Evidence Mounting of New Palestinian Insurgency Offensive to Coincide With Iranian-Syrian Push

Jason Fuchs, Global Information System:

By early April 2005, as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process progressed in the form of the Quartet’s “road map”, there were growing indications that the current state of relative calm belied preparations by the assorted Palestinian groups to initiate a new anti-Israeli offensive and, in the process, for Tehran and Damascus to regain the strategic initiative. READ MORE

On April 6, 2005, GIS sources reported that, far from moving towards a peaceful resolution, “the Palestinians are using the current ‘lull’ for a massive build-up of capabilities far beyond just the recovery and rebuilding of networks hit by Israel”.

As HAMAS’ Damascus-based commander Khaled Masha’al explained to a meeting of the HizbAllah leadership in Beirut on April 1, 2005: “This truce is a period for pause, and to avoid destruction and sabotage.” Masha’al attended the meeting along with HizbAllah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah to sign a cooperation accord between the two groups reportedly at the behest of Tehran.

Significantly, GIS sources noted that the Palestinian military build-up had been facilitated “with the active participation of the Palestinian ‘security forces’ and with tacit though active support from Egyptian military intelligence (Mukhabarat el-Khabeya) in the transfer of weapons into the Gaza Strip”. The participation of elements of Egyptian intelligence had proven key in the fast-progressing militarization of the Gaza Strip, particularly with regard to the smuggling of short-to-medium-range rockets (mostly new Kassam-models) and advanced shoulder-launched surface-to-air-missiles (MANPADs) which would greatly complicate any Israeli Defense Force (IDF) responses which encompassed airborne operations.

Questions remained about the stance of PA Pres. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in this build-up. While, according to published reports by Israel’s Shin Bet (SHABAK), Pres. Abbas had proven helpful in ordering Palestinian security forces to prevent specific attacks when relayed precise information by Israeli intelligence, Pres. Abbas had not acted to dismantle any of the “resistance” infrastructure, including (but not limited to) leadership compounds, training sites, and bomb- and weapons-making factories. Further, the military buildup which GIS sources reported in April 2005 had occurred under Pres. Abbas’ leadership, but apparently without his direction. It was this combination of factors which had left Israeli political circles more divided than ever over how to handle the new Palestinian leader.

It appeared that Pres. Abbas, though not an ideological ally of the Iranian or Syrian governments, recognized that he did not wield enough power — politically or militarily — to stand up to the Iranian- and Syrian-dominated militant groups in the PA. However, whether or not Pres. Abbas could be strengthened in order to facilitate open rebellion against Tehran and Damascus and their HAMAS, HizbAllah, and Islamic Jihad was not the question: many policymakers in Israel and the West failed to realize that a Palestinian leader would not be able stand up to the Palestinian Islamist collective and their state sponsors while that axis remained as strong as it continued to be through April 2005.

Even the late PA Pres. Yasir Arafat, the strongest and most significant leader in the history of the Palestinian national movement, had always operated to an extent at the behest of a variety of governments and their intelligence services, from the Soviet Union in the 1950s to the Iranian and Iraqi governments throughout the last quarter of century until his death in November 2004.

While Arafat had proactively worked with these governments to facilitate his broader anti-Israeli strategy, Pres. Abbas, it seemed, stood aside to allow these outside forces to do their work, mainly in order to ensure the perpetuity of his Administration. While this did affect the closeness of cooperation between the highest echelons of the PA and the now-broken Tehran-Damascus-Baghdad axis, thus facilitating greater coordination of operations within the territories, the ultimate result was the same: the unhindered domination by the leading regional powers of the Palestinian war against Israel.

Any doubts which the Palestinian President might have retained about the willingness and ability of the Iranian/Syrian networks to eliminate him at will would likely have been answered by the March 31, 2005, incident in which fighters from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades opened fire on Pres. Abbas’ Ramallah office while he was inside. While the Aqsa Brigades were technically a wing of Fatah, they work in close concert with PA-based Iranian operatives. The message to Pres. Abbas from Tehran was clear: “Not only can we remove you when we decide, but we can do it from within your own party.”

The prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran in the short-to-medium term only further stressed the fact that Iran was not in a position to be intimidated by the West, much less by the PA. As chief Iranian negotiator Sirus Nasseri declared on March 1, 2005, in the Iranian daily Aftab-e Yazd: “The U.S. and the EU should get used to the idea of a nuclear Iran.”

There existed the possibility that the Iranian-sponsored build-up in the PA was, at least in part, intended to act as a deterrent and possible response in the event the US or Israel decided to attack and attempt to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program. Tehran had begun the process of leaking details of its contingency plans in the event of a US or Israeli strike to the Arab press in late March 2005. Of note was that of central nature to the strategy was extensive planning to strike targets in Israel and Western-allied states in the Gulf. Apparently as part of Tehran’s information campaign, a report on Iranian military planning on March 29, 2005, in the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat warned:

“Iran's military command has taken into account the possibility of a disruption of [communications] between military posts and the central command ... As a precautionary measure, the command has ordered all military and Revolutionary Guards sectors to respond swiftly — within no more than an hour and without waiting for orders — against pre-selected targets, [in light of anticipated] international political pressures that might force Iran to not respond …The objective is to deliver a harsh blow to the US and its ally Israel at the outset, and then to expand the arena, in light of international efforts to contain the crisis and limit its scope and intensity, so as to ignite the whole region. This way Iran will assure its right to respond ... All the countries that host US military forces — particularly Iraq, CENTCOM [US Central Command] in Al-Siliya [Qatar], the Al-'Odeid base in Qatar, and the Fifth Fleet command in Bahrain — are among the sites Iran might consider as targets. However, the biggest fish of all is Israel, which is likely to suffer ‘hellfire’ — particularly when the Iranian response ‘will use [varied] weapons and reach other targets that the aggressors are not expecting them [to reach]’.” However, it appeared that the use of Palestinian Islamist groups to reignite a full-scale offensive would preempt any US or Israeli military plans and, in fact, the timing of the resumption of open hostilities operated with the goal of so drastically changing the regional situation with its intensity that the Israel and the West would by necessity be forced to shift their strategic priorities and, in effect, prevent the US and/or Israel from striking Iranian military targets. Thus, the military build-up in the PA served not as a weapon-of-last-resort to be used in the event of an attack on Iran, but rather primarily as tool to be exercised to secure Iranian and Syrian regional objectives, including the preservation — and culmination — of the Iranian nuclear weapons program before any attack could occur.

While Washington remained implacably anti-Iranian in the eyes of Tehran, the Iranian leadership continued to recognize the vast potential for its relationship with Europe both economically and insofar as Europe’s ability to restrain the US. While Tehran continued to publicly welcome dialogue with the so-called EU-3 on the nuclear issue, it also saw fit to directly threaten Europe at the same time, making clear that the arms of the Iranian Islamic Revolution reached far beyond the borders of Iran. Iranian Pres. Hojjat ol-Eslam.

Mohammed Khatami had warned at a press conference (reported by the conservative Iranian daily Kayhan on February 24, 2005): “The Europeans will suffer more than Iran if they decide to capitulate to US pressure.” He later added again in Kayhan on March 15 and reprinted by IRNA on March 16, 2005: “The Europeans will bear the responsibility for what might happen.”

Kayhan, closely associated with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamene‘i also carried a message to Europe from the former Iranian representative to the IAEA, Dr Ali Akbar Salehi. On March 9, 2005, Salehi explained: “Europe should understand that its security is closely linked to Iran's security.”

See:

Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis, February 16, 2005: Who Benefits From Hariri’s Death?

Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis, March 9, 2005: Hariri’s Death Now Seen as a Planned Catalyst for Resumed Major Conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Threats to European security were not to be taken lightly. As GIS sources reported on September 20, 2004, three groups of mujahedin fighters linked to al-Qaida, and trained in Bosnia in the triangle between Tuzla, Zenica and Brcko (in the village of Maoca) had left Bosnia, apparently destined for Italy in early September 2004, to assess the viability of targeting the funeral arrangements for the then-ailing Pope in Rome. All three groups, each unaware of each other’s missions or even that other groups were destined for Italy, had been given different assignments within this broad framework. A primary contact for the groups in Western Europe was a Salafist activist in Vienna named Muhedin Aleta who frequently visited Maoca and/or the village Rahic in order to relay funds. His brother, Mustapha Aleta, had received training in Iraq and Turkey, though it remained unclear if Mustapha was directly involved in the Italian operation.

See: Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily: September 20, 2004: Three Bosnian Mujahedin Groups Scope Attacks in Rome During Pope’s Funeral. [Reprinted in full below].

Whether or not orders would be issued to attack targets related to the Pope’s funeral in early April 2005, the activities of the three groups remained an indication of the broader threat to European targets; a vulnerability that the armed Islamist international and its primary state sponsor, Iran, had already sought to exploit.

The eventual resumption of the intifada, perhaps sooner rather than later, would also prove particularly beneficial to Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Asad. Pres. Asad faced continued difficulties not only in Lebanon but also among the Syrian leadership in Damascus. Through April 2005 the situation remained unclear; GIS sources confirmed that the situation remained “confusing” with a great deal of “contradictory information” emanating from the Syrian capital. The confusion began on March 16, 2005, when rumors began to circulate throughout the region of a leadership struggle in Damascus. The first published report came from the Lebanese Foundation for Peace (LFP), a US and Israeli based opposition group, which reported on its website on March 16:

“A Coup d' Etat took place in Damascus late last night. Intelligence reports coming from within the Syrian Military Command indicate the following: A rebellion split The Syrian Army in two factions. Since yesterday, Damascus is under the de facto control of the Syrian Army, under the command of Syrian Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan, and supported by Syrian Intelligence General Rustom Ghazaleh, Syrian military General Ali Safi, and Firas Tlass son of former Minister of Defense, Mustafa Tlass. The group rebelled against the decision of President Bashar el Assad to withdraw from Lebanon and seized the Damascus military yesterday. Around 3 am, Damascus time, the Syrian Air Force bombarded two military airfields around Damascus, the Air force base of Dumair, and the Air force base of Katana. Also, late night around 3 am, the Syrian Air force bombarded military positions of the Syrian Army west of the city of Homs. President Bachar el Assad retreated secretly to the city of Aleppo where he is temporarily holding ground. He is massing special forces troops loyal to him and preparing himself to take back Damascus by force.”

GIS sources detected similar rumors from separate sources the same day and, according to one GIS source, a number of US news networks were given similar retellings of the day’s events. Despite this, GIS sources could not confirm these reports and, indeed, by April 6, 2005, it did appear that Pres. Asad remained in control of the Syrian Government. However, GIS sources did note that Pres. Asad had indeed spent a lot of time in Aleppo of late. What that indicated, though, other than giving credence to one facet of the initial reports, remained unclear. At the very least, though, someone in Damascus had purposefully organized a string of leaks to attempting to appraise the international community, specifically the US it appeared based on the channels used, of the possibility of an internally inspired “regime change” in Syria. The implications of this alone for Pres. Asad remained stark and would likely only emphasize the need, in his eyes, for the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraqi intifada in order to regain Arab unity again Israel, the US and the West and distract attention from the degrading situation in Lebanon; a situation Syria continued to seek to keep at “steady boiling point” by means of small-scale warfare designed to exacerbate ethnic and sectarian divides in order to prove the necessity of the Syrian presence.

Thus, from Ramallah to Beirut to Baghdad and even Cairo, the Islamist-jihadists and their state sponsors—so comfortable in the language of revolution and revolt—found themselves in a race against a new revolutionary movement in their midst. As the Qatari writer Youssef Ibrahim put it in an article in The Gulf News in mid-March 2005:

“From Casablanca to Kuwait City, what Bush says mirrors, reinforces and, in fact, reflects what has long been in the heart: A yearning for human rights, justice, freedom, rule of law, transparency, limits on power and women’s rights. In short civilization as we know it today in the 21st Century. The call for these most basic of rights has been murmured for a long time…Its intensity differs vastly from country to country, but a common feature underpinning everything is the lifting of that fear which for decades has constricted the Arab mind … By now all the world knows the slogan for this nascent peoples’ Arab revolt is kifaya (enough) a word which will enter dictionaries, just as the Palestinian intifada did. It is both emphatic and vague enough to be all encompassing yet effective: enough of autocrats, enough corruption, enough occupation and enough repression. It has acquired magical and perhaps lasting power.”1

It was this power that the jihadists now sought to target by reigniting the Palestinian intifada, intensifying the insurgency in Iraq, and, if necessary carrying the fight back to the heart of the West into the cities of the US and Western Europe.

Footnote:

1. http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/print2.asp?ArticleID=156206.