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The Guardian May 04, 2008

Secrets of the desert

Syria's enemies revel in hard-to-verify tales about the remote Jazirah region, and the regime's stonewalling makes them more believable

By James Denselow

Continued contention over Israel's airstrike on a Syrian military installation is lost in the mysterious desert in the Jazirah region.

The Syrians are never the most forthcoming when it comes to unravelling a mystery, so it should come as no surprise that we are unlikely to get to the bottom of last September's bombing of an alleged nuclear facility near Deir Ezzour in eastern Syria.

Two incidents provide a fitting prologue. I remember working in Damascus when the US Embassy was attacked by militants in September 2006. Just an hour after the chaos of heavy gunfire and exploding vehicles, the streets had been cleaned and an air of normality had resumed. A police state cannot be seen to be blind to such acts happening under its nose.

And what of the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh last February? The Syrian authorities were embarrassed when Hizbullah announced his death prematurely. Rolling 24-hour news is very much an Achilles heel for Damascus, whose official news agency, Sana, prefers to focus on the mundane and banal. The reluctance is easily explained: unless Mughniyeh's wife is correct and the Syrians did it themselves, the car bombing of the Hizbullah leader known as "the fox", in the heart of Damascus, is a shocking indictment of lapses in Syrian internal security.

That brings us to the tale of the Israeli airstrike. It is likely that Israel realised the humiliation of having enemy aircraft strike deep inside Syria was not going to be disclosed by a security-obsessed Syrian regime that has a PR-machine trapped in the Dark Ages. The Syrian response - to bulldoze the entire site and then invite a gaggle of journalists to inspect it - was incompetent at best. It would probably have served their interests better to be as up-front as possible, knowing that the global audience would find it difficult to trust US intelligence on WMD. Indeed The Guardian recently reported suspicions that the satellite images of the site had been doctored. However, it is difficult for the leopard to change its spots.

This is not the first time Syria has stood accused of hiding things in the desert. Indeed, the history of the Jazirah region (literally "the island") is that of an unexplored periphery. The area - part-irrigated, part-desert - hides an often desperate poverty. A UNDP report identified that 58.1% of the poor in Syria live in the north-east region (which in their survey included Idleb, Aleppo, al-Raqqa, Deir Ezzour and Hassakeh), with 21% of the rural population living on less than $2 a day. Such poverty is visible in terms of poor quality housing, service provision, high unemployment and poor quality water sanitation supply systems.

The desert was also home to the Tadmur military prison. Located near the ancient ruins of Palmyra, the prison, used mainly for political prisoners, was renowned for its horrors. Amnesty International described it as being "synonymous with brutality, despair and dehumanisation".

An area with a low-density population and far from the traditional flashpoints of the international borders with Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and of course Israel, the Jazirah desert has proved to be a convenient location for much of Syria's military projects in the past. GlobalSecurity.org has tracked Syrian scud missile testing in the desert as well as the use of chemical weapons.

In 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, and in the immediate aftermath, reports emerged claiming that Iraqi WMD had been transferred into Syrian territory. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Israel was a very vocal advocate of this hypothesis; the Israeli prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, said: "There is information we are verifying. But we are certain that Iraq has recently moved chemical or biological weapons into Syria".

Today, in addition to WMD-hosting accusations, the Jazirah desert has been charged with acting as a rat-run for terrorist transit into Iraq, with tribes that span the international border acting as go-betweens in the most explosive type of people trafficking.

The fact remains that despite this myriad of threats and rumours of illicit activity, until there is a significant change in either the style of governance or of the regime itself, it is likely that what goes on in the Jazirah will continue to stay there.