First of all, I have yet to see a transcript of this tape, which I'll be quite honest that I would prefer far more than the AP's summary of it (which is why MEMRI translating the statements of the Iraqi Jaish Mohammed leader was so helpful from an analytical perspective) given the wire service's past track records with statements by al-Qaeda leader. If you have a transcript, please e-mail me ASAP.

The Syrian intelligence officer in question is Lieutenant Anas Ahmed al-Isa (Essa) and here are the claims he makes according to the wire story:

1. He trained Iraqi insurgents in decapitation and the building of car bombs. An Iraqi insurgent claims that they had practiced beheading animals to train for doing the same to hostages.

If al-Isa is in fact a member of the Syrian Idarat al-Amn al-Amm (IAA)'s external wing, it would make sense that he would be in a position to train Iraqis to carry out car bombings. Keep in mind that most of Iraqi Baathist and native Islamist forces are made up in no small part of former soldiers and hence would not have been trained in terrorist techniques. Practicing decapitating animals as a means of psychologically conditioning someone to do the same to the humans has been used by both al-Qaeda (including the 9/11 hijackers) and the Algerian GIA, so I don't find that too terribly hard to swallow.

2. Al-Isa had been instructed by his superiors to assist the Iraqi insurgency to prevent the US from reaching Syria.

That would fit with both Syrian paranoia and the widespread belief in both European and anti-war circles that the US intends to pursue another military campaign against either Syria or Iran in the near future. As long as the US remains tied down in Iraq fighting the insurgency, this objective will remain untenable, which is probably the best argument for both Syrian and Iranian involvement in the insurgency for those who are still in the skeptical category. If you were Bashar al-Assad, would not continued violence in Iraq not serve as a check on the US ever coming after you?

3. Al-Isa received instructions from Syrian intelligence.

Okay. Who's the "we" he's referencing here? His insurgent group? Other IAA officers based in Iraq? This is one of the reasons why I tend to prefer transcripts to press reports on this stuff.

4. An Iraqi intelligence officer appeared and named a number of groups he claimed were Syrian fronts.

Okay. Which ones? The AP story seems to be misreporting this - the Iraqi intelligence officer says there are a bunch of Syrian front groups active inside Iraq and then proceeds to name them. But we have no idea which ones from the wire story ...

5. Al-Isa said that he was the leader of the Jaish al-Fatah (the Army of Conquest), a new insurgent group.

There's been a veritable alphabet soup of Iraqi groups, Zarqawi himself actually leads a coalition of more than half a dozen major groups. They're probably better classified by who they work for than by name, since my guess would be that Jaish al-Fatah is probably just what we would call a terrorist or guerrilla cell with their own specific flavor.

6. Al-Isa was one of 11 men claiming they were recruited by Syrian intelligence to carry out attacks inside Iraq.

I thought al-Isa was a Syrian intelligence officer. So what gives?

7. Al-Isa said that he needed money, which is why he accepted an offer by Colonel Fadi Abdullah to carry out attacks inside Iraq.

So I take it he volunteered for the assignment, then?

8. Al-Isa was trained for 1 year in explosives, assassination, spying, and kidnapping before being sent into Iraq.

He claims later on that he infiltrated into Iraq in 2001, so that would put his training at some point in the 2000 to early 2001 time frame (i.e. quite possibly prior to the death of Hafiz al-Assad!). That's quite aways back, which is a pretty incredible claim in of itself and one of the reasons why I am so torn between just dismissing this off-hand and accepting it on the basis this is too incredible to be made up. In order for propaganda to be believeable, it has to be plausible, while a surface reading of this stuff would likely render it neither simply on the basis of conventional wisdom. This is one of the reasons why I want to hear US intelligence weigh in on this stuff, because we look like idiots for having our station of choice air this stuff unless we consider it at least partially credible. And before somebody says "we're airing it because it fits the insidious neocon agenda!" let me point out that we're airing this to an Iraqi, not an American audience, and that according to most standard renditions of anti-war mythology the neocons are supposed to be quite adept at deception, that's how they allegedly snookered us into going to war with Iraq to begin with. The fact that a former AEI intern could write up a far more plausible sounding propaganda to those familiar with the conventional wisdom on this stuff is one of the reasons I am tempted not to dismiss it as such.

9. Al-Isa infiltrated into Iraq back in 2001 because Syrian intelligence feared that a US invasion was imminent.

There are no dates provided here, but if we're talking after 9/11 here I could actually buy that one. Remember, Iraq was the only nation that refused to condemn the terrorist attacks and the circumstances surrounding Farouk Hijazi's meeting with bin Laden in Afghanistan in late 1998 and 1999 seems to have been ambiguous enough for Richard Clarke to have feared that if the US attacked Afghanistan bin Laden would flee to Baghdad. Assuming the Syrians were familiar enough with these reports, they may have feared that the US would try to attack Iraq in concert with Afghanistan to cut off any avenue of escape for the al-Qaeda leadership or to prevent Saddam from exploiting the situation (OEF in Afghanistan was initially viewed as being a long, drawn-out campaign analogous to the Soviet experience by many an analyst or pundit) - approaches that were in fact advocated at senior levels of the DOD according to the 9/11 Commission report. This would seem to suggest to me that al-Isa infiltrated into Iraq given that Syria feared imminent military action and remained a "sleeper" for about 2 years before being activated in the wake of OIF in 2003 if not later.

10. Shawan al-Sabaawi, a former lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi army, claimed that he had received training in beheadings from Syrian intelligence and that Jaish al-Fatah initially started using car bombs to target US and Iraqi troops before launching their kidnapping and murder campaign.

Makes sense. The people you're kidnapping are less likely to shoot back ...

11. Al-Isa sent a report on the group's progress to Syria.

To whom, the Baathist leadership living in exile there or the IAA? If the former, than this wouldn't be too surprising given statements by US military officials that the Syrian Baathists are exercising command and control over the insurgency.

12. Al-Isa claimed that he received weapons, explosives, and money from Syrian intelligence.

I thought Iraq was awash with both of the former, but okay ...

This other AP story adds some more details.

13. Al-Isa is from Halab.

Halab is both a city and a province in Syria. I'd also be kind of interested in knowing whether or not al-Isa is an Alawite, as that might tell us just how high up in the pecking order he comes from in Syria.

14. Shehab al-Sabaawi, al-Isa's Iraqi aide, said that he was recruited at an Iraqi mosque in 2001 by Jaish al-Fatah leader Abu Bakr.

I thought that al-Isa said earlier that he was the leader of Jaish al-Fatah? So is Abu Bakr dead or captured? I'm genuinely curious, because this sounds suspiciously like Abu Bakr (a kuniyat if I ever heard one) is an al-Qaeda recruiter. Note that al-Sabaawi doesn't even mention the Syrians as being involved in Jaish al-Fatah from the wire story, they come in later in 2003.

15. Abu Bakr offered to take al-Sabaawi to Pakistan, where he could receive terrorist training.

The reference to going to Pakistan (Islamabad specifically) for terrorist training sounds rather suspiciously like what happened with French/Australian al-Qaeda operative Willie Virgile Brigitte, which kind of raises al-Sabaawi's credibility for me. He doesn't, however, say what he was planning on doing with these skills.

16. Al-Sabaawi was in Pakistan for 11 months and received terrorist training there.

If I had to guess, my money would be on the LeT. All the same, al-Sabaawi is described as a former Iraqi lieutenant colonel and if he was in the army when he met up with Abu Bakr I don't imagine that you could just leave your post to receive terrorist training in Pakistan without authorization from somebody higher up. This is getting interesting ...

17. Al-Sabaawi went to Syria for a month after Saddam's overthrow in 2003, where he learned how to behead hostages under the supervision of Syrian intelligence.

Juan Cole, predictably, dismisses this with the following:

Another confessed terrorist said he was sent to Pakistan for training and then Syria. Oh, now we have a Baath-Islamist axis again. Sure. Shiite secular Arab nationalists are just dying to get up a collaboration with non-Arab Pakistani hyper-Sunnis who paint "Kill the Shiites" on their mini-buses in Lahore.

With all due respect to the Master and Commander of Arabic™, that doesn't appear to be the case. From the information available here, it looks like al-Sabaawi fled to Syria with the other Baathist remnants after Saddam was overthrown. Ignoring that the LeT, who is the most likely candidate to have trained him, has always steered clear of anti-Shi'ite activities in Pakistan, al-Sabaawi was likely there because of his status in the former Iraqi military rather than any Islamist credentials he might have. So what we're talking about here is Baath helping Baath, though someone might want to tell Cole that Syria sponsors Sunni Islamist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as Imamiyyah Shi'ites like Hezbollah as part of furthering its ambitions with respect to Lebanon and Israel.

So, back to Mark's comments:

Two years before the invasion, Syria was convinced the US was going to invade and sent intelligence teams trained in guerilla war into Iraq? First of all, Hussein would surely never have allowed this. Hussein had little love loss with the Syrian baathists who sided against him in GW1. Hussein always feared a coup more than a US invasion and for the life of me those teams look as capable of undermining Hussein as the US, particularly 2 years before a speculative war. That leaves the possibility that they snuck into Husseins police state which is possible but extremely dangerous. Furthermore, if Syria was convinced of US resolve to take on Hussein, why would they risk inciting the Americans they feared so much so blatently?

From the way I read this, al-Isa went into Iraq in 2001 because his superiors thought that the US was getting ready to attack (in response to 9/11?) and wanted to start a guerrilla war there to keep us busy so we wouldn't come after them. When the US attack didn't occur, he continued serving there as a "sleeper" until OIF, at which point he came out of the woodwork again and started carrying out his orders.

Al-Sabaawi seems to be an Iraqi (military officer?) who got recruited by al-Qaeda, trained in Pakistan, and then resumed his role (as a sleeper?) in the Iraqi military. After OIF, he fled with the other Baathists into Syria, got help from the IAA, and then went back to settle the score. If I had to pick between the two, al-Sabaawi's strikes me as being the more plausible since a lot of it jives with the cases of Brigitte, Hicks, and other cases of al-Qaeda recruits who got trained by the LeT.

These are not certainties, of course, but I would argue it is more likely that these teams were either free lancers who fell into one of the local groups control, or were recruited by Iraqi baathists before or after the war and not by the Assad government at all.

Maybe, maybe not, that's why I'd really like some of our intel guys to weigh in on this.

Torture victims will say anything you want them to say, or make up any story they think will be believable. Imo, the preponderence of the evidence is that this confession is just to convenient and defies common sense too much to be taken at face value.

Actually, it's the fact that some of this stuff is so incredible that I'm having such a hard time just dismissing it. If it's supposed to be propaganda then it's a pretty crappy job and if I heard that from someone I was torturing (which we don't have any proof occurred in this instance, I would add) I would dismiss it off-hand as a cheap lie that al-Isa made up to save himself.

Assad would have to be mad to be actively directing these insurgents. I have no doubt that plenty of Syrians are involved and Syrian resources and land are in use, but I would require more direct proof than a confession to declare this an act of war.

I'd need somebody to verify al-Isa's confession, myself, and there are ways of doing this, such as through narco-interrogation and other methods that have successfully obtained information from Abu Zubaydah. While such statements are not going to hold up in court, they should be enough to verify the veracity of such claims one way or another. That's one of the reasons why the case of certain statements made by Ibn Sheikh al-Libi aren't nearly as clear-cut as some would like them to be.

And why the silence from the WH?

There's no silence, administration and military officials (as well as Iraqi officials) have long been consistent in their statements that Syria and Iran, or elements in both countries, or however many other hairs you want to split, are involved to varying degrees with the Iraqi insurgency. In most cases, they haven't gotten into specifics but there's more than enough press reporting on the subject for us to draw our own conclusions. As for why they haven't highlighted it to extent that they did say, the perceived Iraqi threat from late 2002 to early 2003, it's due to the simple reality that they aren't going to initiate military action against either nation for a whole host of reasons, many of them discussed in various postings on this blog. If and when military action is needed at some point further down the line, I'm more than confident that we've amassed more than enough in terms of causi bellis. Indeed, I strongly suspect that both nations' support for the Iraqi insurgency is due to the fact that in the event the US stabilizes Iraq that they are the next ones on the chopping block.

UPDATE: MEMRI TV has a transcript excerpt of al-Isa and al-Sabaawi. Interestingly, there's nothing in this excerpt about 2001 or al-Isa being a Syrian intelligence officer. Anybody here got the whole thing?