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DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report April 6, 2011, 6:23 PM (GMT+02:00)

An Israeli Heron drone

Late Tuesday, April 5, two passengers of a Hyundai Sonata car were killed in a mysterious attack by a missile that wrecked their car near Port Sudan. debkafile‘s counter-terror sources report that the attack, carried out by an unmanned aerial vehicle at Kalaneeb south of Port Said, targeted the Hamas representative in Sudan in charge of the vast Iranian weapons smuggling enterprise for the Gaza Strip via Egypt and the Suez Canal.  His latest task was to organize the transfer to Port Sudan of a shipment of mustard and nerve gas purchased by Hamas and Hizballah representatives with Tehran’s help from Libyan rebels in Benghazi.

The covert WMD consignment was destined for Gaza and Lebanon.

debkafile broke the story of this transaction on March 31. The full report appears below.

It raises the possibility that Israel carried out the missile strike in Port Sudan to cut short this traffic. This charge was leveled by the Sudanese foreign minister in Khartoum Wednesday. Jerusalem has made no comment.

debkafile also reports that Hizballah and Hamas personnel are stationed at the headquarters established in Port Sudan by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards intelligence and naval arms.
On March 31, debkafile reported:

Senior Libyan rebel “officers” sold Hizballah and Hamas thousands of chemical shells from the stocks of mustard and nerve gas that fell into rebel hands when they overran Muammar Qaddafi’s military facilities in and around Benghazi.
Word of the capture touched off a scramble in Tehran and among the terrorist groups it sponsors to get hold of their first unconventional weapons.

According to our sources, the rebels offloaded at least 2,000 artillery shells carrying mustard gas and 1,200 nerve gas shells for cash payment amounting to several million dollars.

US and Israeli intelligence agencies have tracked the WMD consignments from eastern Libya as far as Sudan in convoys secured by Iranian agents and Hizballah and Hamas guards. They are not believed to have reached their destinations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, apparently waiting for an opportunity to get their deadly freights through without the US or Israel attacking and destroying them.

It is also not clear whether the shells and gases were assembled upon delivery or were travelling in separate containers. Our sources report that some of the poison gas may be intended not only for artillery use but also for drones which Hizballah recently acquired from Iran.

Tehran threw its support behind the anti-Qaddafi rebels because of this unique opportunity to get hold of the Libyan ruler’s stock of poison gas after it fell into opposition hands and arm Hizballah and Hamas with unconventional weapons without being implicated in the transaction.

Shortly after the uprising began in the third week of February, a secret Iranian delegation arrived in Benghazi. Its members met rebel chiefs, some of them deserters from the Libyan army, and clinched the deal for purchasing the entire stock of poison gas stock and the price.

The rebels threw in a quantity of various types of anti-air missiles.

Hizballah and Hamas purchasing missions arrived in the first week of March to finalize the deal and arrange the means of delivery.

The first authoritative American source to refer to a Hizballah presence in Benghazi was the commander of US NATO forces Adm. James Stavridis. When he addressed a US Senate committee on Tuesday, March 29, he spoke of “telltale signs of the presence of Islamic insurgents led by Al-Qaeda and Hizballah” on the rebel side of the Libyan war. He did not disclose what they were doing there.

Jerusalem Center Projects and On-Line Publications-Articles By Dore Gold-Articles by Dore Gold-Israel’s Requirements for Defensible Borders.

Washington, D.C.

April 5, 2011
Israel is entering an extremely dangerous period in the year ahead. It is not facing an imminent military attack, but rather is confronting a new diplomatic assault that could well strip it of the territorial defenses in the West Bank that have provided for its security for over forty years. This applies particularly to its formidable eastern barrier in the Jordan Valley, which, if lost, would leave Israel eight or nine miles wide and in a very precarious position against the threats that are likely to emerge to its east, in the years ahead.

Traditional U.S. policy indeed recognized that Israel is not expected to withdraw from all the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. This was enshrined in the language of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which was the basis of successive peace treaties between Israel and the Arab states.  This key element of Resolution 242 also appeared in repeated letters of assurance to Israel by U.S. secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher.  In 1988, Secretary of State George Shultz reiterated: “Israel will never negotiate from, or return to the lines of partition or to the 1967 borders.¹

More recently, the April 14, 2004, presidential letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon also spoke explicitly about Israel’s right to “defensible borders” and to the need of it being able to defend itself by itself. The latter point implicitly acknowledged Israel’s doctrine of self-reliance, by which the Israel Defense Forces were to guarantee Israel’s survival and not international troops or even NATO. Two months later, that letter was confirmed by massive bipartisan majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Significantly, it also ruled out the notion that Israel would be expected to withdraw in the West Bank to the 1967 lines, which were only armistice lines, and not internationally recognized borders.

This principle in fact had already been underscored decades earlier by the main author of Resolution 242, the British ambassador to the UN in 1967, Lord Caradon, who admitted on PBS: “We didn’t say there should be a withdrawal to the ’67 line….We all knew – the boundaries of ’67 were not drawn as permanent frontiers, they were a cease-fire line of a couple of decades earlier.”²

A New Quartet Initiative?

Yet today, Britain, France, and Germany are lobbying for a radically new Middle Eastern initiative with the UN Secretariat and the European Union, which, along with the U.S. and Russia, are members of the Middle East Quartet. What they are proposing is that the Quartet detail already the outlines of an Israeli-Palestinian treaty with the hope that international endorsement of key Palestinian demands, like borders, will prompt Mahmoud Abbas to return to negotiations with Israel. The Quartet will have to make a decision about this proposal, perhaps as early as April 15.

But Britain, France, and Germany are not just acting as facilitators, for they are insisting that Israel must accept an agreement on borders based on the lines that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War. This was confirmed in public by British Foreign Secretary William Hague last week during an address at Chatham House in London, where he reiterated these terms.³ In Washington, there have been both public and private efforts underway to press President Barack Obama to join the Europeans and issue his own blueprint for Israel’s future borders, based on the same territorial parameters.⁴ It is only known that the Obama administration has neither embraced nor renounced the 2004 U.S. letter to Israel concerning its right to “defensible borders.”

Strategic Uncertainty Across the Middle East

Amazingly, these new demands of Israel, which would be problematic in any event, are being proposed at the worst possible time, that is, precisely when the entire Middle East looks like it is engulfed in flames. Rebellions against central governments have been spreading from Yemen to Syria, as well as from Egypt to Bahrain. This will hopefully lead in the long-term to accountable and democratic governments. But in the short- and medium-term, the results could be highly destabilizing and bring to power far more radical forces that could seek renewed conflict.

In fact, on March 22, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted in an interview in the Washington Post:

“I think we should be alert to the fact that outcomes are not predetermined and that it’s not necessarily the case that everything has a happy ending….We are in dark territory and nobody knows what the outcome will be.⁵

What this means is that just as Israel faces complete strategic uncertainty with regard to the future of the Middle East, it is being asked to acquiesce to unprecedented concessions that could put its very future at risk. This is clearly misguided advice.

First, how can Israel be expected to sign agreements, predicated on it withdrawing from strategic territories, like the Jordan Valley, when it cannot be certain if the governments it negotiated with will even be there in the future?

Look what is happening in Egypt after the fall of President Mubarak, where senior political figures are already saying that they will have to re-examine the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Treaty of Peace. No one can provide a guarantee to Israel that the regimes ruling today in Syria, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia will not be overthrown. In the West Bank, the regime of Mahmoud Abbas remains in power largely due to the deployment of the Israel Defense Forces throughout the area and their counter-terrorist operations against Hamas and its allies. Were Israel to pull out of the West Bank, under present circumstances, it could not depend on Abbas remaining, regardless of what is happening to Arab regimes today across the region. In short, the degree of strategic uncertainty for Israel, given current political trends around it, has increased sharply.

The Rising Profile of the Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood

What makes this concern even more compelling is the fact that the strongest political forces today that are now vying for power in the Arab world and seek to replace the current regimes there are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood network. This is already evident in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood had an extremely low profile when President Mubarak was toppled, but since that time its role in Egyptian politics has grown substantially.⁶ It has been regarded as the strongest opposition movement in both Egypt and Libya.⁷

The Muslim Brotherhood stands out as one of the main political forces behind the wave of protests transpiring in Jordan, at present, as well.⁸ Indeed, Jordanian Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit charged that the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood was taking orders from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria.⁹

Historically, the Muslim Brotherhood provided the ideological underpinnings for the leading figures in global terrorism from Khalid Sheikh Muhammad to Osama bin Laden. In the last few years, with the rise of leaders like Muhammad Badie in Egypt and Hammam Sayid in Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood has come under a more extremist leadership, which still embraces hard-line doctrines against the West and a commitment to jihadism.¹⁰

Even if the Muslim Brotherhood does not take power at this initial stage, it will undoubtedly become part of future political coalitions that will move many neighboring countries into a much more hostile stance against Israel and even one supportive of militant action against the Jewish state. In the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas has been seeking reconciliation talks with Hamas which, if successful, would definitely affect the future course of Palestinian policy toward Israel.

The hostility of the Muslim Brotherhood to Israel should not be underestimated. It is frequently forgotten that Hamas, which regularly launches rocket attacks deliberately aimed at Israeli population centers, is, according to its own charter, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Muhammad Badie issued in late 2010 a weekly message in which he plainly stated that the way forward on the Palestinian issue is not through negotiations, but rather returning to jihad and martyrdom (istishhad).¹¹ It should come then as no surprise that the Muslim Brotherhood’s second-in-command announced in early February 2011 that the movement will seek to cancel the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.¹²

Second, the present wave of anti-regime rebellions is loosening control of the central governments over large parts of several Arab states. This has created a vacuum in many areas, which is being filled by regional terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and its affiliates, who seek to establish new sanctuaries beyond the reach of pro-Western Arab military establishments. This process is already evident in Yemen. But it has become accentuated in Egypt, as well, especially in the Sinai Peninsula. During the Iraq War, al-Qaeda of Iraq sought to set up forward positions in the Jordanian city of Irbid. The Jordanian security forces overcame this challenge, but can Israel always be certain that this will be the case?

Third, the undermining of the internal stability of Sunni Arab states is occurring as Iran seeks to consolidate its regional hegemony in the entire Middle East.  While Iranian interests may be affected by the continuing rebellions in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Hizbullah-controlled Lebanon, Tehran stands to be a major beneficiary of the current instability in critical countries, like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. For Israel, the biggest question is the future orientation of Iraq, where the Iranians have been supporting a number of key Shiite parties. In the last numbers of years, Lebanese Hizbullah has also been active in Iraq, training Shiite militias, along with Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

As Iran’s regional power grows, will Iraq still be oriented towards the U.S. or will it evolve into an Iranian satellite and re-engage in the Arab-Israeli conflict? Iraq is not far away from Israel; it is roughly 210 miles from the Iraqi border to the Jordan River. It has not gone without notice that Saudi Arabia has reinforced over the last year its northern border with Iraq, considering that it too cannot be certain what Baghdad’s future orientation will be. Israel, as well, cannot rule out Iraq, under Iranian influence, re-engaging in the Arab-Israel conflict. If that is even a remote possibility, how can Israel be expected to fully withdraw to the 1967 lines and abandon its right to defensible borders?

Undermining a Negotiated Peace

To conclude, the pressures Israel faces at this time to agree to a full withdrawal from the West Bank and to acquiesce to the loss of defensible borders pose unacceptable risks for the Jewish state. It also stands in contradiction to the international commitments that were given to Israel in the past. These recognized that Israel did not have to agree to a full withdrawal from this territory. Additionally, the 1993 Oslo Agreements envisioned a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Borders were to be decided by the parties themselves and not be imposed by international coalitions or by unilateral acts.

In fact, those commitments to a negotiated solution of the conflict appeared explicitly in the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement. Notably, that agreement bears the signatures of President Bill Clinton, and officials from the European Union and Russia, who acted as formal witnesses. What is clear today is that the Palestinian leadership under Mahmoud Abbas has no interest in a negotiated solution to its conflict with Israel. It prefers to see the international community impose territorial terms that are to its advantage without having to formally declare an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict and without having to recognize the rights of the Jewish people to a nation-state of their own.

The idea that the Quartet would dictate to Israel the 1967 lines and set the stage for an imposed solution serves this Palestinian interest, but not the interest of achieving real peace. European support for such initiatives would contravene the very peace agreements they signed in the past as witnesses. It would set the stage for further Palestinian unilateralist initiatives at the UN in September and deal a virtually fatal blow to any negotiations.

Finally, it must be added that the people of Israel have undergone a traumatic decade and a half. For the most part, they passionately embraced the promise of the 1993 Oslo Agreements and yet, instead of peace, they saw their cities attacked repeatedly by waves of suicide bombers that left over 1,000 Israelis dead. They still considered taking further risks and supported unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, only to find that there was a five-fold increase in rocket fire against Israeli population centers in the year that followed. Longer-range rockets poured into Hamas-controlled Gaza, as Iran exploited the vacuum created by Israel’s withdrawal.

The people of Israel have an inalienable right to security and to certainty that the mistakes of the last seventeen years will not be repeated. The full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip must not be attempted again in the West Bank, especially given what is happening today across the Middle East region. For those reasons, Israel must not be asked to concede its right to defensible borders.

Notes

1. Richard Holbrooke, “The Principles of Peacemaking,” Israel’s Right to Secure Boundaries: Four Decades Since UN Security Council Resolution 242” (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2009), p. 45.

2. British ambassador to the UN in 1967 Lord Caradon: “We didn’t say there should be a withdrawal to the ’67 line; we did not put the ‘the’ in, we did not say all the territories, deliberately. We all knew – that the boundaries of ’67 were not drawn as permanent frontiers, they were a cease-fire line of a couple of decades earlier….We did not say that the ’67 boundaries must be forever; it would be insanity.” MacNeil Lehrer Report, March 30, 1978.

3. Herb Keinon, “Hague Comes Out Against Interim Agreement,” Jerusalem Post, March 30, 2011.

4. See, for example, Bernard Avishai, “Next, an Israeli-Palestinian Peace Plan,” New York Times, March 30, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/opinion/30iht-edavishai30.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=print.

5. David Ignatius, “Gates Underlines the Dangers in the Middle East,” Washington Post, March 22, 2011.

6. Michael Slackman, “Islamist Group Is Rising Force in a New Egypt,” New York Times, March 24, 2011.

7. “Islam and the Arab Revolutions,” The Economist, April 2-8, 2011. See also, “Energized Muslim Brotherhood in Libya Eyes a Prize,” CNN, March 25, 2011.

8. Ranya Kadri and Isabel Kershner, “Protestors Rally Into Night in Jordan,” New York Times, April 1, 2011.

9. Taylor Luck, “Gov’t, Islamists in ‘Dangerous Game,'” Jordan Times, April 1, 2011.

10. For a discussion about the more extremist trends in the Muslim Brotherhood, see Shadi Hamid, “A Radical Turn for the Muslim Brotherhood?” Brookings, June 26, 2010; and Jonathan D. Halevi, “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood: In Their Own Words,” February 6, 2011, Jerusalem Issue Brief, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Hammam Sayid was known before his election as head of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood to have made statements in support of Osama bin Laden; see al-Hawadeth, September 24, 2001.

11. Muhammad al-Badi’ — Weekly Message, December 23, 2010.

(from the Muslim Brotherhood website in Arabic)

The entire Umma [the Islamic people], and not just the Palestinian Authority, is being asked to return to true fundamental principles, that must guide the [handling of the] Palestinian problem, so that it won’t be forgotten. Therefore, relating to negotiations, to recognition [of Israel], to reconciliation [with Israel], or establishing a Palestinian state in the ‘67 borders as an axiom, is a big mistake, for the Land of Palestine is Arab and Islamic land, on which their holy sites [of the Muslims] are located. The Jihad for the return of this land is an obligatory commandment incumbent on the entire Arab and Islamic nation….Palestine will not be liberated by hopes and prayers, but rather by Jihad and sacrifice, and we call all Brothers in Palestine to return to national unity, on the basis of resistance, for that is the only way to recover Palestine. Jihad is victory or martyrdom for Allah.

(For the complete text in Arabic, see below)

http://www.ikhwanonline.com/Article.asp?ArtID=76669&SecID=213.

في فلسطين ميلاد أمة يلوح في الأفق

إن الأمة كلها– وليس السلطة الفلسطينية فقط– مطالبة بالرجوع إلى الثوابت الحقيقية التي يجب أن تحكم قضية فلسطين حتى لا تُنسى، ومن ثَمَّ فإن اعتبار التفاوض والاعتراف والصلح وإقامة دولة فلسطين في حدود 1967 من المسلمات هو خطأ فاحش، إن أرض فلسطين أرض العروبة والإسلام وعليها مقدساتهم، والجهاد من أجل استرداد هذه الأرض فرض عين على الأمة العربية الإسلامية، ولقد كانت حرب غزة نموذجًا فذًّا لصمود الشعب الفلسطيني المجاهد، وكان الفشل الذريع للصهاينة دليلاً قاطعًا على أن ما يحدث في فلسطين هو ميلاد أمة تخرج من بين الركام والأنقاض أكثر صلابةً وقوةً وإيمانًا، ومَن يرغب في نصرة فلسطين فعليه أن ينضمَّ إلى المشروع المقاوم، فلم تعد تُجدي أساليب الشجب والاستنكار، وفلسطين لن تتحرر بالتمنيات والدعوات، وإنما بالجهاد والتضحيات، ونحن نناشد كل الأخوة في فلسطين العودة إلى الوحدة الوطنية على أرضية المقاومة؛ فذلك هو السبيل الوحيد لعودة فلسطين، وإنه لجهادٌ نصرٌ أو استشهادٌ.

12. Rashad al-Bayumi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s second-in-command, announced in an interview with Japanese TV (and cited by al-Hayat, March 2, 2011) that the group would join a transitional government in order to cancel the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, as it “offends the Arabs’ dignity and destroys the interests of Egypt and other Arab states.”

Egypt’s ElBaradei Threatens War With Israel.

Troubling signs are beginning to emerge from post-Hosni Mubarak Egypt: The prime minister is making new overtures to Iran — and a leading presidential candidate is threatening war with Israel.

Mohamed ElBaradei

Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency who has announced his candidacy for president in Egypt, said on Monday that “if Israel attacked Gaza we would declare war against the Zionist regime.”

The Digital Journal observed: “In the world’s first glimpse of the policies that may emerge from the results of the upcoming Egyptian presidential election, one candidate for president outlined his insistence on protecting Palestinians in Gaza from Israeli military assaults. Mohamed ElBaradei’s position on the matter is clear: An Israeli military strike against Gaza would result in a declaration of war from Egypt.”

In an interview with the Arab newspaper Al-Watan reported by the ynetnews website, ElBaradei also declared: “In case of any future Israeli attack on Gaza, as the next president of Egypt, I will open the Rafah border crossing and will consider different ways to implement the joint Arab defense agreement.

“Israel controls the Palestinian soil and there has been no tangible breakthrough in the process of reconciliation because of the imbalance of power in the region and the situation there is a kind of one-way peace.”

On Tuesday, Palestinian militants in Gaza launched three mortar shells at Israel, and Israeli forces killed an armed Palestinian near the Israel-Gaza border.

“Pressure has been mounting along Israel’s border with the coastal enclave in recent weeks, as Gaza militants and Israeli forces traded blows in what some fear are signs of a large-scale military escalation,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

Also on Tuesday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Al Arabi said his country is ready to open a “new page” with Iran.

“Egypt has opened a new page with all countries of the world, including Iran,” Al Arabi said. “The Egyptian and Iranian people deserve relations which reflect their history and civilization.”

Al Arabi’s remarks came during a meeting with Iranian official Mojtaba Amani, who gave him a letter from Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, AFP reported.

Salehi urged Egypt to explore ways to improve relations between the two countries.

Iran broke off diplomatic relations with Egypt in 1980 in protest of Egypt’s recognition of Israel.

Salehi also invited Al Arabi to visit Tehran, and expressed a desire to visit Cairo himself.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report April 5, 2011, 9:05 PM (GMT+02:00)

Anti-Assad protest turns violent

The Syrian uprising took a new turn Tuesday, April 5, when armed protesters ambushed and shot dead two policemen in the Damascus suburb of Kfar Batna. Syrian troops then opened fire and killed 15 inhabitants.

Monday, police opened fire on the funeral procession for 10 protesters killed in demonstrations in the Damascus suburb of Douma.

The fact that armed elements have taken over and are willing to use violence against Assad regime – and in the capital yet – marks a new and dangerous spiral of violence in the two-week long protest. Until now the violence came from regime forces against protesters. Now that the opposition is resorting to arms, the government may well escalate its crackdown on dissident demonstrations.

The Syrian uprising took a new turn Tuesday, April 5, when armed protesters opened fire for the first time on security forces from a well-laid ambush in a Damascus suburb. Two policemen were killed according to first reports. The fact that armed elements have taken over and are willing to use violence against Assad regime – and in the capital yet – marks a new and dangerous stage in the two-week long protest.

Syria’s banned opposition groups and Muslim Brotherhood, under the combined new banner of “The Syrian Revolution 2011,” earlier announed a fresh round of demonstrations against President Bashar Assad starting Tuesday, April 5, and lasting until next week, debkafile‘s Middle East sources report.

Both sides of the conflict realize that the Assad regime is not yet at the tipping-point for its survival after street protest rallies and bloody crackdowns centering on Daraa in the south and Latakia on the Mediterranean coast, in which 110 demonstrators died. However, a mass, nationwide uprising could badly shake its stability because it would seriously overtax Assad’s loyal military and security troops.

The opposition and the regime are meanwhile playing cat and mouse to see which holds the balance. The protest movement has already made an important gain: Even if Assad weathers the storm, his regime will never recover its old stability, arrogance and confidence. After 11 years in power, the Syrian president’s authority will be on the wane.
To knock it over completely, the Sunnis, who are 76 percent of the Syria’s population of 26 million, must join the protest movement en masse. This they have so far avoided doing for fear of the bullets which Assad’s loyalist forces do not hesitate to shoot.

Because it is hard to get ordinary Sunni Muslims out on the streets, the heads of Syrian Revolution 2011 have instigated a campaign of passive resistance. This week, for example, opposition leaders told the population to stop paying their electricity bills, an act of protest that has caught on in Syria’s big cities. The Assad regime is therefore confronted both by the “Days of Rage” and quiet civil resistance.
Furthermore, the important port-town of Latakia has split down the middle between two opposing camps – the 300,000 members of the ruling Allawite sect fear to venture into the districts populated by the town’s 400,000 Sunnis – and vice versa. Army control is reduced to keeping open the road linking the Syria’s main import and export port facilities to the highway out of the city.
In the next 48 hours, the opposition is hoping to whip up mass demonstrations in Aleppo and Damascus, the capital. Aleppo, a city of 2.8 million inhabitants is the political and economic hub of the Syrian Sunni community. Therefore, major outbreaks there would produce a big crack in Assad’s authority.

The Syrian ruler has tried to pre-empt the Aleppo demonstration by pouring substantial armed strength into the city, cutting its Internet links and arresting thousands of people suspected of opposition ties.
But he faces a huge problem. He can’t trust the Sunni rank and file to obey orders to suppress a large-scale Sunni insurrection in Aleppo – only the Allawite units which owe loyalty to the president and the Assad clan.  He must therefore rely on the support of the 4th Army Division and the security and intelligence services and they may be too thin on the ground to shoulder the task. He dare not try and loose Sunni troops on the protesters of Aleppo for fear they join the protesters.

Mystery strike on car kills two in Port Sudan.

KHARTOUM – Two people were killed in an attack on a car near Port Sudan on Tuesday, which police suggested was a missile fired from the sea, while state media and a regional government official blamed a foreign aircraft.

Witnesses at the scene near the airport at Sudan’s main port city said the small car was destroyed and the two charred bodies of its passengers could be seen.

“A missile from an unknown source probably bombed the car,” police spokesman Ahmed Al-Tahmi told Reuters. He earlier told local radio the missile had likely been fired from the Red Sea.

The Sudanese Media Center, a news agency linked to Sudan’s state security apparatus, and the speaker of the Red Sea state parliament, Ahmed Tahir, said an unidentified aircraft had flown into Sudanese air space to bomb the car.

The plane came in from the Red Sea and flew back after the bombing, Tahir said. The Sudanese Media Center said the army responded with missiles that the foreign plane managed to evade.

“We heard three loud explosions,” a source at Port Sudan airport told Reuters. “We went outside to see what was happening and eye witnesses told us they saw two helicopters which looked liked Apaches flying past.”

Tahir said the two people killed were traveling into the town from the airport when their car was hit. They have not been identified.

Sudan’s foreign ministry declined to comment. Sudan’s army was not immediately available to comment.

This is not the first time mystery has surrounded a strike in Sudan’s eastern Red Sea state.

In January 2009, unknown aircraft hit a convoy of suspected arms smugglers on a remote road in the state according to Sudanese officials, a strike that some reports said may have been carried out by Israel to stop weapons bound for Gaza.

A total of 119 people were killed in that strike near Sudan’s border with Egypt, according to state media, even though the attack was disclosed only two months after it occurred.

Sudan is on a US list of state sponsors of terrorism, but Washington this year initiated the process to remove it from that list after a peaceful January referendum in which the country’s south voted to secede.