Wednesday, August 13, 2008
In the Middle East
There's nothing like a little espionage and mystery to enliven one's day.
When you play with these big boys, somebody always gets hurt...
When you play with these big boys, somebody always gets hurt...
P. David Hornik has this at Front Page Magazine's website:
"Britain’s Sunday Times reports that Brig.-Gen. Muhammad Suleiman, the key aide to Syrian president Bashar Assad who was assassinated last August 2, had been the one supplying Hezbollah with Russian-made SA-8 anti-aircraft missiles that threatened Israel’s air supremacy over Lebanon.
The Times cites the London-based Saudi paper Al-Sharq al-Awsat as saying Suleiman was 'senior even to the defense minister' and 'knew everything.' He had been Bashar Assad’s personal mentor since 1994, and after becoming prime minister in 2000 Assad appointed Suleiman as his operations officer with responsibility for protecting the regime.
The Times notes that Suleiman 'was killed by a single shot to the head as he sat in the garden of his summer house near the northern port city of Tartus. Nobody heard the shot, which appears to have been fired from a speedboat by a sniper, possibly equipped with a silencer.'
In other words, a highly sophisticated job that seems to point to Israel. Right after the assassination, though, with speculations swirling as to who was responsible, and some even saying it was an inside job by Assad himself because Suleiman knew too much about Assad’s involvement in the killing of Rafik Hariri and other Lebanese figures, it was thought that Israel wasn’t a likely suspect because of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s push for Syrian-Israeli peace talks."
