WarSclerotic

Information Warfare: Israel Openly Makes War On Iran.

August 12, 2011: Israel is apparently involved in a Cyber War with Iran, one that receives little official publicity. Not even all the damage is publicized, as a lot of the damage is undetected (often for a long time) by the victim. While Iran has made the most noise about this Cyber War, Israel is doing the most destruction. Israel wants to keep it that way, and keep it quiet. Partly, this is to keep the Iranians confused, but also to keep Israeli government lawyers happy. A lot of the tactics and weapons used in Cyber War are of uncertain legality. The traditional Laws of War have not caught up with Cyber War.

This process has been going on for some time, and some aspects of it do surface in the media. For example, three months ago, Israel established the National Cybernetic Taskforce, with orders to devise and implement defensive measures to protect the economy and government from Internet based attacks. The taskforce consists of about 80 people and is run by a retired general. Apparently, existing Internet security efforts, and military Cyber War organizations have discovered a growing number of vulnerabilities in the national Internet infrastructure. The only solution to this growing vulnerability is a large scale effort to monitor the national network infrastructure for vulnerabilities, and fix them as quickly as possible. You will never catch all the vulnerabilities, but in Cyber War, as in the more conventional kind, victory is not always a matter of who is better, but who is worse (more vulnerable to attack.)

Meanwhile, Israel makes no secret of what it thinks about its Cyber War capabilities. Over the last year, Israel has revealed that its cryptography operation (Unit 8200) has added computer hacking to its skill set. Last year, the head of Israeli Military Intelligence said that he believed Israel had become the leading practitioner of Cyber War. This came in the wake of suspicions that Israel had created the Stuxnet worm, which got into Iran’s nuclear fuel enrichment equipment, and destroyed a lot of it. Earlier this year, Iran complained that another worm, called Star, was causing them trouble. Usually, intelligence organizations keep quiet about their capabilities, but in this case, the Israelis apparently felt it was more useful to scare the Iranians, with the threat of more stuff like Stuxnet. But the Iranians have turned around and tried to attack Israel, and are apparently determined to keep at it for as long as it takes.

This struggle between Israel and Iran is nothing new. Seven years ago, Israel announced that Unit 8200 had cracked an Iranian communications code, an operation that allowed Israel to read messages concerning Iranian efforts to keep its nuclear weapons program going (with Pakistani help), despite Iranian promises to UN weapons inspectors that the program was being shut down.

It’s long been known that Unit 8200 of the Israeli army specialized in cracking codes for the government. This was known because so many men who had served in Unit 8200 went on to start companies specializing in cryptography (coding information so that no unauthorized personnel can know what the data is.) But it is unusual for a code-cracking organization to admit to deciphering someone’s code. Perhaps the Iranians stopped using the code in question, or perhaps the Israelis just wanted to scare the Iranians. Israel is very concerned about Iran getting nuclear weapons, mainly because the Islamic conservatives that control Iran have as one of their primary goals the destruction of Israel. In response to these Iranian threats, Israel has said that it will do whatever it takes to stop Iran from getting nukes. This apparently includes doing the unthinkable (for a code cracking outfit); admitting that you had successfully taken apart an opponent’s secret code.

Israel is trying to convince Iran that a long-time superiority in code-breaking was now accompanied by similarly exceptional hacking skills. Whether it’s true or not, it’s got to have rattled the Iranians. The failure of their counterattacks can only have added to their unease.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Special Report August 10, 2011, 8:44 PM (GMT+02:00)

Syrian tanks in action near Turkish border

Less than 24 hours after Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu handed Bashar Assad in Damascus “a final warning,” to stop the bloodshed or else, Assad demonstrated coolly that he is not scared by the prospect of military intervention or deterred by Ankara’s caution that he risks the same fate as Muammar Qaddafi – i.e. NATO attack. The day after his Turkish guest departed, Wednesday, Aug. 10, he launched military assaults on three towns in the Turkish border region.

Tanks, armored vehicles and motorized infantry units pushed into Taftanaz and Sermin in Idlib province, less than 30 kilometers from the border, while troops entered Binnish, a town squarely on the border.

This exercise was also Assad’s reply to the Obama administration’s leaked report of Tuesday night that within the coming hours Washington would for the first time explicitly call on Bashar Assad to step down, like the marching orders the US gave the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.
This strategy is so far in the red, with only one down (Mubarak) and two (Qaddafi and Yemeni President Abdullah Ali Saleh) still to go. Assad expects to join the latter group after outdoing them all in brutal repression.
He not only brushed aside the Davutoglu’s demand on behalf of Turkey as a NATO member to cut down on his military operations against civilians, he expanded them Wednesday  in the most provocative manner.
The five-month conflict between the Syrian army and rebels is now in its bloodiest week, raging on three fronts: In the north from Wednesday on the Turkish border, in the east, where Syrian tanks and artillery forces are knocking over the towns of Deir al-Zour and Abu Kamal near the Iraqi border and in two protests centers in the Damascus suburbs of Duma and Kharasta.

Assad was cheered on, debkafile‘s military and intelligence sources report, by the apparent weakness he noticed in the Turkish foreign minister when they conversed Tuesday. The Syrian ruler gained the impression that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is still wavering over whether to order his army to cross the border into Syria and he therefore decided to strike while the iron was hot.

By concentrating units so close to the Turkish border, Assad also gained an advantage in the event of Erdogan deciding to invade.

Assad found another sign of weakness in Erdogan’s report that his foreign minister had obtained in Damascus a promise of political reforms and seen for himself that Syrian tanks had pulled out of Hama. There was no mention of the number of civilians killed before that or the public executions in the city’s main square. The Turkish prime minister seemed to have forgotten that all Assad’s past promises of reforms had proved hollow.
According to our sources, the Syrian president received new Iranian guarantees Tuesday night of a missile shield in the event of an attack by Turkey or NATO forces. This is tantamount to a promise that Iranian missiles would target Middle East air bases from which the assault planes took off and send troops to the aid of the Syrian army.

Assad therefore feels safe in discounting the new sanctions the US slapped down Wednesday night, Aug. 10 on Syria’s biggest commercial bank, the Commercial Bank of Syria, and its Lebanon-based subsidiary, under a presidential executive order that targets proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their supporters. A separate order designated Syriatel, the country’s largest mobile phone operator, for supporting human rights abuses in Syria.

He was not bothered by his increasing isolation in the Arab world after Saudi Arabia led the Gulf States in recalling their ambassadors from Damascus in protest against the unbridled blood-letting – any more than he moved by a possible NATO strike.

He views NATO as having failed in its six-month air Libyan campaign either to dislodge Qaddafi or destroy his army. It had the reverse effect of strengthening his regime. As for Western aid to Syrian rebels, government forces have managed to seize most of the weapons and logistical aid shipments they shipped into Syria.

Assad steps up crackdown as US announces n… JPost – Middle East.

    AMMAN – Syrian tanks swept into two towns near the Turkish border on Wednesday despite international demands to end a military crackdown, and the United States announced sanctions against a major Syrian bank and mobile phone company.

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that an armored government force killed at least 11 civilians in an assault on a main residential district in the city of Homs.

“Troops and armored vehicle stormed Bab Amro early evening. The neighborhood is witnessing a massacre. The number of dead are likely to go up because there are seven out of 25 wounded in critical condition,” Observatory director Rami Abdelrahman told Reuters.

Syria said the army pulled out of the central city of Hama after a 10-day assault on a symbolic center of protest against President Bashar Assad’s 11-year rule, but tank attacks in towns north of Hama killed a woman and injured 13 people, an activist group said.

In Deir al-Zor, another Sunni Muslim bastion of dissent towards Assad’s minority Alawite rule, residents reported heavy gunfire as troops deployed across the eastern city, making arrests and spraying pro-Assad slogans on buildings.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who sent his foreign minister to Damascus on Tuesday to urge an end to the bloodshed, said the Syrian state “is pointing guns at its own people”.

“Turkey’s message to Assad is very clear: stop all kinds of violence and bloodshed,” Erdogan said.

In Washington the White House said President Barack Obama believes Syria would be better off without Assad and the United States plans to keep pressure on the Syrian government.

“We are all watching with horror at what he is doing to his own people,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

Earlier the US Treasury Department announced new sanctions which it said were aimed at the financial infrastructure helping to hold up Assad’s government.

It said it was designating the Commercial Bank of Syria, a Syrian state-owned financial institution, and its Lebanon-based subsidiary, Syrian Lebanese Commercial Bank, under a presidential executive order that targets proliferates of weapons of mass destruction and their supporters.

It also designated Syriatel, Syria’s largest mobile phone operator, under an executive order targeting Syrian officials and others responsible for human rights abuses in the country.

The Turkish leader said he hoped that Assad, confronting nearly five months of pro-democracy demonstrations, would take steps within 10 to 15 days towards promised political reforms.

Rights groups say at least 1,700 civilians have been killed since the uprising against Assad erupted in March, making it one of the bloodiest upheavals in the Arab world this year. Authorities say 500 soldiers and police have died.

Syria has barred most independent media since the unrest began, making it hard to verify conflicting reports by activists, residents and officials.

Already under Western sanctions targeting him and his top officials, Assad faces growing pressure to curb the bloodshed after three regional powers publicly called for change this week, leaving Iran as Syria’s only staunch remaining ally.

Analysis: Saudi switch against Syria’s Assad is blow to Iran – World news – Mideast/N. Africa – Iran – msnbc.com.

DUBAI — Saudi Arabia, self-appointed guardian of Sunni Islam, is deeply wary of popular uprisings that have convulsed the Arab world, but it has lost patience with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s violent attempts to crush a mainly Sunni protest movement.

Saudi-Syrian relations were rarely warm, with Riyadh riled by Syria’s alliance with its Shi’ite regional rival Iran, and they chilled further after the 2005 assassination of Lebanese statesman Rafik al-Hariri, a friend of the Saudi royal family.

But until this week Saudi King Abdullah had kept silent on the violence in Syria, which human rights groups say has cost more than 1,600 civilian lives in five months of turmoil.

Now the Saudis have taken a stand, perhaps deciding that Syria’s diplomatic isolation and the bloodshed unleashed by its minority Alawite rulers on their majority Sunni opponents have made Damascus a ripe target of diplomatic opportunity.

“They realize the regime in Syria is facing a serious, nationwide, deep rebellion and is therefore vulnerable,” said Beirut-based Middle East analyst Rami Khouri.

The kingdom, which brooks no dissent at home and helped Bahrain crush Shi’ite-led protests in March, recalled its ambassador from Damascus on Monday and denounced the violence in Syria, which Assad blames on armed gangs with foreign backing.

The Saudi decision was announced in a statement in the name of King Abdullah, who warned Syria it faced ruin over the crackdown, among the bloodiest in Arab uprisings that have already brought down the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt.

Analysts suggested that Saudi Arabia sees in Assad’s woes a chance to strike a blow at Iran, even at the cost of undermining an established ruler, with a chance of chaos — or even representative government — in a nation at the heart of the Arab world.

“The benefits of hitting the Iranian connection outweigh the negatives of a new democracy in Syria,” should one emerge in a post-Assad Syria, Khouri said.

IMPACT ON THE STREET

The Saudi shift was prefigured in the regional political blocs over which the kingdom casts a long shadow, and mirrored by the countries and institutions for which its oil wealth and claim to religious rectitude are persuasive.

The Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council — which includes Bahrain — on Saturday expressed its “concern and regret” over Syria’s crackdown, echoing Western calls for political reform.

A day later, the Arab League, whose new head had visited Assad soon after taking office, called for an immediate halt to violence against demonstrators during military operations in Hama, Deir al-Zor and elsewhere in Syria.

The king’s warning to Syria, said one Saudi commentator, has paved the way for more states to pile pressure on Syria’s rulers while leaving some margin for them to avoid downfall.

“The statement wasn’t isolated from the worldwide movement to put pressure on the Syria regime. Saudi Arabia is important when it comes to future decisions, actions taken to pressure the regime,” said Jamal al-Khashoggi.

“For Saudi Arabia to come out criticizing the regime will no doubt have an impact on the Syrian street. It will fuel the tension, fuel the anger … It will create pressure on Syria to recognize its position for what it is.”

The move has had the immediate effect of cranking up the chorus of condemnation surrounding Syria, already facing sanctions from the United States and Europe.

Bahrain and Kuwait recalled their ambassadors from Damascus hours after the king’s message, and Sunni Islam’s most venerable institution of learning, al-Azhar in Cairo, called the Syrian assault on protesters an unacceptable “human tragedy.”

SECTARIAN RISKS

The latter voice echoes the Sunni bonds Saudi Arabia was invoking by moving against Syria during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, on the heels of a tank assault against a rebellious, largely Sunni city, Hama, where Assad’s father killed thousands to put down an Islamist armed revolt in 1982.

The Assads’ Alawite sect is deemed heretical by Saudi Arabia’s austere brand of Sunni Islam.

Videos posted on YouTube after the king’s message appear to show Syrians in Saudi Arabia cheering the defense of his co-religionists in Syria.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened during Ramadan,” said Gregory Gause, a political science professor at the University of Vermont.

“There is a heightened sense of the importance and role of religion, and people in Syria, an overwhelmingly Sunni country, were sure to read it in a sectarian way,” he said.

“They (the Saudis) increasingly see Iran and the Arab upheavals as requiring them to play their hole card: We’re Sunnis, they’re Shi’a, and there are more of us than there are of them.”

Anti-Assad protesters have sometimes shouted slogans against Iran and Syria’s close Lebanese Shi’ite ally Hezbollah, once wildly popular for its confrontations with Israel.

Any appeal to sectarianism, Syria’s regime and opposition alike have warned, risks tearing Syria apart.

Yet it appears to be a risk that Saudi Arabia, having seen off a domestic challenge between 2003-2006 from militants who derived their ideology from a form of Salafism, a puritanical set of Muslim doctrine, is now willing to take.

“The leadership feels that the kind of Salafist, jihadist movement that threatened them is under control, that they’ve crushed it and controlled it ideologically,” Gause said.

“The upshot of encouraging it in the region is that I think they think they’ve got a handle on it.”

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report August 9, 2011, 10:01 AM (GMT+02:00)

Gen. Ali Habib found dead

The Assad regime’s internal crisis took another brutal turn Tuesday, Aug. 9 when the former Syrian Defense Minister Ali Habib was found dead hours after President Bashar Assad sacked him. debkafile‘s military sources report exclusively that the 72-year old general, a long associate of the Assad clan, died of gunshots from automatic weapons in the hands of the president’s henchmen. First Syrian reports claimed General Habib died by his own hand after being replaced by the chief of staff, Gen. Daoud Rajha. Our sources report that his death was the result of the internal power struggle raging in the top military command between commanders calling for a coup to remove Bashar Assad, a faction demanding to first end to the savage crackdown on protest, and factions with unclear motives.

Unexplained indications of disputes between the high command in Damascus and division commanders in the field surfaced in the last two days along with the tank onslaught on the eastern town of Deir al-Zour.

It now looks as though the generals were busier in their infighting than in subduing the popular uprising. Assad suspected Gen. Ali Habib of conniving with the officers plotting a mutiny against him and therefore had him removed and put to death.

Syria conflict descends into ‘war of attrition’ – Israel News, Ynetnews.

There is little to stop Assad from calling upon the scorched-earth tactics that have kept his family in power for more than 40 years

Associated Press

Despite five months of blistering attacks on dissent, the Syrian regime has yet to score a decisive victory against a pro-democracy uprising determined to bring down the country’s brutal dictatorship.

President Bashar Assad still has the military muscle to level pockets of resistance, but the conflict has robbed him of almost all international support. Even Saudi Arabia this week called for an end to the bloodshed in Syria, the first of several Arab nations to join the growing chorus against Assad.

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The Syrian leader is being watched carefully at home and abroad to see how long his iron regime – which is still strong but wobbling – will continue to use tanks, snipers and security forces on hundreds of thousands of fervent, overwhelmingly young protesters who keep coming back for more.

“Syria is not burying the revolution,” said Nabil Bou Monsef, a senior analyst at the Arabic-language An-Nahar newspaper. “Protests are resuming everywhere, even in areas that were subject to crackdowns.”

He added: “It is difficult for one of the sides to win. Syria has entered a war of attrition between the regime and the opposition.”

Taking cover in Hama (Photo: AP)

There is little to stop Assad from calling upon the scorched-earth tactics that have kept his family in power for more than 40 years. A longtime pariah, Syria grew accustomed to shrugging off the world’s reproach long before the regime started shooting unarmed protesters five months ago.

A military intervention has been all but ruled out, given the quagmire in Libya and the lack of any strong opposition leader in Syria to rally behind. The U.S. and other nations have little power to threaten further isolation or economic punishment of Assad’s pro-Iranian regime – unlike in Egypt, where President Barack Obama was able to help usher longtime ally Hosni Mubarak out of power.

International sanctions, some of which target Assad personally, have failed to persuade him to ease his crackdown. There had been hopes, since dashed, that European Union sanctions would prove a humiliating personal blow to Assad, a 45-year-old eye doctor who trained in Britain.

Until the uprising began, Assad had cultivated an image as a modern leader in a region dominated by aging dictators. He was seen around Damascus with his glamorous wife, Asma, who grew up in London and was the subject of a glowing profile in Vogue just before the protests erupted. The couple’s three small children added to their luster as youthful and energetic.

But the relentless military assaults on rebellious towns have only grown more deadly. The latest wave of bloodshed started a week ago, on the eve of the holy month of Ramadan, when tanks and snipers laid siege to Hama, a city in central Syria that had largely freed itself from government control earlier this year.

Residents were left cowering in their homes, too terrified to peek through the windows. The city is haunted by memories of the regime’s tactics: In 1982, Assad’s father and predecessor, Hafez, ordered the military to quell a rebellion by Syrian members of the conservative Muslim Brotherhood movement there, sealing off the city in an assault that killed between 10,000 and 25,000 people.

Since the start of Ramadan, more than 300 people have been killed in cities including Hama and Deir el-Zour, an oil-rich but largely impoverished region known for its well-armed clans and tribes whose ties extend across eastern Syria and into Iraq.

Syria has blocked nearly all outside witnesses to the carnage by banning foreign media and restricting local coverage that strays from the party line, which states the regime is fighting thugs and religious extremists who are acting out a foreign conspiracy.

Besides the secretly recorded videos that leak out of Syria every day and accounts by witnesses who whisper down telephone lines, Assad has managed to keep the eyes of the world off his bloodied nation.

But Syria’s troubles do not end at the country’s borders.

Syria is a geographical and political keystone in the heart of the Middle East, bordering five countries with whom it shares religious and ethnic minorities and, in Israel’s case, a fragile truce. Its web of allegiances extends to Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah movement and Iran’s Shiite theocracy.

A destabilized Syria, consequently, could send unsettling ripples through the region.

Syria has a volatile sectarian divide, making civil unrest one of the most dire scenarios. The Assad regime is dominated by the Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, but the country is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim.

Alawite dominance has bred resentments, which Assad has worked to tamp down by pushing a strictly secular identity. But he now appears to be relying heavily on his Alawite power base, beginning with highly placed relatives, to crush the resistance.

The uprising has brought long-simmering sectarian tensions to the surface.

In the revolt’s early days, it became clear many foreign leaders were loath to see Assad go. While few supported his policies, Assad had managed to keep his country stable and out of war with Israel.

Mindful of this backhanded support, Assad exploits those fears of chaos and sectarian warfare, portraying himself as the only man who can guarantee stability.

But the early, muted response to the bloodshed in Syria is over.

This week, Arab nations have joined the international chorus against Assad for the first time. Saudi Arabia’s king – who does not tolerate dissent in his own country – demanded “an end to the killing machine” and recalled his country’s ambassador to Damascus late Sunday. On Monday, Bahrain and Kuwait followed suit.

A statement posted on a Facebook page used by protesters lauded the Arab governments for recalling their envoys.

“Arab governments stood and faced the butcher Bashar al-Assad, and stood on the side of the great Syrian people,” said a statement on the “We are all Hamza al-Khatib” page, set up in honor of a 13-year-old boy who was killed in the crackdown.

The U.S., the European Union and even longtime ally Russia have issued scathing statements against Assad, imploring him to stop the bloodshed. The U.S. and the EU have imposed sanctions.

Despite his determination to stay in power, Assad’s regime is undoubtedly hurting.

The security forces, which are the backbone of the regime and the driving force behind the culture of fear and paranoia in Syria, are overextended, exhausted and underpaid.

The unrest is eviscerating the economy, threatening to hurt the business community and prosperous merchant classes that are key to propping up the regime. An influential bloc, the business leaders have long traded political freedoms for enriching economic privileges.

It is unlikely, however, that they will abandon the regime entirely without a viable alternative.

“Before they will help overthrow the Assads, they need a safe alternative,” Joshua Landis, director of the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Middle East Studies, wrote in a recent analysis.

“They are not going to embrace – not to mention, fund – a leaderless bunch of young activists who want to smash everything that smells of Baathist privilege, corruption and cronyism,” said Landis, who runs an influential blog called Syria Comment.

But the revolution has tapped into an underlying well of resentment in Syria, a closed society in which people had long been deeply fearful of a pervasive security apparatus. Now that protesters have broken through that wall of fear, many observers see little chance of turning back.

“The regime is now the prisoner of the security solution, and the opposition will also become a prisoner of escalation,” said Bou Monsef, the An-Nahar analyst. “Syria has entered a tunnel, and it’s difficult to know how it will end.”

Jerusalem Issue Briefs-The Syrian Uprising: Implications for Israel.

Eyal Zisser

• In Syria, the story is the emergence of social groups from the periphery and their struggle to gain access to power and take over the center. The emergence of the Baath party and the Assad dynasty in the 1960s involved a coalition of peripheral forces led by the Alawites, but many others joined who came from the periphery. Now, because of socioeconomic reasons, the periphery has turned against the regime.

• Before the uprising, Bashar al-Assad was supported by the Islamic and radical movements in the Middle East. Most Muslim Brothers supported him – in Jordan, Egypt, and Hamas. Now they have turned their back on him, led by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood on a global scale, who reminds them that, after all, Bashar is an Alawite and supported by the Shiite camp.

• Turkey, under Prime Minister Erdogan, had become a close ally of Syria. But Erdogan has no reservations regarding the possibility that Muslim radicals might come to power in Syria if Bashar falls. On the contrary, the Sunni radicals and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood are Erdogan’s close allies, as is Hamas. So Turkey has nothing to lose if Basher falls.

• If Bashar falls, the situation is likely to be similar to that of earlier decades, with a very weak central regime. This could lead to border incidents with Israel, but not a war, with terrorist acts that a weak regime cannot prevent.

• The Syrian opposition will eventually take over and, as in the case of Egypt, they know that their interests lie with friendship with Western countries like the United States, and not with Iran. So in the long run, a new Syrian regime might be better for Israel than this current regime.

The Periphery Has Turned Against the Regime

It is clear that the Syrian regime has failed in its efforts to suppress the protests, which have spread all over the country. At the same time, the regime is still there and it is still strong and can fight back. The army, including soldiers and officers who belong not only to Assad’s Alawite community but also to other sects and communities, is still ready to fight for the regime. Unlike Egypt, where the gap between the army and the political leadership became quite clear, this is not the case in Syria. And unlike Libya, when immediately following the beginning of the uprising there were many defections by ambassadors, senior officials, and army officers, this is clearly not the case in Syria.

In Egypt there was a clear generational dimension to the revolution, which was led to a certain degree by the younger generation. In Libya, the tension is between east and west – Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. In Yemen, there is the tribal factor – the struggle for power between the south and the north, and also between different tribal configurations. In Syria, the story is a struggle between the periphery and the center, with the emergence of social groups from the periphery and their struggle to gain access to power and take over the center.

This was actually the history of Syria in the 1950s and 1960s. The emergence of the Baath party and of the Assad dynasty involved the struggle of the periphery. It was a coalition of peripheral forces led by the Alawites, the Assad dynasty, but there were many others who joined this coalition and who came from the periphery. Farouk al-Sharaa, the current vice-president and previously the foreign minister, who joined the Baath struggle for power, came from Daraa. Mustafa Tlass, who served as defense minister under Hafez al-Assad for nearly 30 years, came from Rastan, a small town near Homs, where there has been severe violence.

While the key figures in the political echelon are Alawites, the majority of ministers in the government are Sunnis, which reflects Syrian society. They are Sunnis from the big cities, or Sunnis who came many years ago from the periphery and have lost any connection with the periphery. The periphery supported the Baath regime, even during a difficult time in the 1980s when the regime fought the radical Islamists. Now, because of socioeconomic reasons, the periphery has turned against the regime. Thus, this regime has lost a major base of support.

Compare this with Egypt, for example. In Egypt we have not heard about the periphery during the revolution because the movement there was led by young, educated, and middle- to upper-middle-class people who decided to take to the streets and demonstrate against Mubarak. The   young, middle-class Syrians in Damascus and Aleppo have not yet decided, and are still waiting to see what might happen. The unrest is still limited to the periphery, while the main urban centers of Damascus and Aleppo, while they may not support the regime, have not yet joined the protest. Once it reaches these places, it might be the end of the regime, but we are not yet at that stage. We should watch for a shift in the attitudes of the urban Sunni elites in both cities.

The uprising is gaining momentum. It moved from small villages to bigger towns and then it moved to some of the large cities, like Homs and Hama. The key thing to watch for is the continued cohesiveness of the Syrian army. How long will Sunni soldiers and officers be ready to shoot at demonstrators and take part in the efforts by the regime to brutally suppress the uprising?

There is no real opposition in Syria. There are many intellectuals, many critics of the regime, and many human-rights activists inside and outside Syria. Outside Syria there are some groups that call themselves the opposition, but they have no real influence over events inside Syria. Conferences of opposition activists were held in Turkey and later in Brussels which might lead to the emergence of a much more effective opposition with a clear leadership and more influence over the course of events. This could prove to be a very dangerous threat to the regime because this group might eventually be recognized by European  and later by other countries as the legitimate leadership of Syria. Right now there are no groups which could be recognized as such, but it may happen in the future.

The Bashar al-Assad Regime

Only ten years ago, Bashar al-Assad was seen as a reformer with a Western mentality. However, Bashar has said that he was raised in Syria in the house of Hafez al-Assad, and is no different from him. The Western countries and the American administration believed that there was no better alternative to the Assad regime – if this regime collapses, the case of Iraq may repeat itself with chaos, terrorism, and Islamic radicalism. But now there is a change in the attitude of the West toward Syria.

Bashar al-Assad’s Syria is an important part of the Axis of Evil, supported by Iran and Hizbullah. However, Iran and Hizbullah can do very little to help him, especially inside Syria, because part of the uprising and the unrest has to do with Sunni-Shiite tension and, clearly, Shiite Iran will pay heavily for its support of Bashar al-Assad if he falls.

Before the uprising, Bashar was supported by the Islamic and radical movements in the Middle East. Most Muslim Brothers supported him – in Jordan, Egypt, and Hamas. Now they have turned their back on him, led by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood on a global scale, who reminds them that, after all, Bashar is an Alawite and supported by the Shiite camp. Now Qaradawi, as well as other Muslim Brothers all over the Arab world, and even Hamas, are having second thoughts about their alliance with Bashar.

Bashar also had the support of the pan-Arabists. An example is Azmi Bishara, a former Israeli Arab MK who now lives in Qatar. He is Christian but supported Syria as a stronghold of resistance to Israel. Now these people have come to think of Bashar as an obstacle to the revival of pan-Arabism.

Turkey, under Prime Minister Erdogan, had become a close ally of Syria. But Erdogan has no reservations regarding the possibility that Muslim radicals might come to power in Syria if Bashar falls. On the contrary, the Sunni radicals and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood are Erdogan’s close allies, as is Hamas. So Turkey has nothing to lose if Basher falls.

Clearly, the unrest in Syria has to do with economics. We tend to think that the Syrian economy was doing well, but this prosperity involved the center and some Sunni urban elites, but it had little connection to the periphery (which is exactly what happened in Egypt as well). The World Bank was very satisfied with the conduct of the Syrian economy, but the periphery had reservations. Right now the Syrian economy is paralyzed, and Bashar has made some dramatic changes, bringing back subsidies. The tourist industry has collapsed. Even if he survives, Bashar could pay heavily and might be in desperate need not of Iranian missiles but of economic aid.

In the coming weeks and months, if the unrest continues, the Syrian economy will remain paralyzed and Bashar will have no resources to satisfy the urban elites in Damascus and Aleppo, where the middle class could turn against him. So he is playing for time, but time is not on his side. He needs to bring this unrest to an immediate halt, because if it continues, it will threaten his interests.

When Bashar speaks about reform, what he has in mind is to open new schools, to launch new tourist projects, to encourage industry. It has nothing to do with any political change or reform because this would be against the nature of his regime.

Bashar is now fighting for his life and what is happening outside Syria has no relevance right now. We know exactly what might happen to him and to all of his generals in the event of regime change. The defense minister, Ali Habib, is his relative. Since he is fighting for his life, he will do what is needed to win, and he does not care that the Americans and Europeans are condemning him for his brutality.

The Syrians do not see Egypt as a model that is relevant for them. The model that is relevant for Syria is Iraq or Lebanon. Syrians look at the Iraqi model as an example of what might happen if the regime collapses: disintegration of the state, bloodshed, and ethnic clashes.

So far the protest is limited to the Sunni periphery. We have not heard about unrest in the Druze areas in southern Syria. Christians are clearly in full support of the Assad regime, as are the other minorities. The Kurds in eastern Syria are still in a position of wait-and-see.

Syrian Relations with Israel

The Syrian regime has no interest in an escalation along the Syrian-Israeli border. Syria knows that any small incident can turn into a major war like in Lebanon in 2006. I wonder if it was indeed the Syrian regime who organized all those demonstrations along the border on Nakba and Naksa days. Clearly, when the regime was strong, it could not have happened. Now that the regime is weaker and Assad is focusing much of his attention on the riots all over Syria, such events can happen. But when it got out of control, the regime made an effort to contain and bring the events to an end. Bashar needs his soldiers to fight the Syrian people and to suppress the revolt. The last thing he needs is a war with Israel in which Israel might destroy his army, leaving him without any defensive shield against this uprising.

Making peace with Israel is not a popular idea in the Arab world. A weak leader will not even consider it. There is a consensus in Syria that one day it will be possible to think about settling the conflict with Israel, but in a weak regime with a leader under attack, this is not the right time. Nobody in Syria cared about the demonstrations on Nakba and Naksa days. All they care about is Bashar and his regime. People in Syria do not care about what the Israelis do right now.

The Syrian regime should be considered a strategic threat to Israel because Bashar al-Assad has sought to develop nuclear capabilities. He provided support to Hamas and Hizbullah – not the kind of support his father used to give them, but strategic support which turned Hizbullah into a major strategic threat to Israel. Bashar was the one who brought the Iranians to Syria and to the region. The Iranians had been present, but only as guests. Now they are in a different position and the alliance became closer. At the same time, Bashar maintained quiet on the Golan Heights border and said he wanted to sign a peace agreement with Israel.

The Syrian ruler came to the conclusion that having a nuclear capability was what saved the North Korean regime, and that what enabled the Americans to attack Saddam Hussein was the fact that he did not have a nuclear option. A different Syrian regime may not have the economic resources and the intimate links to North Korea and Iran, and might not feel the need for a nuclear capability. It could be that Syria under a new regime will be different than Syria under the Assad dynasty. Hafez al-Assad, with Western help, was able to turn Syria – a small, backward state – into a regional power. Take the Assad dynasty out of the equation and Syria will remain an important state geographically, but not the regional power it was before.

As for peace with Israel, there was something personal in the Syrian demand for an Israeli withdrawal to the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee because Hafez al-Assad, as defense minister, was the one who lost the war in 1967. If you remove the Assad dynasty from the equation, perhaps the Syrian stance will become more flexible.

A New Syrian Regime Might Be Better for Israel

The weaker Syria is, the stronger Lebanon will be. Any regime change in Syria could be a blow to Hizbullah, even though Hizbullah does represent many of the Shiites. It is a deeply rooted, authentic Lebanese Shiite power center. However, it was the help of Syria and Iran that turned Hizbullah into a regional power. Taking Syria out of the equation could reduce Hizbullah to a more reasonable size – to become a strong Lebanese party but not more than that.

Syria supported the Shiites in Lebanon, but at the same time gave some backing to the Sunnis because the logic behind Syrian intervention in Lebanon has always been: divide and rule. A Sunni regime in Syria might change the balance in Lebanon in favor of the Sunnis.

A new regime in Syria could mean a return to the 1950s and 1960s when there was a weak, decentralized Syrian government with strong regions. Each region has its own ethnic and communal characteristics, and there may be a coup d’état from time to time and a lack of stability. The worst scenario is that Syria will turn into a new Iraq, because there are now not only historical accounts to settle but current accounts as well. There have been 2,000 Syrians killed and the families will ask for revenge, not from Bashar but from their Alawite and Christian neighbors.

I do not think it is in Israel’s interest to have Bashar in power. Certainly, as in Egypt, it is always possible that the Muslim Brotherhood might take over in Syria, but I am not sure that this will be the case. If Bashar falls, the situation is likely to be similar to that of earlier decades, with a very weak central regime. This could lead to border incidents with Israel, but not a war, with terrorist acts that a weak regime cannot prevent. The Syrian opposition will eventually take over and, as in the case of Egypt, they know that their interests lie with friendship with Western countries like the United States, and not with Iran. So in the long run, a new Syrian regime might be better for Israel than this current regime.

*     *     *

Prof. Eyal Zisser is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, and former Head of the Department of Middle Eastern and African History and of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, both at Tel Aviv University. He is a leading expert on Syria and has written extensively on the history and modern politics of Syria, Lebanon, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Among his books are: In the Name of the Father: Bashsar al-Asad’s First Years in Power, Lebanon: the Challenge of Independence and Assad’s Syria at a Crossroads. This Jerusalem Issue Brief is based on his presentation at the Institute for Contemporary Affairs of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on June 16, 2011.

Austerity vs. deterrence – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

America’s national debt crisis and Pentagon budget cuts are pushing to the margins emergency plans for an operation against Iran.

By Amir Oren

Mossad’s Miracle Weapon: Stuxnet Virus Opens New Era of Cyber War – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

By Holger Stark

The Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, attacked the Iranian nuclear program with a highly sophisticated computer virus called Stuxnet. The first digital weapon of geopolitical importance, it could change the way wars are fought — and it will not be the last attack of its kind.

The complex on a hill near an interchange on the highway from Tel Aviv to Haifa is known in Israel simply as “The Hill.” The site, as big as several soccer fields, is sealed off from the outside world with high walls and barbed wire — a modern fortress that symbolizes Israel’s fight for survival in the Middle East. As the headquarters of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, this fortress is strictly off-limits to politicians and journalists alike. Ordinarily, it is the Mossad that makes house calls, and not the other way around.

The agency’s strict no-visitors policy was temporarily relaxed on a Thursday in early January, when a minibus with darkened windows pulled into a parking lot in front of a nearby movie theater. The journalists inside were asked to hand over their mobile phones and audio recorders. Meïr Dagan, the powerful head of the Mossad, had invited them to the facility. It was his last day in a position he had held for seven years. On that January day, the journalists were there to document his legacy: the Mossad’s fight against the Iranian nuclear program.

He spoke passionately about the risks of a possible military strike against Iran, saying that he believed that such an attack would lead to a conflagration in the region that would include a war with Hezbollah and Hamas, and possibly with Syria. And anyone who believed that a military strike could stop Tehran’s nuclear program was wrong, said Dagan. It could slow down the program, he added, but only temporarily. For this reason, the outgoing Mossad chief was against bombs — but in favor of anything that could set back the Iranian nuclear program without starting a conventional war.

Delay was the new magic word. And to that end, the Mossad head had created a miracle weapon that everyone in the room on that January day knew about, but which Dagan did not mention by name: Stuxnet.

Stuxnet, a computer virus that can infiltrate highly secure computers not connected to the Internet, a feat previously believed to be virtually impossible, entered the global political arena more than a year ago, in June 2010. The virus had attacked computers at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, where scientists are enriching uranium, and manipulated the centrifuges to make them self-destruct. The attack penetrated into the heart of the Iranian nuclear program.

Stuxnet is the world’s first cyber-weapon of geopolitical significance. Frank Rieger of the legendary German hacker organization Chaos Computer Club calls it “a digital bunker buster.” The virus represents a fundamentally new addition to the arsenal of modern warfare. It enables a military attack using a computer program tailored to a specific target.

One year later, there is not an Internet security firm or government of a major country that is not addressing Stuxnet and its consequences, as well as taking action as a result. To learn more about Stuxnet and understand what is behind the virus, SPIEGEL traveled to Israel — the country where the cyber-weapon was invented.

Following the Trail

The Israeli branch of the US computer security firm Symantec is housed in a nondescript modern complex in Tel Aviv, a 15-minute drive from Ben Gurion International Airport. Sam Angel, the head of Symantec Israel, meets visitors in the underground garage and takes them to the conference room on the fourth floor. At the beginning of his PowerPoint presentation, Angel says: “Stuxnet is the most sophisticated attack we have ever seen. This sort of an attack, on a mature, isolated industrial system is completely unusual.” He projects a map onto the wall, showing the countries where such an attack has taken place: Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Belarus, where a man named Sergey Ulasen discovered Stuxnet.

Ulasen, who works in the research and development department at the VirusBlokAda security firm in Minsk, received what seemed to be a relatively mundane email on June 17, 2010. An Iranian firm was complaining that its computers were behaving strangely, shutting themselves down and then rebooting. Ulasen and a colleague spent a week examining the machines. Then they found Stuxnet. VirusBlokAda notified other companies in the industry, including Symantec.

When the engineers at Symantec got to work, they came across two computers that had directed the attacks. One of the servers was in Malaysia and the other was in Denmark, and they were reachable through the addresses http://www.todaysfutbol.com and http://www.mypremierfutbol.com. They had been registered, under a false name and with a forged credit card, through one of the world’s largest Internet registration companies, a firm based in the US state of Arizona. Symantec rerouted the incoming and outgoing communication at the two servers to its computer center in Dublin, which enabled it to monitor the activity of the virus. Whoever had launched Stuxnet had gotten away, but at least Symantec could follow the trail they had left behind.

The rerouting of communication made it possible to obtain an overview of the countries in which the virus was active. According to that analysis, Stuxnet had infected about 100,000 computers worldwide, including more than 60,000 in Iran, more than 10,000 in Indonesia and more than 5,000 in India. The inventors programmed Stuxnet so that the virus, as a first step, tells the two command-and-control servers if the infected computer is running Step 7, an industrial software program developed by the German engineering company Siemens. Step 7 is used to run the centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz facility.

The plant near Natanz, located in the desert 250 kilometers (156 miles) south of Tehran, is protected with military-level security. The aluminum centrifuges, which are housed in bunkers, are 1.8 meters (5 foot 10 inches) tall and 10 centimeters (four inches) in diameter. Their purpose is to gradually increase the proportion of uranium-235, the fissile isotope of uranium. There is a rotor inside the centrifuges that rotates at a speed of 1,000 times per second. In the process, uranium hexafluoride gas is centrifuged, so that uranium-235 accumulates in the center. The process is controlled by a Siemens system that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Security Holes and Red Herrings

The ruse that makes the attack possible is as simple as it is ingenious. Stuxnet takes advantage of a security hole in Windows that makes it possible to manipulate the system. As a result of this programming error, the virus can be introduced into the system through a USB flash drive, for example. As soon as the drive is connected to a computer in the system, the installation begins unnoticed.

Stuxnet initially searches for anti-virus programs. The code is designed to circumvent them or, if this is not possible, to de-install itself. For a long time, one of the priorities was to leave no traces.

In a second step, Stuxnet lodges itself into the part of the operating system that manages USB flash drives, where it establishes a checksum, the exact purpose of which is unclear. The infection stops when this sum reaches the value 19790509. Symantec speculates that this is some sort of code. When read backward, the number could represent May 9, 1979, the day Habib Elghanian, a Jewish businessman, was executed in Tehran. Is this a coincidence? A provocation? Or a deliberately placed red herring?

It is still unclear how exactly the Israelis were able to get the virus into Natanz. In the jargon of computer experts, previously unknown security gaps like the hole in the Windows operating system are called zero-day exploits. Searching for these vulnerabilities is a combination of hacker challenge and business model. Knowledge is valuable, and there is a black market in which a previously unknown vulnerability can be worth $100,000 (€70,000) or more. Stuxnet exploits no fewer than four of these digital jewels.

‘A Blue-and-White Operation’

Symantec manager Sam Angel believes that it is impossible to write a code like Stuxnet without having intimate knowledge of the Siemens system. “There is no black market for exploits involving Siemens software,” he says. “It’s not used widely enough.” How, then, did the Mossad acquire the information about the technology in use at Natanz?

It has been openly speculated that the Americans may have helped the Mossad. There is a US government research institution in Idaho where scientists study the Siemens control technology used in Iran; the basic research for Stuxnet could have taken place there. After that, the virus could have been tested at Israel’s nuclear research center near Dimona in the Negev Desert.

Israeli sources familiar with the background to the attack insist, however, that Stuxnet was a “blue-and-white operation,” a reference to Israel’s national colors — in other words, a purely Israeli operation. They believe that a secret elite unit of the military intelligence agency programmed a portion of the code, leaving the Mossad to do the rest. The Mossad was also apparently responsible for smuggling the virus into Natanz. The same sources claim that the Mossad tried to buy a cascade of centrifuges on the black market, without success. In the end, an Israeli arms manufacturer, with the help of foreign intelligence agencies, supposedly managed to build a model of Natanz where Stuxnet was tested.

The operation was ready to begin in the summer of 2009. The attackers unleashed Stuxnet at 4:31 p.m. on June 22, 2009. The attack targeted five Iranian organizations and was launched in three waves. After the first wave, a second strike took place in March 2010, dealing a heavy blow to the Iranians. The third wave followed in April. According to Symantec, the targets were not directly related to Iran’s nuclear program, but some of the target organizations were on United Nations sanctions lists. Some 12,000 computers were infected in the five organizations alone.

Stuxnet is programmed to delete itself from the USB flash drive after the third infection, presumably to prevent it from spreading explosively, which would have been noticed immediately. The goal of the cyber-weapon is to sabotage its targets in a sustainable, rather than spectacular, manner.

Another trick, which gives the virus the semblance of legality, shows how complex the design is. It involves digital certificates, which are issued on the Internet by companies that test the activity of a server or a program and certify that it is not malicious. If a program can show that it has such a certificate, then it is allowed access to a system. The Taiwanese firms Realtek Semiconductor and JMicron Technology are among the firms that issue such certificates.

In January 2010, a version of Stuxnet turned up that had been signed with a digital certificate from Realtek. This was followed, in July 2010, by a version signed with a JMicron certificate. Both certificates had been stolen. This theft alone is an operation that requires either a physical burglary at the headquarters of both companies, or the kind of hacker attack that very few programmers worldwide are capable of performing, because these certificates are additionally secured and encoded.

Only a State Could Produce Stuxnet

An analysis by a European intelligence agency classified as “secret,” which SPIEGEL has seen, states that it would have taken a programmer at least three years to develop Stuxnet, at a cost in the double-digit millions. Symantec, for its part, estimates that the tests in the model facility alone would have occupied five to 10 programmers for half a year. According to the intelligence analysis, “non-governmental actors” can be “virtually ruled out” as the inventors of Stuxnet. Members of Germany’s Federal Security Council, a government committee for defense issues whose meetings are secret, felt the same way when the council met in Berlin on Nov. 25, 2010.

Stuxnet shows what can happen when potent attackers are at work, said then Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, who is now German defense minister. Anyone who is willing to invest that much money and resources, Maizière added, knows what he is doing. The council members agreed that a sovereign state had to be behind the virus.

De Maizière’s staff noted that 15 vulnerabilities are found in standard computer programs every day, and that tens of thousands of websites are infected worldwide on a daily basis. At the end of the meeting, the council decided to establish a national cyber defense center. “The experiences with the Stuxnet virus show that even key areas of industrial infrastructure are no longer safe against targeted IT attacks,” a government cabinet paper later stated.

The virus has fundamentally changed the way we look at digital attacks. The US government recently issued a new cyber war doctrine that defines a cyber-attack as a conventional act of war. The Stuxnet code, which is now accessible to the public, could inspire copycats, Roberta Stempfley of the US Department of Homeland Security warned last week.

Last year the British government adopted a new security strategy, for which it approved funding of 650 million pounds (€565 million or $1,070 million). The cyber world will become “more important in the conflict between nations,” Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor said in a speech in Jerusalem in February. “It is a new battleground, if you like, not with guns but with something else.”

Success Comparable to Cracking Enigma

The Mossad views Stuxnet as a great success, comparable to the cracking of Germany’s Enigma cipher machine by the Poles and Britons in World War II. The Israeli military isn’t as euphoric. It argues that the fact that Stuxnet was discovered was a high price to pay, despite the setback it dealt to Iran’s mullah-led regime.

And it was a painful setback indeed. An Iranian IR-1 centrifuge normally spins at 1,064 hertz, or cycles per second. When the rotors began going haywire, they increased their frequency to 1,410 hertz for 15 minutes and then returned to their normal frequency. The virus took over control again 27 days later, but this time it slowed down the rotors to a frequency of a few hundred hertz for a full 50 minutes. The resulting excessive centrifugal force caused the aluminum tubes to expand, increasing the risk of parts coming into contact with one another and thereby destroying the centrifuges.

Six cascades containing 164 centrifuges each were reportedly destroyed in this manner. Authorities on the Iranian nuclear program, like David Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), believe that Stuxnet destroyed about 1,000 centrifuges. Iran has admitted that its nuclear program was set back. According to Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s civil defense organization, the program suffered “potentially major damage.”

Former Mossad chief Dagan achieved his goal of sabotaging the nuclear program without triggering a new war in the Middle East. But Iran still has 8,000 other centrifuges, and the more modern, second-generation IR-2 centrifuges, which are equipped with carbon fiber rotors, can operate smoothly even at 1,400 hertz. They are not affected by the existing version of the sabotage software. The Mossad could be in need of a new virus soon. Using it would constitute the next round in a clandestine cyber war.

‘People Had Never Seen Anything Like Stuxnet Before’

Two young Israelis who work indirectly for the government are sitting in one of Tel Aviv’s modern cafés. The men run a company that handles jobs for the Mossad and Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency. They smile and say that digital attack, not defense, is their discipline. They are part of a global hacker elite. According to rumors circulating in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the men did some of the groundwork for the Mossad in the development of Stuxnet.

“People had never seen anything like Stuxnet before, except in movies,” says one of the hackers. “Now they can see that it’s real.” His voice is filled with pride when he says: “In the small community of attackers, none of this was really new.” Almost all of the vulnerabilities had already been used in a past attack, the hacker says, but they had never been used at the same time. He explains that the real challenge in staging an attack with a virus like Stuxnet is to penetrate into a system that is not connected to the Internet.

What are the consequences of Stuxnet?

The two men are silent for a moment; they see things from the attacker’s perspective. “The discovery of Stuxnet was a serious blow to us,” one of them says. “We find it particularly upsetting, because a successful method was disclosed.”

The inventors of Stuxnet apparently had many more plans for their product. Symantec has since discovered another version of the Stuxnet virus, which contains even more complex code and is designed to target modern Siemens control technology, but which had not been activated yet. Stuxnet, say the people at Symantec, “is the type of threat we hope to never see again.”

That wish is unlikely to come true.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Iran MP: Nuclear plant’s launch delayed again – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Says Iran already paid at least twice expected costs for 1,000 megawatt plant

Associated Press

An Iranian lawmaker says the country’s first nuclear power plant in southern port of Bushehr faces more delays because of money demands from Russia.

The reformist Aftab daily on Monday quotes Asgar Jalalian, a member of the parliament’s special committee on the plant, as saying that Iran has already paid at least twice the expected costs for the 1,000 megawatt plant. Russia’s Rosatom is building the facility.

Jalialian says the committee doubts the plant will come on line by August, as promised.

Moscow and Tehran signed a US$1 billion contract to start building Bushehr in 1995. Its 1999 completion date has been repeatedly pushed back.

In June, Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the plant was finished and could begin generating electricity in August.

“The project is complete, everything is tuned, and now it is a question for the engineers, when they can realistically turn on the switch,” RIA quoted Ryabkov as saying.

The Bushehr Nuclear Plant (Photo: Reuters)

“If this happens in the first days of August it will fully correspond with the prognoses and expectations of the Russian and Iranian sides.” he said.

The Bushehr plant has faced repeated delays, angering Tehran and fuelling speculation that Moscow has used it as a lever in diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear program, which the United States and others say they fear is a front for weapons development.

The 1,000-mw plant had been due to start producing electricity early this year, but those plans were thwarted by what Russia said was a pump problem requiring the removal of nuclear fuel that had just been loaded.