WarSclerotic

A mission with multiple messages | The Times of Israel.

If, as Sudan claims, those were Israeli planes that bombed its military factory on Wednesday, Jerusalem would not have lacked reasons

Wednesday’s explosion at Sudan’s Yarmouk Complex, outside Khartoum. (photo credit: image capture from Channel 2)

If, as the Sudanese claim, the four desert-camouflaged fighter planes that swooped down on a military factory near Khartoum early Wednesday took off from Israel, then the ruin they left in their wake was a message not just to the country’s genocidal leader Omar al-Bashir but also to Gaza’s terror groups, to Iran and to the West.

The mission might also have been ordered to remove a large stockpile of weapons slated for Gaza or Sinai; as a warm-up drill for Iran; and as a preemptive strike, albeit risky, that preserves the fragile peace with Egypt, which Iran has every interest in destroying.

So many potential aims. Such rumbling silence from Jerusalem.

Let’s start with the West. Surely several officers in the Pentagon and elsewhere noted that the distance between Jerusalem and Khartoum is identical to the distance between the Israeli capital and Qom. Over recent months, there has been ample talk of Israel’s ostensible inability to strike deep within Iran. Much of that talk admittedly revolved around the potency of an Israeli attack and its capacity to inflict damage on Iran’s nuclear plants, but an apparent ability to evade or cripple enemy radar for a distance of some 1,700 kilometers would doubtless now be duly noted.

For Tehran, the strike might have sharpened the message that so long as part of the nuclear program remains above ground, it is vulnerable to attack. Perhaps Iran’s air defenses are better than Sudan’s — or Syria’s, for that matter. And surely a strike against Iran would be far more complex. But Iran might now be wondering afresh whether its radar will detect enemy planes cutting through its air space.

The attack would also seem to underline that the Iran-Sudan-Gaza link, channeling an increased flow of arms, will not thrive undisturbed. “Sudan is the pivot on which Iran’s Africa relations turns,” said Ely Karmon, a senior researcher at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya. From there, he noted, Tehran long worked to undermine Hosni Mubarak’s hold on power in Egypt, and from there Iran has been sending arms shipments to Gaza.

President al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague on three counts of genocide and crimes against humanity, has longstanding ties with an impressive array of terror organizations – both Sunni and Shiite. From 1991-1995 he hosted Osama bin Laden in Sudan, and his ally, Hassan al-Turabi, the head of the National Islamic Front in Sudan, organized joint training camps for Hezbollah, the PLO and al-Qaeda operatives among others, according to the 9-11 Commission report.

Critically for Israel, and despite al-Bashir’s Sunni beliefs, those partnerships include links to Iran. “The ties between Tehran and Khartoum were significantly tightened ever since al-Bashir came to power in 1989,” said Karmon. Much as it did for al-Qaeda during the nineties, he added, Khartoum has allowed Iran to build several “very large bases.”

At one point, many shipments of those made-in-Sudan arms went to Hamas. It was in this context that many viewed the 2010 assassination in Dubai of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the chief of Iranian weapons procurement for Hamas, and the air strikes against weapons convoys and arms dealers in Sudan that began in 2009.

Today, Karmon said, Hamas is out of the loop. Ever since the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Hamas leadership’s decision to leave Damascus, Hamas, unlike the Salafist groups that will cooperate with any element fighting the West, has taken sides with the Sunni mainstream — which is to say it is locked into a struggle for regional supremacy with Iran and Shiite Islam. ”The visit of the Emir of Qatar is the final proof that Hamas has moved to the Sunni side,” Karmon said of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani’s visit to Gaza on Tuesday.

Iran, on the other hand, still maintains “a distinct interest” in pitting Israel against Egypt. For this reason it continues to supply Islamic Jihad and the Salafist groups in Gaza and Sinai with weapons — hoping to draw Israel into a battle with Egypt, which would weaken both Israel and the Sunni camp in the Middle East.

Israel, finally, has several possible reasons to strike Khartoum. One, there may have been a large stockpile of weapons that Israel wanted to remove from the market. Two, hitting a major arms factory and not just a convoy, as in the past, “sends a signal to the Iranians” that their installations are vulnerable, Karmon said. And lastly, he speculated, “it could be a sort of live fire drill” in preparation for Iran.

Israeli officials, for their part, were keeping mum on Thursday. Cheerfully so.

Iran Underground Nuclear Plant Almost Finished, N.Y. Times Says – Businessweek.

Hamas ‘harshly condemns’ attack on Sudan arms factory | The Times of Israel.

Flurry of protests from Palestinian organization highlights suspicions that destroyed weapons were destined for Gaza

Hamas on Thursday issued an unusual statement condemning an apparent air strike on a Sudanese arms factory, and the organization’s political leader called the Sudanese president to condemn the attack, highlighting suspicions that the arms destroyed were intended for the Palestinian Islamic movement.

“We harshly condemn this Zionist crime and this treacherous attack perpetrated by the enemy’s army,” read the statement on Hamas’s official website. “We completely identify and stand with the sister-state of Sudan… and appreciate its positions that support the Palestinian people and its legitimate rights.”

The statement was followed by a phone call from Hamas political chief Khaled Mashaal to Sudanese president Omar Bashir. According to a Hamas-affiliated news agency, the Palestinian Information Center, Mashaal thanked Bashir and the Sudanese people for “supporting and aiding the Palestinian people, their legitimate rights and their just cause.”

It is still officially unknown who attacked the factory located in the capital Khartoum, but Sudanese Information Minister Ahmed Bilal Osman told reporters on Wednesday that four airplanes using sophisticated technology had penetrated Sudan from the east. Government officials, including Bashir, later accused Israel.

The Sudanese government would not disclose the type of weapons manufactured at the Yarmouk plan, or who they were intended for. But sources in Israel claimed that Iran had built weapons factories in Sudan.

Earlier Thursday, Israeli Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad told Army Radio that Sudan was “a dangerous terror state,” but stopped short of acknowledging Israeli responsibility for the attack.

Sudan was attacked twice from the air in the past three years. In May 2011, a missile launched from an aircraft killed two men in a car in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan. In January 2009, some 120 men were reportedly killed when a convoy of trucks believed to be carrying weapons headed for the Gaza Strip was attacked from the air.

Israel has never admitted responsibility for the attacks.

Sudan: a front for Israel’s proxy war on Sinai jihadis? | Reuters.

(Reuters) – If Israel bombed a Sudanese munitions factory, as Khartoum alleges, the raid was part of its widening proxy war against Islamist militants in neighboring Egypt which the Jewish state is reluctant to confront directly.

A huge explosion ripped through the factory near the Sudanese capital Khartoum on Tuesday, killing two people, with Sudan swiftly accusing Israel of sending four military planes to take out the complex.

The poor Muslim east African state, with its ties to Iran and Sunni jihadis, has long been seen by Israel as a conduit for weapons smuggled onward to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, via the Egyptian Sinai desert.

With Sinai itself becoming a seedbed of al Qaeda-inspired cadres during Cairo’s political upheaval, the Israelis now fear such arms could be used against them from within Egyptian territory. That puts Israel in a strategic bind, laid bare by the half-dozen guerrilla attacks it absorbed over the Egyptian border in recent months.

The countries’ landmark 1979 peace accord precludes Israeli military action, whether preventive or retaliatory, in the Sinai, and Israel is highly unlikely to risk even a one-off breach given Egypt’s unsympathetic new Islamist-led government.

Israel’s response, government and military sources said, has been to hit first against those on Egypt’s periphery suspected of links to the Sinai militants.

That has meant stepped-up up air strikes on Gazans accused of plotting operations in Sinai, and – to judge by reports from Khartoum – similar escalation in Sudan, to Egypt’s south.

Israel has never confirmed or denied carrying out attacks on Sudanese targets. But Israeli defense officials admit placing a high priority on tracking arms trafficking through the country.

The monitoring, one retired official said, dates back to the previous government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, which waged a 2008-2009 Gaza war to crush Palestinian rocket fire and found itself fending off fierce censure abroad over the civilian toll.

Since early in 2009, shortly before the centrist Olmert was succeeded by the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, Sudan has accused Israel of carrying out several strikes on its territory. The sense of a far-flung covert campaign was further fuelled by the Israelis’ alleged assassination of a senior Hamas armorer in Dubai in 2010 and abduction for trial of a suspected Palestinian rocket expert from Ukraine the following year.

Commenting tersely on Israel’s strategy, the ex-official said it aimed to “stem the flow of arms (to Sinai and Gaza) without triggering major confrontations”.

“This is all the more relevant today,” the ex-official said, referring to instability in Egypt and surging Sinai militancy.

DRONES TO JETS

Foreign intelligence sources said Israel carried out a unmanned drone raid on a convoy south of Khartoum last month that destroyed 200 tons of munitions, including rockets, intended for Gaza.

Tuesday’s blowing up of the Sudanese munitions factory was different to previous incidents, in that a state asset was hit. In a further suggestion of escalation by Israel, witnesses said the sortie was carried out by piloted fighter jets.

Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli defense official, made clear that Sudan should be considered fair game – an enemy like Hamas and Iran – and that Cairo’s interests were also at stake.

“It is clear that it (Sudan) supports the smuggling of munitions, or it helps Gaza. In actuality, these munitions pass through Egypt, so it is endangering its major neighbor, Egypt. It harms national security because tomorrow these arms could also be used against the Egyptians,” Gilad told Army Radio.

Sudanese Information Minister Ahmed Belal Osman declined to say whether any weapons from the attacked Yarmouk arms factory in Khartoum had ended up in Gaza, saying on Wednesday that only “traditional weapons in line with international law” were produced there.

A Swiss-published 2009 Small Arms Survey sponsored by several European governments found that Iran was a major supplier of light munitions to Sudan.

Khartoum has not said whether Iran was in any way involved in the factory that was bombed. A non-Israeli source briefed on the incident said the air strike focused on the main open area between the plant’s main buildings, leaving open the possibility the target was specific personnel or production lines, rather than the whole complex.

Given the some 1,900 km (1,200 mile) distance between Israel and Sudan, some Israeli commentators saw in the alleged raid a warning to Iran, whose similarly remote nuclear facilities the Netanyahu government has hinted it could attack should diplomatic efforts to shut them down fail.

Alex Fishman, senior defense analyst for Israel’s top-selling newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, dubbed the Sudan raid a “live-fire practice run” for Iran.

But the Israeli ex-official, who has an extensive military background, was skeptical about comparing a fenced, open-air Khartoum factory with antiquated air defenses to Iran’s dug-in nuclear facilities.

The ex-official also noted the further difference between flying along the Red Sea toward Sudan, an international aviation corridor, to the prospect of Israeli jets reaching Iran through the unfriendly skies of Arab states like Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

“Israel isn’t ‘signaling’ to Iran, just as it’s not ‘signaling’ to the terrorists in Sinai,” the ex-official said. “Whatever actions might be taken in Sudan are taken to counter a real, immediate threat.”

Though attacks on Israel by Sinai jihadis have been mainly with small arms, there have been occasional short-range rocket launches and Israeli officials worry about possible attempts to down airliners with shoulder-fired missiles.

(Writing by Dan Williams; Additional reporting by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Crispian Balmer and Giles Elgood)