Just like Bin Laden did in the late 1990’s, apparently Syria’s Bashir Assad declared a Holy War on the US and our presence in Iraq in 2003, according to a Telegraph article covering Paul Bremer’s new book (hat tip WorldNetDaily]:

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria secretly incited Iraq’s top Shia leader to declare holy war against US and British forces, according to Washington’s former administrator in the country.

In his new book, My Year in Iraq, Paul Bremer said he heard the explosive intelligence in October 2003 as sectarian tensions soared across the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The report came from an extremely senior source, the supreme leader of Iraq’s majority Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

According to Mr Bremer, the news was passed to him by Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a senior Shia politician involved in negotiations with the ayatollah. The Syrian leader had apparently recalled the Shia-led uprising against the British in 1920 and urged the Shia to repeat history.

The news “stunned” the US administration in Iraq. “This was an act of extraordinary irresponsibility from Syria’s president,” Mr Bremer writes. “We had good intelligence showing that many insurgents and terrorists were coming into Iraq through Syria.”

To me this is tantamount to declaring war on us. Syria better be very careful Americans do not found more instances of them calling for a Jihad on America.

The revelation that Syria’s leader was trying to stoke unrest inside Iraq goes some way to explaining Washington’s unrelenting hostility towards the Damascus regime ever since.

You think?