Shock and outrage in the region after US raid in Syria (News Feature)

By Anne-Beatrice Clasmann Oct 27, 2008, 14:42 GMT

Istanbul - It is an open guess whether the truth will come to light beyond a shadow of doubt as to whom the US soldiers killed in their raid on a remote village in Dayr As Zawr.

Were they really only construction workers and children, as official Syrian media say, or were they possibly self-appointed Islamic 'holy warriors' on their way to Iraq?

But no matter who it was that US forces killed in Sunday's raid, the commando operation was being regarded in the Arab world as a monstrous incident - so monstrous that the state and government heads of Arab countries initially were dumbfounded, reduced to an incredulous silence for several hours.

This had never happened before since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 - that US soldiers simply entered a sovereign country in order to attack and kill people.

'The US has added a new entry into their list of sins,' the Iraqi News Agency INA, which is critical of the Baghdad government, said. 'American terrorism has now also reached Syria.'

An angry Arab League General Secretary Amr Mussa thundered that the last thing the Mideast region needed at the moment are new efforts to destabilize it.

Only Israel, as well as Syria's US-supported Reform Party, could find nothing wrong with the US raid.

Even if US soldiers were in fact pursuing extremists, then why did they not simply just wait until they crossed the border into territory where, with the permission of the Iraqi government, they can attack anyone they regard to be terrorists?

And does Sunday's attack also mean that US soldiers in the future could attack members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards inside Iranian territory because they are suspected of heading towards Iraq to bring armour-piercing munitions to militias?

Again and again, Syria has had a number of strange acts of violence which were never completely cleared up, ranging from the alleged suicide of Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan to the assassination of Hezbollah commander Emad Moughniye to the recent terror attack on a secret service facility in Damascus.

But even for those who, like the Reform Party, hate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, it is a complete stretch of even a conspiracy-minded imagination to believe that the Syrians themselves staged the commando raid in order to put the blame on the US Army.

For Iraq's government, the attack inside Syria is problematic in any event. For it makes Baghdad's guarantees that no US attacks on neighbouring states would be launched from Iraqi territory sound hollow.

The commando raid also promises to make it even more difficult for the US and Iraq to reach an envisaged security agreement, negotiations on which are currently stuck.

The attack by the Americans is also a major problem for the Syrian government. It demonstrates once again how the Syrian army appears to sit back and watch every attack without taking any action.

From a military point of view, the Israeli air attack on a suspected Syrian nuclear facility in September 2007 would certainly have not been so easy to repel as Sunday's raid.

But four US helicopters which crossed over the border unhampered, killed people inside Syria and then just as easily flew back into Iraq - this must hurt al-Assad, who in contrast to his late father Hafez al-Assad, has no military background.