“This is just to give you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded,” Ayashi says. “If you don’t take our advice, then we have warned you.” A touch of Saddam there, I thought. The date was 1912.Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses and artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia, others record the opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz ­ soon to be Saudi Arabia ­ while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day Jordan, the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who attacked his interrogators “with a knife and tried to stab them but was restrained and later bought off”. There is a 19th-century letter of recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, “a man of the highest morals, of good conduct and who works with the [Ottoman] government.” This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history ­ all that is left of it, which fell into The Independent’s hands as the mass of documents crackled in the immense heat of the ruins. King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca, whose staff are the authors of many of the letters I saved, was later deposed by the Saudis. His son Faisel became king of Iraq ­ Winston Churchill gave him Baghdad after the French threw him out of Damascus ­ and his brother Abdullah became the first king of Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the grandfather of the present-day Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East.

Genghis Khan’s grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the Tigris river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq Why?
More from Robert Fisk. ‘I have made it clear, and I repeat, that Syria is not ‘next on the list’,” declared Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, yesterday in a tone that sounded anything but confident. “I have made it clear, and I repeat, that Syria is not ‘next on the list’,” declared Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, yesterday in a tone that sounded anything but confident.
His nervousness was understandable, for Syria seems all too clearly in the American sights, as over the weekend, starting with Donald Rumsfeld and going on to the Secretary of State Colin Powell and finally President Bush himself, one warning after another has been sounded against the Syrian regime for harbouring Iraqi leaders and having developed weapons of mass distraction of its own.It was only by the skin of its teeth and Tony Blair’s urgings that Syria escaped being included in President Bush’s “axis of evil speech” last year. As the countdown to war with Iraq developed this year, Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, started openly to bracket Syria as a potential enemy. Told about by this by an aide fearful of a widening war, President Bush is supposed to have looked up from his papers and simply said “good”.That is not a view shared by London, where the accession to power in Syria of Bashar Assad, the British-educated son of the wily President Hafez al-Assad, had in 2000 given rise to fond hopes of a London-Damascus axis to bring peaceful reform to the Middle East. “But Assad and his wife have only recently had tea with the Queen,” gasped a ruffled TV announcer when Washington’s war of words began in the middle of last week.At this moment, the US is probably not planning to direct its armies to wheel left from Baghdad to march on Damascus.

But the sense of threat, and the menacing tone of the references to “regime change”, are far too carefully orchestrated to put down to pique at Syria’s vociferous and unrelenting denunciation of the invasion of Iraq or specific concerns about escaping Iraqi bigwigs.That is certainly what the Syrians believe. From the beginning they have seen the US as aiming to redraw the Middle East map, in which Israel’s enemies – most notably Iraq, Syria and Iran in that order – would be brought to heel or knocked off one by one, if not by direct military action then by the threat of it.And there is some justification for this fear, if not for the Zionist conspiracy theories that Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East believe in. Regime change not just in Iraq but in the neighbouring countries has been a central plank of the security policy developed by Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Vice-President Dick Cheney, security adviser Richard Perle and Richard Garner, America’s proposed governor of Iraq, a decade ago.In this view, the root of the problems of terrorism and insecurity in the Middle East lies in the continuance of a series of undemocratic states, supported in the past by Washington, whose interests lie in stirring up trouble abroad and denying Israel’s right to exist in order to divert attention from their tyranny at home. Confront these regimes and force change and the Middle East will develop into a peaceful region of democratic states that will cast aside terrorism, recognise Israel and peacefully pursue a course of economic development at home and neighbourliness abroad.Syria, in this world view, is an archetypal baddy.