Syriana, The Sequel?

The film Syriana didn't actually have anything to do with Syria, so maybe director Steve Gaghan should consider a sequel spotlighting the real place. There's certainly plenty of intrigue here for another intricate Middle East political thriller.

Take last Friday's assassination of Abu al-Qaqa, and how it may be connected to the Syrian regime's assistance to the jihad in Iraq. The background is that Syria has its own problems with Muslim extremists. In 1982, President Bashar al-Assad's father faced a Sunni Muslim Brotherhood uprising, and crushed it by killing some 20,000 Syrians in the notorious siege of Hama. Historically, Baathism's slogans have been secular in nature: nationalism and socialism. But even under Hafez, Syria found it useful to coordinate with non-Sunni fundamentalists, whether the Iranian regime or Hizballah in Lebanon. Getting involved with the Sunni resistance in Iraq, however, always risked a certain Sunni blowback.

The question now is, Is the assassination in Aleppo of a fiery Sunni preacher, Mahmoud al-Aghasi, alias Abu al-Qaqa, a sign that the regime is getting burned by its Iraq meddling? Whatever the truth about the mysterious al-Qaqa, he was a colorful and popular figure. He drove around in a Mercedes. Cassette tapes of his sermons sold in the souks of Syria. Some people believe that Abu al-Qaqa was a hardcore radical aligned with Al Qaeda's global jihad. Some of his supporters were caught red-handed trying to stage a terrorist attack in downtown Damascus. Others think al-Qaqa has been working in cahoots with the Syrian regime, attracting young radicals with his sermons and sending them to Iraq. Jihadist websites have increasingly been warning not to trust al-Qaqa.

Was al-Qaqa killed by a Syrian regime entity, perhaps an effort to shut down the underground jihad railroad as a gesture to better relations with the U.S.? Or was he rubbed out by disgruntled jihadists, who felt he had used and betrayed them? Damascus-based Syrian analyst Sami Moubayed has written a fascinating piece on the guy. Moubayed quotes al-Qaqa comrade Samir Abu Khashabeh accusing the CIA of killing al-Qaqa because he "was an enemy of the American project in Iraq". Okay, you have a radical pop preacher knocked off either by 1) Syrian intelligence, 2) Osama's agents or 3) the CIA. And the preacher's nom de guerre? Even Hollywood couldn't come up with that one.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo