WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (AFP)- US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed as "nonsense" Tuesday a report that the Pentagon is intensively debating a so-called "Salvador option," in which US special forces or Iraqi squads would pursue insurgents into Syria.
Rumsfeld said US special forces are not going into Syria in pursuit of insurgents. When asked whether that had been considered, he said: "Why would I even talk about something like that?"
The US defense chief said he had not seen the story published by Newsweek magazine, only reporting about it.
"But everyone's talking about it, and it's nonsense," he told reporters, after raising it himself at a press conference with visiting Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov.
"The reality is that the responsibility of the commanders there and the coalition and the Iraqi government is to see that the Iraqis are trained up to provide security for that country," he said.
"And somebody has been reading too many spy novels and went off in flights of fancy, which I hope have been put to rest," he said.
Newsweek said the Pentagon, under pressure in Iraq, was intensively debating an option to use special squads to target insurgents much the way "death squads" were used to kill rebel leaders in El Salvador during the early 1980s.
It said one Pentagon proposal would send US special forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria.
The report said it was unclear whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations to capture insurgents and send them to special interrogation facilities.
Newsweek said the current thinking was that while US special forces would lead operations in places like Syria, activities inside Iraq would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries.
Another aspect of the debate, according to Newsweek, was whether the Defense Department or the CIA would take responsibility for such an operation.

01/11/2005 20:53 GMT - AFP