Syrians dig in for battle

Press, 13 May 1981, Page 8

Syrians dig in for battle

By

ROBERT FISK

of “The

Times” Chtaura, Lebanon

Syria is preparing a 16km long and Bkm wide battlefield in Lebanon in readiness for the Israeli attack which President Hafez Assad of Syria now seems to regard as inevitable.

On the wide plain of the Bekaa Valley, from the Syrian frontier at Masnaa, across to the mountains above Beirut, the Syrian Army has laid down field after field of anti-aircraft guns, heavy artillery, mortar positions and tracked armoured vehicles, some of them so new that fresh paint gleams on their metal. Tanks have been dug in along the slopes of Mount Lebanon overlooking the Bekaa, beside the rusting skilift at Deir al-Baidour and along the thin line of ridges to the north.

Almost every country lane off the main Damascus-

Beirut highway is now scarred by tank tracks, leading innocently off into orchards and vineyards. Yesterday the Syrian Special Forces, the shock troops of President-Assad’s brother, Rifaat, also made their appearance around the market town of Chtaura in their familiar red-and-grey uniforms.

One battery of 5.A.M.6 anti-aircraft missiles has — the weapons which the Israelis threaten to attack — been moved farther away from its original site just south of Chtaura, but the missiles at Rayak and Deir Zeinoun are still in place. Extra Syrian checkpoints have been set up on the Beirut road and heavy military vehicles yesterday drove at high speed along the highway. I had to drive my own car right off the main road to avoid a collision with a So-viet-built self-propelled auto-

matic anti-aircraft vehicle, which was careering towards Chtaura. The soldier on top of the vehicle, a Z.5.U.23-4, was leaning out of the hatchway just beneath the big radar dish fixed to the roof. Parallel with this military activity there has emerged the familiar xenophobia of the Syrian secret police whose Leyland Range-Rovers and Mercedes limousines now cruise the roads of the Bekaa Valley every few minutes.

Only I.6km from the Deir Zeinoun missile battery, two men in a white Mercedes ordered my car to stop and insisted that the two women travelling with me— one of them a diplomat — “should transfer to their vehicle.”

When I refused to comply, the bigger of the two men, wearing an open-necked white shirt and perspiring profusely, pulled from his belt a bright silver Walther pistol and brandished it in a

very alarming manner. When I started shouting at him, he also pulled out a Syrian police identity card, stamped with a small eagle at the bottom left-hand corner.

Only when I again refused to do as I was told did he place the second man in the back of my car and order me to follow him with the two women to the Syrian secret police headquarters in Chtaura. Just short of our destination, however, I turned my car suddenly across the stream of traffic, losing the gunman in front of us, and drove at breakneck speed through the gates of the local Lebanese gendarmerie.

Here the second armed man found himself rather unhappily surrounded by Lebanese “Squad 16” security units who clearly bore no great love towards the Syrians. Even then it took a Lebanese Army lieutenant more than an hour to per-

suade the police station to let him go. . It was scarcely safer in Beirut, where shells began falling into residential areas on both sides of the Green Line that divides the city. The main streets of western Beirut were deserted as loudspeaker vans drove past flats advising the occupants to stay indoors. At one point rockets exploded every 30 seconds beside the Corniche and near Hamra Street. Mr Adul Halim Khaddam, the Syrian Foreign Minister, was supposed to have returned to Beirut yesterday for further talks with the rival militias whose shells were being fired over the city.

But the Israeli-Syrian crisis overtook events and Lebanon’s battlefield in Beirut has been temporarily neglected by Damascus in favour of the bigger battlefield that might very soon develop in the Bekaa Valley.