$1,369.86

According to Faisal Akbar, a member of Al-Qaeda in the Levant, he was smuggled into Lebanon from Syria in late January 2005 with the express purpose of killing former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

"We paid 80,000 Syrian Lira to the smuggler in return to smuggling us over the border, whereby we crossed the Syrian side in around an hour. We began by descending then ascending the mountain then descending again. It should be known that we were transported on an old motorbike that was parked near the smuggler's home, and he would take each of us alone for a distance of 15 minutes then he would return and get the next one. He began by transporting Jamil then Abu Ades then Khalid and finally me, and he left the motorbike during the phase of ascending the mountain, where there was a small Syrian village, the name of which I can't remember, where the smuggler had acquaintances.

The nearest date that I can find an official conversion rate from Syrian pounds to US dollars is December 5, 2005. At that date, one dollar bought you 58.4 Syrian pounds. Assuming the conversion rate was approximately the same when Faisal Akbar crossed into Lebanon earler that year, him and his three compatriots paid $1369.86 to be smuggled into Lebanon. That actually strikes me as high, given that all the smuggler did was drive them up and down a mountain on his old motorbike.

Akbar then describes how they arrived in Beirut, went to their apartment in Dahiyeh, ordered some Kentucky Fried Chicken, and then planned Hariri's assassination. Akbar admitted to playing a role in Hariri's assassination in January 2006, but then retracted his confession. Whether or not he played a role in killing Hariri, the broad strokes of his description of the inner-workings of a jihadist organization may still be accurate.

Obviously, it is no coincidence that Akbar's confession appears in the opposition-aligned Al-Akhbar. In the wake of Nahr al-Bared and with the Presidential elections looming, it serves the opposition's narrative to blame Hariri's murder on a Sunni Islamist who was operating below the radar of the Syrian regime. Check out Nibras Kazimi's blog for his English translation of the entire testimony.