‘Assad was angry at Hezbollah for ruining chance for peace with Israel’

Syrian President Bashar Assad believed Israeli-Syrian peace talks were torpedoed by the fact that Hezbollah had blamed only Israel and not the US for a 2008 assassination, according to a Lebanese source quoted on Wikileaks.

The whistleblower website this week published an email in which an analyst for Texas-based intelligence company Stratfor reports, quoting a reliable source, that Syria was “very upset with Hezbollah’s chief Hassan Nasrallah” because the sheikh’s eulogy of Imad Mughniyeh – who died in a 2008 car bombing in Damascus – denounced Israel exclusively for the assassination, without mentioning the possibility that US agents could also have been responsible.

Israel was widely blamed for the killing, though Jerusalem has never admitted to involvement.

“Assad feels that by limiting the accusation to Israel, Nasrallah was jeopardizing Syria’s attempts to convince Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to relaunch the peace talks with Damascus,” Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla wrote on March 7, 2008, about three weeks after Mughniyeh was killed.

Later that year, Olmert, who served as prime minister until March 2009, announced that he had started indirect peace talks with Syria. “We are talking seriously, and in my estimation very soon the negotiations will have to be direct,” he said in July 2008.

‘Assad felt that by eliminating the role of parties other than Israel in assassinating Mughniyeh, Nasrallah was essentially asserting that the Mossad has penetrated Syrian intelligence’

Hezbollah blamed Israel for the assassination and vowed revenge. Israel denied responsibility, instead suggesting that he was killed by rival factions with the organization.

According to the source — who Stratford analysts consider somewhat reliable — Assad expressed his anger about Nasrallah blaming only Israel for the assassination “through his own channels of communication.”

“Assad felt that by eliminating the role of parties, other than Israel, in assassinating Mughniyeh, Nasrallah was essentially asserting that the Mossad has penetrated Syrian intelligence,” Bhalla wrote, quoting the Lebanese source. “Politically, it would have been more correct to include the CIA as well because Assad can always say that Arabs do not have the means to stop the USA, whereas it would reflect negatively on them to fail with the Mossad.”

In a second email, Bhalla quotes a Fatah military source saying that both Iran and Syrian had “unambiguously” told Hezbollah not to avenge Mughniyeh’s assassination.

“Both countries are concerned that such a retaliation against the Jewish state might ignite a new war that does not spare Syria and Iran,” Bhalla quotes the source, which Stratford considered reliable.

Israel accused Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran of planning and executing a series of attacks against Israeli targets in India, Georgia and Thailand last month, which coincided with the fourth anniversary of the Mughniyeh assassination. Hezbollah denied any involvement in the attacks

Wikileaks recently published more than five million emails that Stratfor analysts exchanged between July 2004 and December 2011. Stratfor, which calls itself a “provider of geopolitical analysis,” is believed to provide intelligence to corporations and government agencies, such as the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

After the leaked emails were first published, Stratfor released a statement calling the leaks “a deplorable, unfortunate — and illegal — breach of privacy.” The statement further said that while some of the emails might be accurate others could be forged. “We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them.”