“We have information that shipments of military supplies have been crossing the border from Syria into Iraq, including night vision goggles,” he said at a Pentagon news conference. “These deliveries pose a direct threat to the lives of coalition forces. We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government accountable for such shipments,” he said.

He declined to say whether the Syrian government was behind the shipments, but stressed: “They control their border. We’re hopeful that kind of thing does not happen again,” he said.

“There is no question but that to the extent military supplies, equipment or people move borders between Iraq and Syria that it vastly complicates our situation,” he said.

He also said that hundreds of Iranian-backed Iraqi rebels had been seen coming into Iraq, in reference to the Badr Corps, the military wing of the Supreme Council on Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Iran-based Iraqi opposition movement.

“The Badr Corps is trained, equipped and directed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard and we will hold the Iranian government responsible for their actions and will view Badr Corps activity inside Iraq as unhelpful,” said Rumsfeld. “Armed Badr Corps members found in Iraq will have to be treated as combatants,” he said.

“We don’t want neighboring countries or anyone else for that matter to be in there assisting Iraqi forces,” Rumsfeld said.

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad said yesterday that he hoped Washington would fail to oust Saddam Hussein.

In an interview published in Lebanese daily As-Safir, Assad also predicted that, if the United States and Britain were to take over Iraq, they would be confronted by a “popular resistance” that would prevent them from controlling the country.

Syria, the only Arab member of the UN Security Council, voted for Resolution 1441, which paved the way for the resumption of weapons inspections in Iraq. It said it did so on assurances that this would avoid a war.

But as war approached, it joined China, France, Germany and Russia in preventing a new resolution specifically authorizing an attack on Iraq.

Assad, never known for his diplomatic language, publicly predicted that Washington would become bogged down in Iraq as it was in Vietnam, or forced to abandon the country as it did in the 1980s in Lebanon, now under Syrian dominance.

His words made analysts wonder precisely what Syria’s intentions are, especially since the interview was published the same day as a call by the country’s mufti for suicide attacks against US forces.

Although Syria is not included in US President Bush’s “axis of evil”, which groups Iran, Iraq and North Korea, it is still on the State Department’s list of countries supporting terrorism.

And like Iran, it fears that it may be the next US target after Iraq in Washington’s “war on terrorism.”