Massacre of Syrian Soldiers in Iraq Raises Risk of Widening Conflict

By Duraid Adnan and Rick Gladstone, NY Times, March 4, 2013
BAGHDAD—More than 40 Syrian soldiers who had sought temporary safety in Iraq from rebel fighters along the border were killed on Monday in an attack by unidentified gunmen as the Iraqi military was transporting the soldiers back to Syria in a bus convoy, the Iraqi government said.

At least seven Iraqis were also reported killed in the attack, which appeared to be the most serious spillover of violence into Iraq since the Syrian conflict began two years ago.

Ali al-Musawi, a spokesman for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, accused “armed groups from the Iraqi and Syrian side” of coordinating the attack, which he described as an ambush. He said Iraq would deploy more security forces on the border. Middle East experts said such a move raised the risk that the Iraqis could become more directly enmeshed in the Syrian conflict, underscoring how it threatens to destabilize a wider swath of the region.

“We will not allow any terrorist to enter the Iraqi lands,” Mr. Musawi said in a telephone interview. He said the ambush was partly the consequence of “sectarian speeches that encourage people to hate each other.”

The attack threatens to inflame the sectarian tensions that already divide Iraq, where a Sunni minority sympathizes with Syria’s overwhelmingly Sunni opposition.

Mr. Musawi did not specify which armed groups he considered responsible for the attack, but it was clear that he meant Sunni militant extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq. These groups have become increasingly emboldened by popular Sunni resentment against Mr. Maliki, a Shiite who is accused by critics of trying to marginalize Iraq’s Sunni population since the American occupation of Iraq ended in 2011.

The Al Nusra Front, a Sunni insurgent force in Syria that has become known for its audacious attacks on government targets, has links with Al Qaeda in Iraq, and American officials have blacklisted it as a terrorist organization. But many Iraqi Sunnis sympathize with the Syrian insurgents, who are overwhelmingly Sunni and whose clan relations span national boundaries.

“A number of us have been saying that Iraq is the one most affected by the meltdown in Syria,” said Joshua M. Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and curator of the Syria Comment blog, which has chronicled the Syrian conflict.

“In that region, the tribes go right across the Syrian border, and most of the people are related by blood,” he said. “They’re in one common struggle.”