Observations on Syria

The battered yellow Fiat cab, its back windscreen half obscured by posters of Hezbollah's Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah, swung to a halt outside the Old City in Damascus. The heavily bearded driver scowled when I asked for a ride to the north-west of the Syrian capital. "It's all closed," he shouted as he drove off. "Haven't you heard about the American embassy?"

News of a bomb attack on the US embassy began to filter through a city still edgy from its position on the fringes of the Israel-Lebanon conflict. I set off towards the Abu Rumana diplomatic district, up a road lined with digitally enhanced posters of President Bashar al-Assad and Nasrallah smiling at each other over fields of flowers.

It seemed an unlikely romance, but support for Hezbollah and anti-Americanism have proved useful to Assad's regime, which western leaders increasingly regard as the region's prime troublemaker. "The strings are being pulled from Syria, from Damascus," Tony Blair had told an Israeli TV station two days earlier.

Shunned by the west, Damascus relies on alliances with anti-US forces, from Iran and Venezuela (via George Galloway) to Hamas and Hezbollah, to bolster its international position and boost support for the government.

But with the attempted attack on the US embassy (three attackers dead; little damage), rhetoric tipped into reality. The end of the street was ankle-deep in water and crowded with soldiers in sand-coloured flak jackets, marshalled by plain-clothes mukhabarat - the secret police, their handguns tucked into waistbands. Overhead, marines perched on the embassy roof, assault rifles trained on the crowd.

The speed and efficiency of the clean-up was startling. Just two hours later, there was little sign of the attack. Cleaners were clearing broken glass and debris with high-pressure hoses, leaving only a scattering of bullet holes in the embassy wall and a stray clot of flesh on the pavement.

The government is eager to sweep evidence of such attacks under the carpet. An eyewitness said the bombing had been carried out by a small group "shouting religious slogans" - the Assad government's worst fear. As a largely secular police state run by a religious minority, Syria walks a tightrope between strategic support for foreign "resistance" groups and a long-standing fear of domestic political Islam, which it has suppressed brutally.

Anti-western feeling is less overt in Damascus than in Beirut, where billboards sponsored by Hezbollah proclaim the message "Made in America" next to images of wounded children and shattered apartment blocks, but it is growing. "There are many people here who hate America, especially since the war," said Ahmed, a student watching workers remove the mess from outside the embassy. "But perhaps it was Pakistanis - they are more extreme."

That would be convenient, but the 12 September attack suggests that Syria has a home-grown Islamist problem even its famously effective intelligence services are struggling to contain. Before driving Syria further into the arms of Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran, Bush and Blair would be wise to consider the risk of creating another nursery for anti-western militants. It was a quick and easy job to clean up this small-scale suicide mission; the traces of a better-organised attack would prove more difficult to erase.

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