http://www.orf.at/?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.orf.at%2Fticker%2F326847.html

Karl, I wouldn’t disagree with that if you paid me, but that wasn’t my point. All I was asking was whether he could be a Syrian national, and pointing out that in most countries you can’t simply shrug off your citizenship.
I only mentioned passports as an example. It’s possible to be a Brit (Israeli, Latvian, Monagasian, …) without ever holding a passport of those countries.

I chat online to some gay men in Syria and am forever urging caution in how they access the internet.

Not only is Syria redolent of the chilliest of the cold war communist states it is also spook city with plots and counterplots between nations and their spys that would rival a le carre novel.

The British FCO/MI5 have been up to some very strange things in Syria over the past few years.

They are in endless engagement with Syria forever co-sponsoing seminars hosted by DIFID and senior members of the Bar Council for instance (ive posted on this before).

Gsirrah do you know Syria well? I am trying to do a bit of detective work over identifying certain officials.

Do you have an e-mail address I can contact you at?

From south Lebanon, we went to Syria to meet the President, Foreign Minister, other Ministers and parliamentarians, the British ambassador and many others. The President lived for a long time in the UK. He is a charming and open man who, for a long time, was not going to be President and therefore took on the style of an ordinary western citizen. He is very popular in his country because he does not have a grandiose or fine-living style. He is keen to deliver significant reform in Syria, to open up the country and to improve the economic opportunities of the people, but he made it clear that the situation in the region made that difficult. Shortly after he took over, there was what has been called a “Damascus spring”—a sort of opening up. It is difficult to continue such reforms when there is such bitter division all around and organised extreme Islamist groups in the region.

The President stressed that the Syrian regime is secular and takes a tough line against Islamist insurgents, but that it was keen to work with others to help to stabilise the situation in Iraq. He deeply regretted the fact that the UK did not have, as he put it, an independent foreign policy. He said that, before Sir Nigel Sheinwald visited Syria for talks on behalf of our Prime Minister, he had been to Washington and that his view was that the UK could play a much more useful role if it had an independent policy, but sadly it did not and it continued to be a complete echo of US foreign policy.

Deeply unpleasant.

P.