Buzz on the streets of Damascus

DAMASCUS, SYRIA - With Beirut's azure coastline in the rear window of the taxi and the snow-capped top of Mount Lebanon in the windshield ahead, the road to Damascus looked good. 

Just four days after the assassination of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, our NBC News team was anxious to revisit the oldest continually inhabited city in the world  and get a sense of the mood in the last true Arab city in the Middle East.

Damascus has changed dramatically in the past five years. A new highway from the Lebanese border into the heart of the capital is lined with apartment blocks bristling with TV satellite dishes. 

Syrian President Bashar Assad, who inherited power from his father in 2000, has expanded telecommunications to include cell phones and internet connections. Our NBC News team has visited Syria regularly since the 1970's, but it was the first time constant communication with our news desk in New York was possible.

The prevailing mood in Damascus was that the United States, along with most of the world, suspected Syria was behind Hariri's assassination in Beirut because, before his untimely demise, the popular and immensely wealthy politician was on the verge of asking Syria to disengage from Lebanon. 

Hariri was killed in a massive bomb blast. His million-dollar armored Mercedes was totally destroyed. Lebanese police said at least 700 pounds of explosive dug a 30-foot crater in the road. 

It was the kind of horror that made Beirut infamous in the 1980's when Syrian troops were all over Lebanon battling militias to stop the civil war.

To many in the West, blaming Damascus makes sense. Last year, the United States and France co-sponsored a U.N. resolution that called from Assad to evacuate troops from Lebanon. 

Assad’s late father former President Hafez Assad sent troops Lebanon in 1976, and although the war ended in 1990, they haven't gone home yet because they run the Lebanese army and its security services. 

At least a million Syrian civilians also work in Lebanon and it's a major source of resentment in the country because Lebanese need the jobs themselves and the economy has never really recovered from the civil war.

Syria blamed for harboring Iraqi fugitives
Syria also is accused of harboring fugitive Baathists from neighboring Iraq, some of whom are thought to be sending cash over the border to fuel the insurgency against the U.S.-led coalition forces and the Iraqi interim government.

The Syrian government, despite being dominated by Baathists, has always been violently anti-Iraqi Baathist. Syria sent troops to fight alongside Americans in the first Gulf War to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and, over the years, both Iraq and Syria have mounted terror attacks against each other's capitals. 

But in the Middle East, money can make strange bedfellows, and if the stories about Iraqi fugitives making off with billions of dollars ahead of advancing Americans two years ago are even half-true, it's understandable that some of them may have bought sanctuary in Syria. 

Since Syria is still the only country in the world which does not require an entry visa for any Arab national, Damascus can always say it didn't know who the Iraqi refugees were when they arrived at the border.

In addition, relations between Syria and Iraq thawed slightly after the death of the former president Hafez Assad, so it's difficult to convince a suspicious America that Syria's intentions are perfectly honest.

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