Terrorist threat a pretext or reality?

Seventeen people were killed in a bomb attack close to Damascus, the Syrian capital last week, indicating what is beginning to look like a pattern of violence unknown until recently. Then there was another attack at the weekend, this time in an area of Lebanon close to the Syrian border, claiming five lives.

Is Syria being sucked into what is known as the Global War on Terror? Or, as some cynics suggest, Damascus is building a case for intervention in Lebanon?

According to some Beirut circles, Syria is preparing to seize the opportunity provided by the global financial crisis, the US presidential campaign, and the recent terrorist attacks as a pretext to restore at least part of its military presence in Lebanon.

Syria, however, insists that it has no interest in returning to Lebanon as an armed participant in that country's complicated politics. Analysts in Damascus say the leadership is preparing to make a strategic choice of restoring normal ties with the European Union and the moderate Arab states as a means of counter-balancing Iran's growing power and influence. Such a strategy cannot succeed if Syria is perceived as an expansionist power. Despite Syrian denials, the Lebanese claim could not be dismissed out of hand.

Syria has been moving heavily armed elite military units to the Lebanese border for the past week or so. By last Friday, the troops massed on the border numbered between 15,000 and 25,000, according to different accounts. Backed by tanks, armoured vehicles and attack helicopters, the units were on "maximum war footing", according to eyewitnesses. The official explanation from Damascus is that the build-up is for dealing with smuggling rings that run the black market in the Syrian capital and major provincial centers.

The Lebanese describe that explanation as "laughable". They claim that Syrian elite itself runs the black market in both countries through their security services. Interestingly, the build-up covers only the northern portion of the Lebanese border, leaving the eastern portions in the hands of the Iran-financed Hezbollah militia.

According to Lebanese analysts, the type of force massed by Syria is better suited to a classical invasion rather than chasing small and scattered groups of bandits along the border.

More ominously, the official Syrian media claim that the force could be used to "hunt down and eliminate fundamentalist terrorists linked to Al Qaida". This refers to a group called Fatah Al Islam (The Conquest of Islam) that fought the Lebanese army in the northern city of Tripoli, close to the Syrian border, for months, before being flushed out. Since then, the group, acknowledging links with Al Qaida, has gone underground and been blamed for a number of assassinations and suicide attacks.

Promised

In his meetings with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan last month, Syria's President Bashar Al Assad promised to "play a more active part" in the war on terror without going into details.

The Lebanese believe that Syria's claim of trying to fight terrorists linked to Al Qaida is designed to "hoodwink the Americans".

"They want to present their invasion as part of the global war on terror led by the United States," says a Lebanese analyst.

There is evidence that Syria assisted the emergence of Fatah Al Islam in the Tripoli area. Lebanon has only two borders, with Israel and Syria. As it is unlikely that the Fatah Al Islam killers entered Lebanon from Israel, the assumption that they came through Syria cannot be dismissed easily. Shortly after Fatah Al Islam seized control of the Nahr Al Bareed area close to Tripoli, a pro-Syrian Palestinian group known as Fatah Al Intifada (Conquest of the Uprising) merged with it. This could not have happened without approval from Damascus.

According to members of Fatah Al Islam captured by the Lebanese army, almost all fighters of the group came from other Arab countries. Once installed in Tripoli, they linked up with "sleeper" Palestinian terror networks there and launched a joint bid for the control of the mostly Sunni city.

Yet another pretext evoked by the Syrians for possible intervention in Lebanon is the protection of the Alawite religious minority. The Alawites, an esoteric sect regarded by most Muslims as heretics, number around 50,000 around Tripoli. However, Alawites, who account for 11 per cent of the Syrian population, dominate that country's government and armed forces through the Al Assad dynasty.

In its brief domination of Tripoli, Fatah Al Islam gang refrained from attacking Alawite neighbourhoods, giving credence to claims that it was a proxy for Syria.

When Syria invaded and occupied Lebanon in the 1970s, the excuse was that it intended to protect the Christian minority against the Palestinians and their allies. Today, with a majority of Lebanese Christians opposed to Syrian intervention, Alawites are being portrayed as a vulnerable community in need of protection in Lebanon. One thing is certain: the Syrian military build-up has little if anything to do with fighting smugglers or terrorists. Syria has special police and security units for such tasks.

Al Assad might well be tempted to remedy the humiliation he suffered in 2005 when he was forced to withdraw his army from Lebanon after 29 years of occupation. He may well think that he has a window of opportunity that may not remain open for long.

The US is preoccupied by its financial crisis and presidential election. Europe, led by Sarkozy, has just committed itself to rehabilitating Syria and would not jeopardise the supposed gains of the "positive dialogue" with Damascus.

Turkey would be in no position to criticise Syrian incursion into Lebanon because this is what Turkish forces have repeatedly done in Iraq, ostensibly to hunt down Kurdish rebels.

Grateful for Syria's support in the recent war with Georgia, Russia would not frown at a Syrian move to topple the pro-West regime in Beirut.

Israel, paralysed by its Byzantine politics and possibly heading for early elections, is not in a position to oppose a Syrian invasion.

So far, Syria's military gesticulations on the Lebanese border have not elicited warnings from the US or the European Union, encouraging the hardline faction in Damascus that is pressing for a "return to Lebanon".

Amir Taheri is an Iranian writer based in Europe.