On Sunday U.S. Special Forces raided
Sukkariyeh Farm near the town of Abu Kamal five miles inside the Syrian border with Iraq. Meanwhile on Monday missiles struck the Pakistani village of Manduta in South Waziristan and took out at least two senior Taliban commanders. This was the 19th Predator strike in Pakistan since the beginning of August. Seems like the war on terrorism is back on.
The raid in Syria was particularly noteworthy. If reports are correct, it was a pinpoint raid to capture Abu Ghadian, al-Qaeda’s man in Syria, who was the group’s chief coordinator funneling arms and insurgents into Iraq. If he was in fact captured alive he may provide a profusion of useful intelligence. The computers, cell phones and other items scoped up in the raid surely will.
This operation is similar to the raid Colombia conducted in March against guerilla headquarters in Ecuador. The raid was very successful; FARC number-two man Raul Reyes was killed, and evidence was seized demonstrating the FARC’s ties to Venezuela and revealing numerous details about the personnel and inner workings of the guerilla group. Several operations quickly followed the incursion, since intelligence of this nature must be exploited while it is still hot.
In the case of the raid in Syria, secondary targets may already be in the process of being struck, in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere. It is possible that Monday’s missile attack in western Pakistan was the result of actionable intelligence collected in eastern Syria. Surely any bad guy who suspects there was anything at Sukkariyeh Farm that pertains to him has already at least attempted to go to ground.
The Syrian government condemned the strike as “serious aggression” and a “war crime.” Hezbollah decried the “blatant violation of the sovereignty of an Arab state,” sensibly not addressing the legitimacy of their predilection for aggression against non-Arab states. Iran, sensing that it could be a candidate for a similar raid, expressed grave concern. The charge that this was an act of aggression might hold up in the abstract, but raids of this type can be justified a number of ways, either as “hot pursuit” or as an act of “anticipatory self-defense” if the pursuit is not quite hot enough. A better justification is found in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001), which mandated that, inter alia, “all States shall…deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts, or provide safe havens; and prevent those who finance, plan, facilitate or commit terrorist acts from using their respective territories for those purposes against other States or their citizens.” The resolution pledged that the member state would “take all necessary steps in order to ensure the full implementation of this resolution.” In 2007 President Bush declared his intent to take cross-border defensive action against the insurgent networks, stating that the United States would “interrupt the flow of support [for insurgents in Iraq] from Iran and Syria” and “seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”
The U.S. raid was a well-planned surgical strike that took the fight into a terrorist sanctuary produced by Syrian incompetence or complicity. This was not hot pursuit but cold calculation. It was not anticipatory self-defense since the threat was not anticipated but already manifest. Syria’s inability to keep terrorists from using their territory as a base of operations (if not complicity in hosting them) obligated the United States to act. Violent non-state groups cannot operate across international borders from countries lacking either the means or motivation to stop them and expect the convention of state sovereignty to protect them. Nor can Syria expect the United States to do nothing while insurgents move and operate openly within easy reach of the forces with whom they are at war
