(Middle East Quarterly) Matthew Levitt - The Syrian government is the longest-standing member of the U.S. State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, having been so designated in 1979. In February 2008, the U.S. Treasury Department released a collection of documents known as the Sinjar records, which provide details of 700 foreign nationals who entered Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007. The records were found in October 2007 by U.S. troops at Sinjar on the Iraqi-Syrian border. The Sinjar documents identified four members of a key terrorist facilitation and finance network operating out of Syria in support of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. intelligence officer Adam Boyd noted in November 2008 that for "every example of cooperation from Syria, there are an equal number of incidents that are not helpful." The writer is a senior fellow and director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near Policy.
2010-01-21 08:47:38Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive