The following is a blog I wrote for the American Foreign Policy Council.  The original is available here on their website.

“Terrorist aggression” is what Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mu’allim termed the U.S. raid into Syria that either captured or killed Abu Ghadiya. The daylight attack took place five miles inside Syria in the town of Sukkariya near Abu Kamal. Syrian television claimed nine people were killed and 14 were wounded in the operation. A native of Mosul, Iraq, the 32-year old Ghadiya has been in charge of al-Qaeda’s extensive Syria network since 2005, when the organization declared an Islamic Emirate in Al Qaim along the Iraqi border. In February, U.S. intelligence sources named Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih (a.k.a. Abu Ghadiya) as al-Qaeda in Iraq’s top operative in Syria, tasked with funneling foreign fighters, weapons, and cash into Iraq.

This latest event on Syrian soil presents the Asad regime with a difficult problem. Several recent brazen attacks against Syria are thought to have been carried out by the West. Back in February, Hezbollah’s senior official and longtime resident on America’s most wanted list, Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated in Damascus. In September 2007, Syria’s (alleged) nuclear facility was bombed in an Israeli air raid. The silence with which the Arab governments in the region greeted the news was deafening. Now the same appears to be the case, serving to demonstrate the new low Syria has reached in its regional political standing.

In response to questions about the operation, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh explained: “The attacked area was the scene of activities of terrorist groups operating from Syria against Iraq. The latest of these groups… killed 13 police recruits in an [Iraqi] border village. Iraq had asked Syria to hand over this group which uses Syria as a base for its terrorist activities.”

Such an activist response from Iraqi officials - and such a muted response among Arab governments - would have been unthinkable before Rafiq Hariri’s assassination in Lebanon in February 2005. One might even have to reach back to the 1980s - when Syria supported Iran in its war against Iraq - to find a time when Syria was last seen as so opposed to regional Arab interests. Asad’s recent foreign policy maneuvers, in which the Syrian dictator has simultaneously supported various militant and sectarian groups with often-competing agendas, has left Damascus without regional support outside of Iran.

So far, the Syrian regime has tried not to tip its hand about potential responses. The real question, however, is whether this latest attack on Syria - the first publicly claimed by the United States - will alter the regime’s decision-making process or lead to a lasting change in Syrian behavior.