their areas of jurisdiction and no coordination among them. For example, although the civilian security police dealt with internal security matters, the responsibilities of Military Intelligence headed by General Ali Duba were not limited to matters affecting the armed forces, but also included internal security. In the mid-1980s, Western sources reported that the power and pervasiveness of Syria's internal security apparatus inspired fear among the Syrian population.
Asad established several security agencies focussed on the senior officers' echelon in the army. These included the Air Force Security Administration headed by Ibrahim Khuwayji, as well as the Military Security Department headed since February 2000 by Hasan Khalil, who replaced `Ali Duba who had served as head of this department since 1974.
The regime also established strike forces whose task was to ensure its existence and defend it from any threat coming from within the army's own ranks or from opponents in Syria. These units were provided the best military equipment and personnel, and were composed almost exclusively of members of the `Alawite community. They were subordinated directly to President Asad and not to the army command. One of these had been Rif`at al-Asad's "Defense Companies" unit, though after Rif`at had tried to use this unit to promote his own standing against his brother's will, it was converted into a regular army division and subordinated to the army general command. The "Defense Companies" unit was replaced by the Republican Guard Division, which was established in the mid-1980s under the command of `Adnan Makhluf, a relative of Asad's wife's, Anisa. Both of Asad's sons, Basil and Bashar served in this division, as now does Bashar's younger brother, Mahir. In the course of his path to becoming Syrian president, Bashar dismissed Makhluf as the division's commander replacing him with `Ali Hasan, an `Alawite officer close to Bashar.
In the mid-1980s, much media attention was paid to Syria's alleged use of terrorism to achieve diplomatic, military, and strategic objectives in the Middle East and elsewhere. Although the exact Syrian role was murky, in the mid-1980s, Syria's intelligence and security networks were strongly implicated in the support of Middle Eastern and other international terrorist groups in Western Europe. In fact, Syria was one of the countries on the terrorism list issued by the United States government, first compiled in 1979.
Within Syria's intelligence and security services, sponsorship of terrorism reportedly was conducted by Air Force Intelligence, of which Major General Muhammad al Khawli, an air force officer, has served as chief since 1970. Khawli, an Alawi, was considered Assad's most important adviser and his office was adjacent to Assad's in the presidential palace in Damascus, where he was presidential adviser on national security and head of security. Since 1976 Khawli has been the architect of Syria's policy in Lebanon. He also was credited with crushing the uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamah in 1982, and, according to the London Times, under his command Air Force Intelligence operatives had directed at least twenty-nine terrorist operations as of late 1986. These intelligence operatives reportedly worked in the offices of the Syrian Arab Airline abroad and also as military attachés in Syrian embassies. Thus, Syria had a formidable intelligence network with which to direct and fund terrorist groups and provide them such assistance as explosives and weapons, false passports and official Syrian service passports, diplomatic pouches, safe houses, and logistical support. Lieutenant Colonel Haitham Sayid, deputy chief of Air Force Intelligence and its operations director, was second in command to Khawli. In Lebanon, Khawli's power was exercised by Brigadier General Ghazi Kanaan, head of Syria's military intelligence in Lebanon.
Military Intelligence services (mukhabarat) were headed by General Ali Duba, an Alawi, who was, in effect, the country's chief of internal security. The mukhabarat was headquartered in the Defense Ministry complex in the center of Damascus and reputedly exercised immense authority because it operated from within the military establishment. Reportedly, Military Intelligence services handled radical Palestinian terrorist groups, such as Ahmad Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine--General Command. General Khawli and Lieutenant Colonel Sayid were allegedly also the "paymasters" of the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, also called the Fatah-- Revolutionary Council. According to the United States Department of State, Syria provided the Abu Nidal organization with logistical support and permission to operate facilities in Damascus (the Syrian government asserts the facilities were limited to cultural and political affairs). It is also claimed that the Syrian government helped the Abu Nidal organization maintain training camps in Lebanon's Biqa Valley, an area controlled by Syrian armed forces, and supplied travel documents permitting Abu Nidal operatives to transit freely through Damascus when departing on missions.
Western government and intelligence sources admited that they could not pinpoint Assad's complicity in planning terrorist operations but considered it unlikely that he was not informed in advance of major terrorist acts. It was equally unlikely that Major General Khawli would act without clearing a potentially risky operation with Assad.
Various news organizations have claimed that, as part of its overall support network, in the 1980s Syria provided training camps for Middle Eastern and international terrorists. There were reportedly five training bases near Damascus and some twenty other training facilities elsewhere, including the Syrian-controlled Biqa Valley in eastern Lebanon. In late 1986 U.S. News & World Report stated that since October 1983, when Israel withdrew from Beirut, large numbers of international terrorists known to Western intelligence sources have turned up in Damascus. These include members of radical Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist groups, which depended on Syria for refuge, logistical, and financial support, as well as other freelance terrorists. Other sources report that a number of West European terrorists, including members of the Red Army Faction (also known as Baader Meinhof), and the Action Directe, as well as the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), the Japanese Red Army, the Kurdish Labor Party, the Pakistani Az Zulfikar, the Tamil United Liberation Front of Sri Lanka, the Moro National Liberation Front for the Philippines, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Somalia, and the Eritrean Liberation Front, have also received training in Syrian camps or in Syrian-controlled areas in Lebanon. Furthermore, the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF) was based in the Lebanese village of Qubayat, within the area of Syrian control. Syria also permitted Iran to operate training camps in eastern Lebanon for the Shia Hizballah (the Party of God) organization.
Syria's goal was to employ as surrogates terrorists whose operations left few traces to Syria. In June 1986 the Washington Post reported that Middle East analysts had noted three distinct types of relationships between Syria's intelligence and security services and terrorist groups. In the first type of relationship, however, there was direct Syrian involvement, because Syrian intelligence created new radical Palestinian factions, such as As Saiqa, which were, in effect, integrated components of the Syrian armed forces and hence direct Syrian agents. The radical Palestinian Abu Musa group, which was almost totally dependent on Syria, was another example of such a relationship. In the other two types of relationships, Syria used terrorists as surrogates to avoid direct blame. In the second relationship, Syria collaborated with and provided logistical and other support to terrorist groups that maintained independent organizational identities, but were directed by Syrian intelligence, which formulated general guidelines as to targets. Reportedly, Abu Nidal's Fatah--Revolutionary Council and the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF) were examples of such collaboration. The third relationship involved selection of freelance or "sleeper" terrorists, mainly Palestinians and Jordanians, to carry out a specific operation. The convicted Lebanese assassin of Bashir Jumayyil and Nizar Hindawi and his half-brother Ahmad Hasi, convicted in 1986 of trying to blow up an Israeli commercial airliner in London and of bombing the German-Arab Friendship Society office in West Berlin, respectively, were listed as examples of this type of relationship.
The firmest proof of Syrian sponsorship of terrorism occurred at the trials of Nizar Hindawi in Britain and his half-brother, Ahmad Hasi, in West Berlin. Evidence introduced in Britain, and other information not made public, linked Hindawi with the Syrian intelligence services. Because of the evidence, the British government severed diplomatic relations with Syria. Hasi's case implicated Haitham Sayid, deputy chief of Syrian Air Force Intelligence, for whom an international arrest warrant was issued by West Berlin authorities. After Hasi's conviction, the West German government downgraded its relations with Syria.
A series of terrorist explosions in Paris in September 1986 were linked to a Marxist Maronite terrorist group, the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF). LARF was implicated in the assassination of a number of American, West European, and Israeli diplomats in Europe, and its operations were reputedly known to Syrian intelligence. In a magazine interview in September 1986, Pierre Marion, former director of the French General Directorate of External Security, charged that in the early 1980s Syrian intelligence agents had helped terrorist groups to operate in France, as part of a Syrian effort to punish France for its involvement in Lebanon.
Although Syrian links to terrorists in Western Europe emerged in the mid-1980s, observers believe that Assad had long used terrorism to further Syrian policy objectives in the Middle East. Over the years, Jordanian officials have accused Syria of assassinating Jordanian diplomats. PLO leaders have accused Syria of the assassination of Arafat's chief of staff and close aide, Saad Sayil (known as Abu Walid), killed near a Syrian checkpoint in the Biqa Valley in eastern Lebanon in 1982. According to the report by the United States Department of State on "Patterns of Global Terrorism: 1983," several attacks by members of the Abu Nidal organization reflected Syrian opposition toward the proArafat Fatah faction of the PLO. In 1983 these attacks included the assassination at the International Conference of Socialists in Portugal of PLO observer Issam Sartawi, who had advocated dialogue with Israel. The same report also charged Syria with encouraging the radical Shia Lebanese group, Islamic Jihad, to carry out the 1983 suicide bombing attacks against the United States Embassy in Beirut and the headquarters of the United States and French contingents of the Multinational Force (MNF) in Beirut, which resulted in 557 casualties.
The Syrian Government in 2003 continued to provide political and material support to Palestinian rejectionist groups. HAMAS, the PIJ, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine operate from Syria, although they have lowered their public profiles since May, when Damascus announced that the groups had voluntarily closed their offices. Many of these groups claimed responsibility for anti-Israeli terrorist acts in 2003; the Syrian Government insists that their Damascus offices undertake only political and informational activities. Syria also continued to permit Iran to use Damascus as a transshipment point for resupplying Hizballah in Lebanon.
Syrian officials have publicly condemned international terrorism but continue to make a distinction between terrorism and what they consider to be the legitimate armed resistance of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and of Lebanese Hizballah. The Syrian Government has not been implicated directly in an act of terrorism since 1986.
Despite tensions between the United States and Syria about the war in Iraq and Syrian support for terrorism, Damascus has repeatedly assured the United States that it will take every possible measure to protect US citizens and facilities. Damascus has cooperated with the United States and other foreign governments against al-Qaida, the Taliban, and other terrorist organizations and individuals; it also has discouraged signs of public support for al-Qaida, including in the media and at mosques.
In 2003, Syria was instrumental in returning a sought-after terrorist planner to US custody. Since the end of the war in Iraq, Syria has made efforts to tighten its borders with Iraq to limit the movement of anti-Coalition foreign fighters into Iraq, a move that has not been completely successful.
