Turned Down Offer – Made Bad Choice – Payday Coming!
October 21, 2005
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Two years ago I could see the handwriting on the wall for Bashar Assad, the Syrian President. He was caught in a trap and had to make a hard decision – follow the way of Libya, or stick with the arena of confusion in the Islamic world. I closed Archive Prophecy Update 143B, October 26, 2003, with the following paragraph.
“I expect Syria’s military, political, and religious situation to become increasingly unstable beneath the surface, and would not be surprised if a Sunni led coup replaced Bashar Assad in the next few years.”
The Hariri assassination investigation report has left Assad in a very precarious position. The following article from the Jerusalem Post, by the Associated Press, is the initial skeleton of the report.
BEGIN EXTRACT FROM JERUSALEM POST
UN: Top Syrian, Lebanese Officials Involved in Hariri Hit
Associated Press, THE JERUSALEM POST
October 21, 2005
A UN investigation concluded that high-ranking Syrian and Lebanese security officials were involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, according to a report released Thursday.
The strongly worded report by chief investigator Detlev Mehlis said the two nations’ intelligence services kept tabs on Hariri before his assassination by wiretapping his phone, and there was evidence a telecommunications antenna was jammed near the scene of the car bomb that killed him and 20 others on Feb. 14.
The decision to assassinate Hariri “could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security official and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services,” the report said.
Mehlis’ 53-page report accused Syrian authorities of try ing to mislead his
investigation, and direclty accused Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa of lying in a letter sent to his commission.
The commission said Syria’s cooperation in form – but not substance – “has impeded the investigation and made it difficult to follow leads established by the evidence collected from a variety of sources.”
“If the investigation is to be completed, it is essential that the government of Syria fully cooperate with the investigating authorities, including by allowing interviews to be held outside Syria and for interviewees not to be accompanied by Syrian officials,” it said.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan gave the probe a three-month mandate when it began its work on June 16 but said it could be extended for three more months if necessary. In August, Mehlis received an extension beyond the original Sept. 15 deadline.
Mehlis said the investigation is not complete and must be continued with Lebanese judicial and security authorities in the lead.
Several lines of investigation still need to be pursued, he said. They include jamming devices in Hariri’s convoy that were functioning at the time of the bombing. It appears there was interference with a telecommunication antenna at the crime scene at the time Hariri was killed in a massive car bomb, Mehlis wrote.
In Lebanon,
authorities had increased security ahead of the report’s findings. Many there blame Syria for the Feb.
14 assassination of Hariri, a former prime minister whose motorcade was bombed on a Beirut street, killing him and 20 others. Syria has denied involvement.
Hariri’s death led to demonstrations against Syria and magnified the international pressure on Damascus to withdraw its troops, which it eventually did. The Security Council approved a probe into Hariri’s assassination on April 8.
The report said a Syrian witness living in Lebanon who claimed to have worked for Syrian intelligence in Lebanon told the commission that “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials decided to assassinate Rafik Hariri” about two weeks after the UN Security Council adopted a resolution in September 2004 demanding the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.
The witness, who was not identified, claimed a senior Lebanese security official went to Syria several times to plan the crime. At the beginning of January 2005, a high-ranking Syrian officer posted in Lebanon told the witness that “Hariri was a big problem to Syria.”
“Approximately a month later the officer told the witness that there soon would be an `earthquake’ that would re-write the history of Lebanon,” the report said.
END EXTRACT FROM JERUSALEM POST
Over a year and a half ago, Assad was offered a deal by the US similar to that offered to Libya, and Bashar made a very bad choice when he turned it down. The account of the offer follows in Archive Prophecy Update 161C.
SPECIAL PROPHECY UPDATE NUMBER 161C
March 5, 2004
Syria Makes a Very Bad Choice
I have always believed and taught that the most likely part of the old Roman Empire, which would foster the rise of the Antichrist, would be Syria. Syria has been hanging suspended between two choices: (1) Turn toward the United States in order to avoid sanctions, and to gain support from the western world in a war on terror, or, (2) Turn toward Iran to make an alliance and continue to give support to all the terrorist groups. On February 28 Syria apparently made its choice. The Iranian Defense Minister, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, came to Damascus and signed a new military pact with the Syrian Defense Minister, General Mustufa Tias. I believe this is a clear sign that President Assad has made his choice to put his trust in an Iran-Syria Axis to protect his administration from a coup by terrorist groups in his own country. President Assad has been active recently in communications with Washington to see what they would give him in the way of security if he should choose to give up sponsoring the many terrorist group offices in Syria, and Hizbollah in Lebanon.
Really, he did not have much of a choice.
Had he turned pro-west and resisted the terrorist groups, his regime would have been overthrown in a matter of weeks. Syria’s new military pact with Iran likely contains an Iranian promise to invest in additional long range Scud-C missiles, now in mass production at Syria’s underground missile facility near Hamah, which is somewhat ironic in that the northern extent of Israel’s territory, after it defeats Syria at the end of the tribulation period, will extend to Hamah. The biblical name for Hamah is Hamath.
Ezekiel 47:17 – And the border from the sea shall be H az
ar-enan, the border of Damascus, and
the north northward, and the border of Hamath. And this is the north side.
Genesis 15:18 – In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:
Ezekiel 47:19 – And the south side southward, from Tamar even to the waters of strife in Kadesh, the river to the great sea. And this is the south side southward.
If you want to envision the size of the Abrahamic Land Grant promised to the descendants of Abraham through Jacob (Israel), then go southwest from the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip along the coastline of the Mediterranean 35 miles and place a point on the shoreline. Then draw a line directly east from that point until you hit the Euphrates River of Iraq. That is the southern border of the land God promised to the seed of Abraham through his grandson, the man whom God renamed Israel, the man Jacob, the son of Isaac, the promised seed God gave through Sarah.
The northern border of the land grant may be visualized by finding Hamah or Hama in north central Syria, and then drawing an east-west line through it, which ends on the Mediterranean to the west, and on the Euphrates River to the east. This is the northern border of Abraham’s God given Land Grant. As you can see, this is a very large tract of land, 95 percent of which is occupied by descendants of Abraham through Ishmael’s twelve sons, the six sons of Abraham by Keturah, and Moab and Ammon, the two sons of Abraham’s nephew Lot by his own daughters. They are identified generally as Arabs, and some 95 percent of them are
of the Islamic faith. Since they believe that the promises of God come through Abraham’s son Ishmael through Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s handmaiden, you can see the basic reason for the hatred between Arabs and Jews that has only intensified with the passage of the centuries (See Prophecy Updates 67 and 68 in the Archives).
I am confident that the new military pact will undoubtedly transfer the information necessary for the manufacture of the advanced Shihab-3 missile in Syria, as well as the financing for greater production of long-range artillery and ammunition.
The United States and Europe wanted Syria to follow Libya’s lead, but Bashar Assad was really in no political position to do so without being overthrown by the terrorist elements in his own country.
There were four things the United States wanted Syria to give up.
(1) Scrap your long-range missile program.
(2) Scrap your WMD program.
(3) Drive all the terrorist groups out of Syria.
(4) Stop supporting Hizbollah in Lebanon.
I feel confident it was a choice Bashar Assad simply could not make. Iran and Syria are of the same mind on these four issues. Had Syria chosen to do those four things, it would have cut Iran’s flow of weaponry and the movement of terrorists to Hizbollah. Syria was left without any military backup with the fall of Iraq, so Assad has chosen to shore up and expand its existing ties with Iran, and create new military ties with them for a joint defense against the west. The strong showing by the radical Shiite hardliners in Iran’s elections last month was a strong element that Assad considered in making his choice. Iranian Shiites will continue to have a direct pipeline via Damascus airport for massive shipments of military hardware to the large Hizbollah terrorist army, which it has supported in southern Lebanon for years, as have the Syrians.
Rest assured that Israel has three very definite targets on its mind for the possibility of future air strikes, namely, the Syrian underground and surface facilities near Hamah, the Iranian nuclear complex centered ten miles south of Bushehr, and selected weapons supply depots in southern Lebanon (See Prophecy Update 160A).
By no stretch of the imagination will Iraq remain a democracy any great length of time after the election of a new government. It will take less than two years after Iraqi elections for most of Iraq to become an Islamic Republic.
And, when it does, there will be a military Islamic union stretching from Iran to Lebanon through Iraq and Syria.
Contrary to today’s popular belief, the antichrist will not come out of Europe, but out of the area that includes Syria, Lebanon, and northern Iraq (See Special Prophecy Update 74B and Whole Numbered Prophecy Updates 62 to 69).
And, contrary to today’s popular belief, the 10 toes of Daniel’s statue and the 10 horns on his fourth beast, which are the same 10 nations that will make up the coalition of nations that attack Israel in the last days, will not come out of Europe, but out of the southern half of the old Roman Empire, which included lands from Morocco to Iran, and as far north as Turkey (See Prophecy Updates 54 and 78).
Daniel 2:42 – And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken.
Daniel 7:24 – And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from t
he first, and he shall subdue three kings.
Revelation 17:12,13 – And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. [13] These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.