By Haggai Carmon

When the 1996 amendment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) made State Sponsors of Terror liable to civil suits in the U.S., there was a catch. Victims of terror couldn’t sue a country, they had to identify “an official, employee, or agent of a foreign state designated as a state sponsor of terrorism.”

In 2008, this catch was removed by the National Defense Authorization Act. Following its passage, victims of terrorist acts and their survivors would, in theory, be entitled to financial reparations from the state sponsor of terrorism itself.

In Gates v. Syrian Arab Republic, this amendment was put to the test and upheld by Judge Rosemary Collyer, who ruled on September 26, 2008 to award the plaintiffs more than $400 million in damages.

The plaintiffs in the case were the survivors of Jack Armstrong and Jack Hensley, who were both working as civilian contractors in Iraq when they were kidnapped and subsequently murdered by the Al Qaeda in Iran (AQI) leader Abu Musan al-Zarqawi. A video was made of their beheading, which was posted on the Internet.

The lawsuit found Syria responsible for providing not only financial support to AQI, but also a safe base from which to train, organize and penetrate/exit Iraq.