The Sunni/Wahhabi Threat.

Equally - if not more - serious to the Assad regime is the challenge now coming from Syria's Sunni Arab majority, including Islamist members of the Shammar confederation of tribes. The Syrian branch of this confederation extends from Iraq's north-western region of Mosul, which Syria once claimed to be historically part of its territory. Mosul, Iraq's third largest city of about 2m people, is part of the Al-Jazeera (island) area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The Shammar tribes, which include a very radical Wahhabi community, for the biggest confederation of Sunni and Shiite groups stretching from the northern half of Saudi Arabia through Iraq, Syria, southern Turkey and down to Jordan.

Shammari clans are also members of Syria's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) which, together with Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and other Wahhabi groups, want to establish a global Sunni Caliphate (see News Service No. 20 of last week's Diplomat in news20aQaedaNov15-04). The Syrian MB has been trying to take power from the ruling Baath Party through an armed insurgency since the 1960s. Although it was crushed in the 1960s by the then Sunni Baathist regime of Gen. Amin Al Hafez, the MB insurgency arose again after Gen. Hafez Al-Assad  took power in 1970s. But Assad was far more ruthless as his special forces in the early 1980s crushed them in one decisive battle, killing 20,000 of them in the famous "Hama massacre of the mosques". They were bombarded as they came out of the mosques or fought from narrow alleys. Their area was flattened. Since then the Syrian MB has been dormant.

The current chaos in Iraq, however, provides the MB, HT and Al-Qaeda - as well as remnants of Saddam's Sunni Baathists - with a rare opportunity to be active on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian borders. The western and northern parts of Iraq's Sunni Triangle border with Syria. Equally important to note is that Ben Laden's mother is a Syrian convert to Wahhabism. Al-Qaeda has many important Wahhabi Syrians. A Syrian jailed in Spain since 2001 and thought to be a major operative for Al-Qaeda was on Oct. 25 identified as the prime mover behind the March 11, 2004, terror attacks in Madrid.

While Spanish officials had named several different men as possible masterminds over the previous months, a high-ranking intelligence official on Oct. 25 told the parliament the man behind the attacks was Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas (also known as Abu Dahdah). "It is very clear to me", the investigator, Rafael Gomez Menor, said, "that if by mastermind we mean the person who has put the group together, prepared the group, trained it ideologically, sent them to Afghanistan to be prepared militarily for terrorism, that man is Abu Dahdah, without any doubt". (Yarkas was sent to prison in November 2001 by Judge Baltasar Garzon, who had been investigating Al-Qaeda's presence in Spain since the mid-1990s. In an indictment filed in September 2003, Garzon said that, since 1995, Yarkas had been responsible for recruiting members, indoctrinating them with an extremist ideology and sending many of them to Afghanistan for training at Al-Qaeda camps. In his comments on Oct. 25 to a commission looking into the attacks, Gomez Menor did not say Yarkas had planned the Madrid attacks from his prison cell. Instead, he suggested Yarkas had set the stage for them before his arrest.

Experts in Syrian affairs believe that, if the Assad regime itself has a hand in the Iraqi insurgency, then it might be playing with fire as the insurgency could eventually spill over to the Syrian side. After US and Iraqi troops re-took police stations in Mosul on Nov. 16, it was discovered that a well organised Baathist insurgency had seized control of broad swaths of this sprawling city. Even as US soldiers shut Mosul's five bridges and swept both banks of the Tigris, a top Kurdish official in the city said a Baathist resurgence had spearheaded the uprising there, which was designed to distract American and Iraqi forces from Falluja.

According to Kurdish intelligence and captured insurgents, the Baath Party in Mosul had reconstituted itself and was co-ordinating attacks in Mosul against the Iraqi police and government as well as the Kurdish and Christian minorities. If true, assertions by a senior Kurdish official, Sadi Ahmed Pire, marked a shift towards Baathist control of an insurgency so far dominated by fragmented groups, local shaiks and Wahhabi religious leaders.

Violence in Mosul threatens to touch off ethnic bloodshed, as insurgents have singled out Kurds and Christians for assassination. In response, Kurdish officials have sent thousands of Peshmerga fighters into the city. They are nominally under the command of the Iraqi National Guard but in reality answer to the main Kurdish political groups - the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Fighter jets roared overhead all day on Nov. 16 as US forces moved into the west bank of Mosul to recapture police stations. In western Mosul, a US officer, Lt. Col. Michael Gibler, was then quoted as saying: "It went well. All of the police stations were reoccupied - all of them". Insurgents fled to the east bank of the Tigris River where they clashed with Kurdish fighters. Machine gun and mortar fire rang out in front of the PUK offices on the eastern edge of the city, where Pire commands a garrison of about 500 Kurdish fighters.

With 1.5m residents still in the city, defeating insurgents in Mosul is expected to prove far more complicated than in Falluja, a city of 300,000. Under Saddam Hussein, 330,000 Mosul residents were employed in the Iraqi military or security services. Sunni Arabs loyal to his regime were moved into the Kurdish neighbourhoods on the east bank of the Tigris in the 1970s and 1980s.

Baath Party officials met in the Syrian border town of Hasakah at the end of September, where they elected a new party leader, and appointed officials to run operations in every city, according to Kurdish intelligence officials with sources in the insurgency. "The Baath Party has reorganised. They are very popular here [in Mosul]", Pire said, adding:

"There is a new, young leadership, mostly from the Mukhabarat and the special military forces". The Baathists voted to expel all party members who had worked with US forces, the interim Iraqi government, or the Kurdish political parties, Pire said. The party is trying to broaden its appeal to traditional Sunni Arab tribes by recruiting the sons of major shaikhs. In Mosul, Pire said, the Baath Party is leading the attacks that began on Nov. 10 - in stark contrast to Falluja, where residents said tribal militia commanders and Wahhabi cells were at the forefront of a loose-knit coalition of militant groups. Pire said: "The Baath Party has played the main role in these attacks".

Iraq police officers defected en masse when insurgents attacked in Mosul on Nov. 10. The Iraqi government immediately fired the city's police chief, but the only Iraqi forces currently entrusted with security by the government are Kurdish Iraqi National Guardsmen. Kurdish officials say they believe the Baathist leaders want to drive out the city's Kurdish minority, which forms about 20% of the city's population. As soon as the attack on Falluja started on Nov. 8, insurgents seized the University of Mosul, once a top Iraqi institution that has fallen under the sway of Wahhabi extremists over the last year. On Nov. 10, the insurgents took over eight police stations. They abandoned three stations after blowing them up. "The insurgents had the full cooperation of the police", Pire said. On that day, the KDP and PUK deployed about 6,000 of their Peshmerga fighters into Mosul.

Pire said: "The Baath Party is working to create an ethnic civil war. Their plan was first to eliminate police stations, then the Kurdish forces, then finally the Kurdish community".

The Iraqi Interior Minister, Faleh Al-Naqib, on Nov. 16 told a news conference in Baghdad that Mo'ayed Ahmad Yassin, the leader of the Army of Muhammad, and five aides were arrested recently in the capital. This group is believed to be responsible for several beheadings of Iraqis and foreigners. Yassin was a member of Saddam's elite Republican Guards and had worked closely with Saddam, Naqib said. US and Iraqi officials said the group was formed by Saddam in the final days of his rule to fight for the resurgence of his Baath Party. Since the start of the insurgency, Yassin has travelled to Syria to meet with close associates of Saddam, Naqib said. In Baghdad, Nasir Ayaef, a member of the interim National Assembly and an official in the influential Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni groupm, was arrested, said Iyad Al-Samarra'i, a senior party official. Samarra'i said on Al-Jazeera that Ayaef had not been engaged in any criminal activity but had been detained because of the party's stand against US policies.

Naqib admitted for the first time that the interim government and the US-led coalition faced a broad insurgency covering the Sunni Triangle. Naqib made a number of other major revelations:

- Contrary to previous assumptions that the insurgency consisted of dozens of disparate groups, it is a unified movement with a large measure of central command and control.

- The overwhelming majority of the insurgents are Iraqis, not foreign fighters. In fact, non-Iraqi Arab fighters represent between 4-6% of the combattants. In Falluja of the 1,200 insurgents killed, only 24 were non-Iraqis (a death toll announced on Nov. 15, with the toll now being much higher).

- The remnants of Saddam's regime play a much bigger role in the insurgency than previously assumed. The insurgency has a political leadership operating from Syria.

- Naqib named the main co-ordinator as Muhammad Yunus Ahmad, a former Baath party security official.

- Saddam's regime had prepared special units for waging urban guerrilla warfare long before the US-led invasion in 2003. Those units have now been activated throughout the Sunni Triangle.

- The insurgents aim to disperse US firepower in what looks like a dress rehearsal for fomenting enough chaos to disrupt the elections scheduled for January 2005.

A series of apparently well-orchestrated and simultaneous attacks in Baiji, Baquba, Ramadi, Haditha, Tikrit, and other towns showed that the insurgents had switched to hit-and-run tactics, abandoning their previous strategy of seizing and holding terrain that could be turned into safe havens. The most dramatic illustration of this was in Mosul. The three-day raid on Mosul drew some 1,200 US troops away from Falluja and Ramadi. It also provoked the desertion of at least 300 newly recruited Iraqi policemen and troops.

Mosul is ethnically very mixed with large communities of Sunni Arabs (partly Shammaris), Kurds, Turkomans, Christians and Yazidis. Thus it is not a place where Sunni Arab insurgents could strike root. Saddam Hussein's efforts to Arabise the city by moving in his Sunni supporters inevitably created tensions. Lightly armed insurgent forces are like grains of sand. As combat power is deployed against them they tend to drift away, either going to ground or seeking another battlefield on which to fight. They could also hide their arms and melt into the local population to reappear when and where an opportunity arises. This is exactly what has happened in Falluja.

The insurgents appear to have suffered serious losses in Falluja, but not necessarily a knockout blow. It is clear that some insurgents left Falluja before the US-led assault and embarked upon a co-ordinated series of attacks in Baquba, Samarra' and Mosul. This implies a reasonably sophisticated level of centralised command. But in military terms it is far from clear what these various attacks amount to. It is also clear that the US simply does not have sufficient troops on the ground to maintain order in several key cities at once while launching a major offensive against another.

Once Falluja is secure the US may have more troops available to put down the sporadic violence elsewhere. But it is still far from clear what message Sunni leaders have taken from the Falluja operation. Despite expectations that the fall of Falluja would break the back of the insurgency it seems to have produced unintended consequences. The insurgents were using an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 men to hold Falluja. It seems that at least half of them got away and were almost immediately deployed for attacks in other areas. This means the insurgents, abandoning their tactic of holding to territory, can wreak havoc in many more places with fewer fighters.

In Falluja they were fixed targets while the US-led force was moving. Now they become mobile while the US-led forces, especially Iraqi police and army units, become fixed targets. Analysts say the fighting in the past few days has shown the insurgents have little chance of winning a war over territory. But they can achieve tactical political objectives that could prevent Iraq's stabilisation anytime soon.

The big prize is the January 2005 elections. If the insurgents manage to have it postponed or cancelled they would emerge as winners, at least of this round. If, on the other hand, the elections are held on time, the insurgency might find it hard to sustain itself even within the Sunni Triangle.

The first signs that the interim government, headed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, may have been rattled came on Nov. 16 when Naqib hinted that the elections might be postponed. Hours later, however, Deputy Premier Barham Salih (of the PUK) rejected any suggestion that the exercise could be postponed, saying: "We have a moral pact with the Iraqi people to hold the elections".

The Syrian Political Leadership: It was speculated in March 2000 that, under the rule of Gen. Hafez Al Assad since 1970 when he took power in a Baathist coup which he called a "corrective movement", Syria was going to change for the better. Assad was then preparing his eldest surviving son, Bashar, to become the next ruler. (Assad's first son and heir apparent, Basil, died in a car crash in 1994).

Hours after Gen. Assad died on June 10, 2000, however, a small elite around key Alawite intelligence and military officers and Alawite Baath Party leader took over power in a quiet coup. Consisting mainly of figures who shun publicity, this elite assumed control as an invisible layer of authority. Most of the members of the invisible layer under Gen. Assad were either retired by the old ruler before he died or retained later by the ruling elite.

Allied to this layer are the two Vice Presidents of the Republic, Abdel Halim Khaddam who deputises for the head of state and Zuhair Masharqa who deputises for the head of the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party. The post of third vice president, held by Rifaat Al Assad, was abolished years ago as Hafez banished his younger brother; but Rifaat, who lives in Europe, still does not recognise the rule of his nephew Bashar and remains adamant on taking over power in Syria - though the ruling elite would do all it can to prevent a change to the current status quo.

The coup, hours after Bashar made then prime minister Mohammed Miro interim president on June 10, was quick and simple. The old Assad may have tried to abolish the practice of having an invisible layer of authority in favour of a visible and modern one under his son Bashar, which may explain the latter's appointment of Miro as interim ruler. But soon after Miro's appointment, the new elite moved quickly to proclaim Khaddam as an interim president. Khaddam, a Sunni from the town of Banias who began his career as a layer and Baath Party activist, has since become a pillar of the invisible layer.

Bashar, elected president in July 2000, was given limitations within which he could rule but beyond which none of his decisions would be executed. Khaddam, supposed to be among figures to be convicted in a major corruption scandal, became one of Bashar's invisible mentors.

To understand this country, one must remember that the area of Syria today was in the past millennia a melting pot for all the major civilisations the world has known. This territory was attached to the empires of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Arabs, Mongolia and the Ottomans.

Indeed, much of Syria today is a living museum. But all of Syria is ruled by the invisible layer, with President Bashar Al Assad's visible layer having struggled since mid-2000 to project a modern image for the country.