Wednesday, July 02, 2003 U.S. Strikes into Syria!
Damascus filed only a mild protest at Washington�s tardiness in repatriating the five Syrian soldiers captured by US troops when on June 18 when they attacked a convoy suspected of carrying Saddam Hussein in flight to Syria. The Syrians, three wounded, were handed back Monday, June 30. The Bashar government did not make too much of a fuss over the incident, inhibited by reasons set forth in the account carried in DEBKA-Net-Weekly on June 27:
The importance of the US commando attack on June 18 lies in its location � inside Syria. A US official indeed admitted the American force may have pursued part of the convoy across the Iraqi border into Syria. In fact, the subsequent clash, in which five Syrian border guards were captured, occurred at the Syrian border post of Abu Kamal, 365 miles south of Damascus. The convoy was destroyed.
Our military sources reveal that the Syrian side lost between 25 and 30 dead in their first encounter with US combatants. Syrian president Bashar Assad and Syrian military chiefs monitored the incident from the war room of general headquarters in Damascus. He ordered the ground troops to fight, but was wary of an air engagement and halted all Syrian military traffic when US warplanes crossed into his country�s airspace.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly�s military sources note that American anti-Syrian military action - widely expected last March when Syria was found to be pushing Arab fighters into Iraq to fight against the United States - was launched in fact on June 18.
Fighting on the American side was the elite Task Force 20 set up to hunt down Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay and unearth Iraq�s weapons of mass destruction.
Both these missions necessitate deep thrusts into Syria, for which Pentagon authority has been given � initially for the border regions. The US commandos lie in wait for senior officers of the deposed Saddam regime on their way to and from Syria, a path well trodden since in the end of the war, and seek leads to Iraq�s unconventional weapons where the task force�s commanders believe them to be stashed: in western Iraq, northern Syria and eastern Lebanon. The also attempt to cut down on the influx from Syria into Iraq of the Arab fighters, mostly Syrian, boosting anti-American resistance in the country. Read more at DEBKAfile -- posted by Chuck at Wednesday, July 02, 2003 | E-mail | Permalink | Main |
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