WarSclerotic

Bashar Assad helps Muammar Qaddafi defy West

As Washington commended the Arab League for approving a proposed no-fly zone over Libya and European powers drew up plans for saving the anti-Qaddafi movement from defeat, Syria began sending Muammar Qaddafi supplies of arms, ammunition and weapons spare parts to sustain his effort to crush the uprising. debkafile‘s military and intelligence sources report exclusively that over the weekend a Libyan army general arrived at the Syrian Naval command at Tartous to establish a liaison office for organizing military hardware supplies from Damascus to the Libyan army and arrange shipping schedules.
Our sources report that another Libyan official was in Damascus early last week to negotiate with Syrian President Bashar Assad the types of weaponry required, prices and transport arrangements. After he left, Assad ordered Syrian emergency military stores to be opened and civilian freighters chartered to carry the consignments they had decided on across the Mediterranean to Libya.
The Syrian and Libyan arsenals are fairly compatible: both are dominated by Russian military products, Mig and Sukhoi fighters and bombers, T-72 tanks, BM-21 rocket launchers, the same armored personnel carriers and anti-air and anti-tank missiles.
The Libyan-Syrian arms transaction is a landmark in the sense that it is the first time since the Arab revolts erupted in January that one Arab regime has stepped in to help another suppress an uprising.

Damascus is also in violation of last month’s Security Council Resolution 1970 whichincluded an arms embargo against the Qaddafi regime and by supplying Libya weapons by sea Assad undermines the Western-Arab effort to introduce a no fly zone to curtail Qaddafi’s aerial might.

By this action, Bashar Assad shows contempt for the US President Barack Obama’s policy in support of the popular unrest against authoritarian Arab regimes and scorns the indulgence shown him by the US president.

In the last six months, Washington has gone to extreme lengths to establish friendly relations with Damascus – not only restoring the US ambassador after five years, but quietly accepting fresh Syrian meddling in Lebanon.

The Obama administration had hoped that Assad would respond by being helpful on the Palestinian issue and start distancing himself from Tehran. Instead, he has strengthened his military ties with Tehran, granting Iran its first permanent base on the Mediterranean at Tartous.
Now, by replenishing the regime’s stocks of arms and ordnance, the Syrian ruler has gone directly against US policy of support for the Libyan opposition and spurred Qaddafi on for his final major offensive to crush the uprising without having to stop and wait for fresh supplies of war materiel.

In the last 24 hours, rebel militias were pushed out of the two key oil towns of Ras Lanuf and Brega in eastern Libya after losing their footholds in Tripolitania to the west. Pro-Qaddafi forces were landed for the first time by sea Saturday, March 12, at Agilah, 60 kilometers east of Ras Lanuf, indicating that Qaddafi intends to drop  more troops on the coast of Cyrenaica to pursue his thrust into the rebel-held region.
Our military sources report that no obstacles now stand in the path of Qaddafi loyalist troops heading for the rebel center of Benghazi, 200 kilometers from Brega. The rebels have nowhere near the manpower they need to hold Libya’s second largest city against a government offensive. There are first signs of an exodus beginning from the city.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has scheduled visits to Tunis and Cairo this week and a possible rendezvous with Libyan opposition National Transitional Council leaders in Cairo Tuesday, March 15. If Qaddafi’s troops continue to gain ground at their present pace, Libyan opposition leaders may not make that rendezvous.

They arrived too late. The killers had flown.

Palestinian Hamas websites quickly hailed the murder of a mother, father and three of their children, aged, 11, three and a baby of a month, whose throats were slashed in their sleep at Itamar, south of Nablus Friday night, March 11 as “a heroic operation.” The escape of at least two Palestinian killers long before the alarm was sounded after midnight was eased by the dismantling of most Israeli security checkpoints on the West Bank and slow military vigilance.
debkafile‘s intelligence and counter-terror sources disclose that the Itamar attack was the first result of an Iran-funded secret conference in Khartoum last week of the heads of the national branches of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Arab world, at which a plan was charted for Hamas to launch a multi-casualty terrorist assaults against Israel on both sides of the Green Line – over and above missile attacks from the Gaza Strip in order to ignite the third Palestinian uprising (intifada). The Egyptian Brotherhood is the parent organization of Hamas.
This decision was a facet of a comprehensive plan drawn up in Khartoum for Brotherhood activists to fire up the uprisings in the various Arab countries. With Iranian backing and funding, the different branches resolved to coordinate operations for using the unrest to take control of Arab capitals
Iranian intelligence officers attending the conference used the occasion to set up direct contacts with Brotherhood leaders who came from Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, Syria, Jordan, Great Britain. The Palestinian delegation representing Hamas-Gaza was headed by Mahmoud A-Zahar and Hamas-Damascus headed by Khaled Meshaal.

The plan for Hamas to revive terrorist on the West Bank and inside Israel was an important part of the Iranian-backed resolutions reached at the Khartoum conference.

debkafile notes that not a single Arab government – not even Israel – prevented the Brotherhood and Hamas delegates from setting out for Khartoum.  No word of the conference was allowed to leak to the Israeli public and Israeli security authorities appear not to have adapted their practices to the decisions reached by the Islamists there.
This could explain why there was no prior terror alert for the Itamar killings or apparent IDF redeployment for an upsurge of multiple terrorist murders even though Hamas networks had been known to be regrouping in Judea and Samaria for the purpose of attacking and kidnapping Israelis on both sides of the Green Line. Several Palestinians were recently detained at the few remaining West Bank checkpoints carrying pipe bombs, knives and fire bombs.

Despite appeals from West Bank Israeli community leaders, the military did not recommend putting any of the checkpoints back – even though the Palestinian Authority’s security services had slowed down their counter-terror cooperation and intellience-sharing with Israel, therefore failing to keep their side of the bargain for the removal of the checkpoints.
For more than a year, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak acceded to relentless US and European pressure to grant West Bank Palestinians almost unrestricted freedom of movement and generous aid for their economic development as a means of persuading PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas to return to the negotiating table. This policy failed in its purpose while leaving Israelis vulnerable once again to terrorist attacks.  None of these alarming developments were brought to public notice in Israel. Jerusalem is still trying to pretend that Egypt remains faithful to its 1979 peace treaty, whereas nothing of those relations appears to have survived the fall of Hosni Mubarak.