"...Syria’s borders are open to citizens of any Arab country, no visa required, so the drive up the snaking main highway over the Eastern Lebanon Mountain Range and through the official border crossing was straightforward enough. From Damascus, he was driven to the Iraqi border with two other would-be insurgents, where the three men split up. Each was given his own guide for the journey into Iraq....Abu Khalid’s anxious delay in the Iraqi desert would not last long—the insurgency’s “ratline” from the Syrian border to Baghdad was well oiled by then. (He estimates “hundreds” from Lebanon alone had already made the trip.) Soon enough, he’d be in a safe house in Baghdad with sealed windows, sharing it with 15 other Arabs from Libya, Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. He’d know them by aliases....Even at the most lethal peaks of the insurgency, the U.S. military estimated only about 5 percent of insurgents were non-Iraqi, something the Bush administration was long loathe to admit. But the foreigners punched above their weight, with veteran Arab fighters teaching insurgency tactics to Iraqis and young foreign volunteers leading by example in the first deadly waves of suicide bombings....Williams concluded that the bleed-out of insurgent tactics and techniques from Iraq had transformed the Taliban. “I don’t want to call them good guys, but the Taliban weren’t terrorists [prior to 2005],” Williams said. “They have definitely morphed under the influence of al-Qaeda into a bona fide terrorist movement”–one that doesn’t share al-Qaeda’s primary goal of attacking the United States, but has nonetheless become an effective partner against U.S. troops inside Afghanistan. Battle-hardened foreign fighters from Iraq have also emerged in locales as diverse as Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and North Africa.....Abu Khalid said he was in a hurry to get back home and get to work, more impatient than scared, and made the relatively risky decision to cross into Syria through an official border post rather than through the desert. (He declined to say which border crossing, only that it was not the same one through which he’d entered.) Once again, he shaved his beard and donned fresh clothing. (I heard from other former insurgents that they would shave several days before attempting the crossing in order to suntan cheeks left pale where their beards had been).
The border was extremely tense, he said. The Syrian regime had upped the number of border guards from 300 to some 12,000: it was his bad luck to be crossing at a period when Syria was trying to earn favor with the U.S., which had long accused the Syrian government of manipulating the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq. “The Syrians, it would seem, randomly caught people crossing the border and would inform the Americans to score points,” Abu Khalid said. “That is why I gave the guard a large bribe—so I wouldn’t be one of those.” The border guard got $200, and Abu Khalid slipped across...."
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