Assad's purge of Jisr a-Shughour and Erdogan's election
DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis June 12, 2011, 8:30 AM (GMT+02:00)
It took Syrian president six days to send troops and tanks to punish the small northern town of Jisr a-Shughour near the Turkish border for attacking and killing 120 Syrian security personnel last Monday. Although thousands of residents fled, the operation which began Friday June 10 ran into stiff resistance. Syrian TV later reported that security forces had arrested a large number of "armed group" leaders responsible for "violent acts" and wounded and killed many more – "despite the numerous ambushes set up against the army units." Refugees report a major purge is taking place in the defiant town and its buildings leveled. According to some reports, the soldiers are shooting defectors.
Saturday night, June 11, the US accused Syria, of creating a humanitarian crisis and urged it to stop offensive - still avoiding any reference to President Bashar Assad by name as the party responsible for the crisis.
It took Assad several days to attack Jisr a-Shughour because he couldn't decide which unit to send to the rebellious town: He first sent the 85th Armored Brigade on this mission and then replaced it with the 47th Armored Brigade under the command of his brother Gen. Maher Assad, together with the expanded 555th commando battalion. As the Syrian army's top-notch unit, the 47th Brigade had been held in reserve in Damascus for defending the regime in a last resort. The opposition took advantage of its absence from the capital for an attempt to raise a protest rally which was broken up before it drew substantial numbers.
The small border town has acquired strategic importance way beyond its size and location - and not only as a potential tipping point for the uprising against the Assad regime.
The battles there will impinge on how the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan fares in the general election Sunday, June 12 and the Muslim Brotherhood's position in the Arab Revolt (Jisr a-Shughour is one of its bastions). Iran, as President Assad's foremost ally, has a stake there, especially after Saudi military intervention stalled its push into the Gulf Emirates on the backs of Shiite protesters.
Erdogan is generally expected to achieve a major election victory in his run for a third term in office after 10 years - and even possibly a majority in parliament for reforming the constitution to unite the posts of prime minister and president.
He can boast of important achievements in his 10 years in office, but is after the major triumph of acknowledgement as head of the paramount Muslim power. A Sunni Muslim rebel win against Assad's Iran- and Hizballah-backed forces in the Battle of Jisr a-Shughour would show that Erdogan played the right horse after failing to ride the wind of protest in the Arab world.
Its eruption threw the bloc formed by Turkey, with Iran, Syria and Hizballah onto the wrong side of the Arab revolt. The Turkish prime minister played no role in the Egyptian uprising and, in Libya, both Muammar Qaddafi and the Benghazi rebel government Benghazi scorned his feelers for influence when they saw him gyrating between going with NATO of which Turkey is a member, siding with Qaddafi and aiding the rebels.
The Turkish prime minister's decision to send troops into to Syria and establish a buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border (as DEBKfile first reported Friday, June 10) is a gamble which places him in opposition to Tehran, spells finis to the Turkish-Iranian pact and ends his hopes of acting as a bridge between Sunnis and Shiites.
Sunni Muslims across the Middle East are watching the battle of Jisr a-Shughour and assessing the numbers of Sunni defections from the Syrian army fighting their coreligionists there. If they are substantial and spill over into military units in other parts of Syria, this battle could become the tipping-point of the uprising against Bashar Assad. It would also be the Muslim Brotherhood's first military achievement since the Arab Revolt began, after holding themselves aloof from the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya.
Al Qaeda's dead East Africa terror chief targeted the US and Israel
DEBKAfile Special Report June 11, 2011, 11:26 PM (GMT+02:00)
For more than 15 years, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed slithered out of every US and Israeli undercover operation to nab him, often with minutes to spare. This week, his luck turned: Sentries at a Somali roadblock on the outskirts of Mogadishu shot him dead Wednesday when the pick-up truck in which he and a companion were travelling refused to stop. They killed him without realizing who he was. He was identified by DNA Saturday, June 10,
DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources report: Fazul, 38, was one of Al Qaeda's most accomplished operational planners and commanders. His strategic skills ran to guile and tactics for bamboozling his enemies. For years, he pulled the wool over the eyes of American and Israeli terrorist hunters.
His passing leaves al Qaeda's branch in East and the Horn of Africa and Somalia leaderless and Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant (who was not elected to succeed him), high and dry. Left now is the second important terrorist branch, the one led by Saif al Adel, who has chosen as acting al Qaeda leader and operates out of Waziristan.
A member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Fazul arrived in 1995 at the Indian Ocean Comoro Islands where he was born opposite Kenya. He settled in the capital of Moroni as a fisherman and married a local girl.
From there, he set about organizing and executing two major terrorist operations targeting Israel and the United States.
It took him a year to set up the hijack of Ethiopian Airways flight 961 en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. During its forced landing opposite the Comoros, five heads of Israel's Aviation Industries and a security guard were murdered, together with the CIA station head in the Ethiopian capital, Leslie Shed, and the deputy commander of the Ukrainian air force.
The group was on its way to a meeting with US, Ukrainian and Israeli teams, headed by the Ukraine president and Israeli defense minister, at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. They were to have discussed a deal whereby the Ukraine would supply Ethiopia with fighter jets which Israel would upgrade and the US would pay for.
To this day, all four governments have maintained a tight blackout on the terrorist attack because they have never discovered how Fazul obtained the top secret information about the passengers on the flight and their mission.
After that dossier was shelved, no one followed the investigation up with questions about the location the terrorists chose for landing the hijacked Ethiopian airliner, namely near the Comoro Islands. They would have discovered that waiting for the murderers of the Israeli executives, the American agent and the Ukrainian airmen were fishing boats prepared by Fazul in advance for them to vanish at top speed and go to ground on the islands.
Two years later, in 1998, Fazul planned and executed the twin attacks on the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi killing 224 people, the worst al Qaeda atrocity before 9/11. It was then that US intelligence picked up the first lead to the unknown terrorist mastermind. An FBI task force arrived in Moroni in 1998, two years after he set up his base there. But they were too late; the bird had flown having been tipped off to his peril. He was placed at the top of the FBI wanted terrorist list with a $5 million bounty on his head.
In 2002, Fazul returned to the attack, hitting again on Israeli targets in Africa.
He had a bomb car rigged for crashing into the Paradise Hotel of Mombasa, a favorite haunt of Israel visitors, following which rockets were launched against an Israeli Arkia passenger plane just taking off from Mombasa airport with 271 passengers. The rockets missed. They were fired from a plane Fazul and his team had chartered. Before escaping to Somalia, they flew the plane over the still smoking hotel and dropped explosives on the building.
These episodes were recounted in detail by DEBKAfile at the time they occurred.
In the summer of 2010, Fazul orchestrated multiple suicide attacks on a number of cafes in Uganda when they were filled with crowds watching the live broadcast of the World Football Cup final in South Africa.
His purpose was to punish Uganda for taking part in the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, where Faizal was leading the al-Qaeda-linked Shabaab effort to topple the shaky transitional government>
His death will weaken than effort and is good news for war-torn Somalia.
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