SYRIAN BIGS CONNED U.N. 
By NILES LATHEM 
WASHINGTON — Top Syrian officials, including a former defense minister and two cousins of President Bashar Assad, earned millions helping Saddam Hussein evade sanctions and scam the U.N. oil-for-food program, according to documents released last night. 
The House International Relations Committee released bombshell investigative reports from the IRS that detail mass corruption reaching the highest levels of the Syrian regime. 
The Syrian officials were acting in support of Saddam's clandestine prewar campaign to raise cash and smuggle military equipment at a time when Iraq was under global sanctions. 
The documents, released in advance of a hearing today on Syria's role in the scandal, came from a Treasury Department probe of Saddam's hidden financial assets that was conducted after the war. 
Despite U.N. Security Council sanctions that limited amounts of oil Iraq could sell on the world market and supplies Saddam could purchase, Syria and Iraq signed a trade protocol in June 2000 outside the oil-for-food program. 
It called for Iraq to sell Syria millions of barrels of discounted oil, which it could use domestically or sell on the world market at a profit. 
According to the Internal Revenue Service, 60 percent of the proceeds went to purchase supplies for Saddam and the rest wound up in bank accounts controlled by the Iraqi regime. 
Implicated in the newly released IRS documents was Mustapha Tlas, the recently retired hard-line Syrian defense minister and lifelong associate of the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. 
IRS agents reported they were informed by former Iraqi officials that Tlas received tribute payments from Iraq for allowing the shipment of goods between Syria and Iraq. 
Also identified as a major player in the Iraq-Syria deal-making was Asef Shaleesh, the son of the late dictator Assad's half-sister. 
The IRS documents also named Tlas' son, Firas, and Thualhina Shaleesh, another cousin of Bashar Assad, as intermediaries in many Iraq-Syrian transactions that earned them 10 to 15 percent commissions on each deal they handled.