The hotel is described as luxury class and it boasts the longest private beach on the Mediterranean. But is it really a place where an ex-dictator and his chums would hide?
Nobody quite knows why the Côte d’Azur de Cham, 8km north of Lattakia in Syria, has been singled out for suspicion, but its barbed wire and a mysterious underground passage may have helped.
The rumours started when an Israeli website, debka.com, claimed the holiday complex had been booked — ”prepaid and chartered” — by Baghdad. The group staying at the hotel ”may include Saddam Hussein or his sons, but this is not confirmed,” Debka said.
”Top Iraqi officials are reported hiding there since March 23. They are guarded by a Syrian commando unit armed with anti-air missiles while Syrian naval missile boats secure the port.”
On Sunday, in what may have been a coordinated gesture, the United States-backed Iraqi National Congress announced that Saddam’s son-in-law, Jamal Mustafa Sultan, and a senior official in Saddam’s secret police, Khaled Abdallah, had surrendered to their organisation after returning from Syria. Others are still hiding in Syria.
Approaching the Côte d’Azur de Cham hotel there was no sign of missiles, but perhaps they were hidden behind the stalls selling beach balls.
”The hotel is a vast structure with 3 000 beds. But there is another section adjacent to it, known as ”the residence”, with 100 rooms in four-storey blocks grouped around a swimming pool with no obvious way in, a curious feature noted by the Lonely Planet guide to Syria.
”It has such a foreboding, military air that you probably wouldn’t want to stay there anyway,” the guide adds.
Brown blinds are drawn across the windows, the swimming pool is empty and the place seems abandoned. Following the line of the barbed wire led to a small street where a man called out from a house on the other side. ”Hello, what are you looking for?”
”The entrance.”
”It’s under the ground,” he said, ”From inside the main building.”
The man may be right. In the basement of the building there is what looks like the entrance to a tunnel though glass doors bar the way. There were no Iraqi limousines in the car park.
The Syrian commandos guarding the hotel must have been taking a day off, because anyone could walk in. Once inside the only problem was how to pick out the Iraqis. Syrians say they can easily spot an Iraqi from the face, but they have trouble explaining how.
”Look for men with jowls and a big moustache,” one advised. ”No,” said another. ”Look for men without a moustache and a pale upper lip where they have shaved it off.”
It was a lot simpler than that. To look inconspicuous at the Côte d’Azur, you have to be in your 20s or the parent of two screaming children. On the terrace, four women in headscarves were gathered round a table. One puffed on a hubble-bubble pipe in a rather masculine fashion. Could this be Uday in disguise? On closer inspection, not.
The hotel denies having any Iraqi guests, ex-members of the regime or otherwise. So, if the Iraqi leaders are not at the Côte d’Azur, where are they? Western diplomats are convinced that some remain inside Syria. Iraqi limousines with blacked-out windows were seen in Damascus, they say, and the cars had official Syrian escorts. — Â