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Syrian bank funded insurgency with Saddam's millions
The United States has concluded that Syria helped finance the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Officials said the regime of President Bashar Assad used the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria to relay hundreds of millions of dollars to Saddam Hussein loyalists in Iraq. They said the money has been deployed to finance the insurgency against the U.S.-led coalition primarily in Iraq's Sunni Triangle. The Commercial Bank of Syria held more than $1 billion in Saddam regime accounts on the eve of the U.S.-led war in Iraq in March 2003, officials said. Most of that money stemmed from Iraqi arms and oil smuggling as well as illegal commissions obtained from Iraqi oil sales overseen by the United Nations.During a hearing by the Senate subcommittee on Nov. 15, Treasury Assistant Secretary Juan Carlos Zarate asserted that Syria has disbursed $600 million to unidentified Iraqis. Zarate, responsible for terrorist financing and financial crimes at Treasury, said a U.S. team was auditing the Commercial Bank of Syria in an attempt to trace the transfer of funds. "What we found was when we sent our investigators to Damascus, upon review of the documents and review of the transactional data, it became clear that the Syrians had, in fact, paid out the vast bulk of the amount that had existed in that particular account," Zarate said. Posted by: Mark Espinola 2004-11-18 |
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