According to Paul Bremer, Syria ‘tried to fuel a holy war in Iraq against US and Britain’. (Hat tip: Allah.)

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria secretly incited Iraq’s top Shia leader to declare holy war against US and British forces, according to Washington’s former administrator in the country.

In his new book, My Year in Iraq, Paul Bremer said he heard the explosive intelligence in October 2003 as sectarian tensions soared across the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The report came from an extremely senior source, the supreme leader of Iraq’s majority Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

According to Mr Bremer, the news was passed to him by Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a senior Shia politician involved in negotiations with the ayatollah. The Syrian leader had apparently recalled the Shia-led uprising against the British in 1920 and urged the Shia to repeat history.

The news “stunned” the US administration in Iraq. “This was an act of extraordinary irresponsibility from Syria’s president,” Mr Bremer writes. “We had good intelligence showing that many insurgents and terrorists were coming into Iraq through Syria.”

But the allegation was far more serious, he says. “This message from Assad essentially incited Shia rebellion. If he were to succeed, the coalition would face an extremely bloody two-front uprising, costing thousands of lives.”

The revelation that Syria’s leader was trying to stoke unrest inside Iraq goes some way to explaining Washington’s unrelenting hostility towards the Damascus regime ever since.

In Europe Mr Assad has been portrayed as a leader motivated by the desire to stand up to Israel and stay in power. But in Washington he has long been seen as a far more dangerous figure.