Shiite terror group reportedly eyeing Bashar Assad chemical warfare arsenal; Israel fears growing chaos in war-torn country will enable Hezbollah to get hold of advanced weaponry
Hezbollah has set up several bases in Syria, near known locations where Syrian President Bashar Assad is holding parts of his chemical warfare arsenal, Ynet learned Monday.
The information came to light amid growing concerns in Israel that Assad’s arsenal of unconventional weapons – considered to be the largest in the world – would fall into the hands of the Lebanon-based Shiite terror group.The UN says that so far, over 60,000 people have been killed since the revolt against Assad began, in March 2011.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently held a number of security assessments focusing on the developments in the war-torn country.
Israel’s defense establishment has been holding similar assessments, focused on the potential shift in the balance of power between the IDF and Hezbollah, in the event that the latter would get hold of Assad’s WMDs.
As the regime’s hold on power slips further, it is becoming apparent that Hezbollah will use the chaos embroiling Syria to transfer advanced weapons system – and most likely unconventional weapons – into Lebanon.
Wary of the developments, Israel deployed two Iron Dome batteries near the northern border on Sunday.
The IDF has also stepped up work on the new border fence in the area, which is equipped with advanced surveillance systems able to provide the military with more accurate intelligence about inland Syria.
Meanwhile, fierce battles between Damascus’ forces and the rebels continue in Homs, as Assad attempts to tighten his grip on the “Alawite enclave” in the province, which has become the Syrian revolution’s symbol for resistance.
The Free Syrian Army claimed Sunday to have taken a major military base near Syria’s international airport, as well as a political security building in Deir al-Zor, near the Syria-Iraq border and several military posts in the northwestern province of Idlib.
Iranian technicians work at a facility producing uranium fuel for a planned heavy-water nuclear reactor, outside Isfahan, 255 miles (410 kilometers) south of the capital Tehran, in 2009. (photo credit: AP/Vahid Salemi)
Two senior Iranian officials on Sunday denied reports that the country’s Fordo nuclear facility had been rocked by a huge explosion.
Deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency Seyyed Shamseddin Barbroudi said there had been no explosion at the facility whatsoever, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
The chairman of the Iranian parliament’s Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, referred to rumors of the blast as “Western-made propaganda” and said they were “baseless lies” meant to impact ongoing talks on Iran’s nuclear program, reported IRNA.
A report published Friday on the website wnd.com claimed that a blast deep within Fordo last Monday “destroyed much of the installation and trapped about 240 personnel deep underground,” citing information from former intelligence officer Hamidreza Zakeri, who it said used to work with the Islamic regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and National Security.
The article claimed the blast “shook facilities within a radius of three miles,” that Iranian security forces had “enforced a no-traffic radius of 15 miles,” that the Tehran-Qom highway was shut down for several hours after the blast, and that, “as of Wednesday afternoon, rescue workers had failed to reach the trapped personnel.” It said US officials were aware of the reported blast.
There was no independent confirmation of the claims. Nonetheless, Israel’s biggest-selling daily Yedioth Ahronoth led its Sunday paper with the report on the alleged blast, which it said might be “the most significant incidence of sabotage in the Iranian nuclear program to date.”
Asked about the explosion on Sunday, Home Front Defense Minister Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, said, “Any explosion in Iran that doesn’t hurt people but hurts its assets is welcome.” Dichter was acting defense minister Sunday, in the absence of Ehud Barak.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but that claim has been rejected by much of the international community. The Islamic Republic’s consistent refusal to allow international inspectors into the Fordo nuclear facility has frustrated Western powers and officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iranian technicians work at a facility producing uranium fuel for a planned heavy-water nuclear reactor, outside Isfahan, 255 miles (410 kilometers) south of the capital Tehran, in 2009. (photo credit: AP/Vahid Salemi)
Israeli intelligence officials have confirmed that a major explosion has rocked an Iranian nuclear facility, according to a report Monday in The Times of London.
The British daily cited officials in Tel Aviv who said the blast occurred last week, as originally reported on the website wnd.com.
Iran has not evacuated the area surrounding the Fordo plant, according to the same Israeli sources, who said that an investigation into the blast was ongoing.
“We are still in the preliminary stages of understanding what happened and how significant it is,” one Israeli official told the London Times. He did not know if the explosion was “sabotage or accident” and refused to comment on reports that Israeli aircraft were seen near Fordo at the time of the blast.
On Sunday, two senior Iranian officials dismissed reports of the explosion.
Deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency Seyyed Shamseddin Barbroudi said there had been no explosion at the Fordo facility whatsoever, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
The chairman of the Iranian parliament’s Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, referred to rumors of the blast as “Western-made propaganda” and said they were “baseless lies” meant to impact ongoing talks on Iran’s nuclear program, reported IRNA.
The original wnd.com report published Friday claimed that a blast deep within Fordo last Monday “destroyed much of the installation and trapped about 240 personnel deep underground,” citing information from former intelligence officer Hamidreza Zakeri, who it said used to work with the Islamic regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and National Security.
The article claimed the blast “shook facilities within a radius of three miles,” that Iranian security forces had “enforced a no-traffic radius of 15 miles,” that the Tehran-Qom highway was shut down for several hours after the blast, and that, “as of Wednesday afternoon, rescue workers had failed to reach the trapped personnel.” It said US officials were aware of the reported blast.
Asked about the incident on Sunday, Home Front Defense Minister Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, said, “Any explosion in Iran that doesn’t hurt people but hurts its assets is welcome.” Dichter was acting defense minister Sunday, in the absence of Ehud Barak.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but that claim has been rejected by much of the international community. The Islamic Republic’s consistent refusal to allow international inspectors into the Fordo nuclear facility has frustrated Western powers and officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
According to the report, the explosion in Fordow seriously damaged many of the centrifuges in the plant and trapped underground 240 employees who have yet to be rescued. But if this is true, why have the major news networks dismissed it?
The Fordow nuclear facility under construction inside a mountain located about 20 miles north northeast of Qom, Iran. Photo by AP
By DPA | Jan.27,2013 | 9:50 PM | 22
The Internet has been abuzz over the last couple of days with an uncorroborated report regarding a huge explosion in the underground uranium enrichment plant at Fordow in Iran. According to the report, the explosion seriously damaged many of the centrifuges in the plant and trapped underground 240 employees who have yet to be rescued.
If this is true, it will be the most serious sabotage caused yet to the Iranian nuclear program. If this is true.
The main problem with the report is that no supporting evidence has appeared so far from any reliable sources to corroborate it, nor has a statements been released from an official source in Iran or any other country. All the main Western news organizations with contacts and sources in the intelligence community have steered well away from the story. (In Israel, only the tabloid Yedioth Ahronoth, which splashed the story on the front page of its Sunday edition, took notice of the story.)
Perhaps it’s the identity of the report’s author which leads to the disbelief: Reza Kahlili, an Iranian exile with an interesting past who is well known to many reporters covering intelligence and Iranian affairs. He published the report on the explosion, which apparently took place on Monday, the eve of the Israeli elections, on World News Daily, a veteran website with close contacts to the far-right in the United States. Kahlili himself is a frequent speaker at events organized by right-wing organizations and those that support the right in Israel. It’s not hard to realize why. In an interview he gave Haaretz two years ago, upon the publication of his book “A Time To Betray”, Kalili set out a worldview on Iran that was surprisingly similar to that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He also compared the regime in Tehran to that of the Nazis, and called upon Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear installations.
Kahlili’s book tells his story as a young Iranian man who studied in the United States and returned to his homeland following the Islamic revolution with the belief that Ayatollah Khomeini was a force for positive change. He joined the Revolutionary Guard, but after a few years lost faith. He volunteered to spy for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and for a few years collected information in Iran. In the late 1980s he was taken out of Iran along with his wife and has since lived in the United States.
In recent years, he has made a living writing and giving talks on Iran, claiming to still have an impressive network of sources in various government agencies. To this day, in his public appearances he will not reveal his face, for fear of retribution, and appears with a baseball cap, dark glasses and a surgical mask. (His employment by the CIA has been confirmed by Agency sources and an approving review of his book even appeared on the CIA website.)
Not for nothing have the major news organizations ignored Kahlili’s Fordow report. Beyond his questionable credibility, there is no supporting evidence. If a large explosion did occur at Fordow a week ago, why have no satellite photos appeared of dozens of vehicles on the site involved in rescue operations? And if there are 240 workers trapped underground, how come no worried relatives have expressed concern on one of the social networks? Iran may have a repressive regime, but tens of millions of citizens are connected to the Internet and are experts at evading the regime’s attempts to monitor and filter their communications. Something would have come out by now.
Even assuming one of the intelligence agencies engaged in the silent war against Iran – the CIA, Mossad, MI6 or any other – was capable of placing a large explosive device in the secure underground facility still under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, without leaving an incriminating trail, such an operation would have been the closest thing to declaring war. Would the governments of the west have taken such a risk while it they still believe that Iran can be convinced to stop enriching uranium through a combination of sanctions and diplomatic engagement.
In a phone-interview with Haaretz (Kahlili used a voice-distorting device), he insisted that his information was accurate and based on his “several sources in the Revolutionary Guards, government offices and [Supreme Leader] Khamenei’s office.” He admitted to frustration over the mainstream media’s lack of reaction to this report and said: “I have revealed many facts about the regime and its secret work and months later major news networks picked it up.”
Among his recent revelations that have not attracted attention are two new enrichment installations that he claims are being operated with Russian cooperation and use laser technology. He volunteered another scoop: following the Fordow explosion, he claims, meetings were held between Revolutionary Guard commanders and Hassan Nasrallah, in which Hezbollah was ordered to evacuate a number of villages in south Lebanon, to prepare for an attack on Israel.
He is totally convinced that in the coming weeks, additional information will emerge and the regime’s retaliation will confirm his version.
According to former Iranian Revolutionary Guard report, explosion at Fordow destroyed much of the instillation; remains unverified.
IAEA cameras in Iran uranium plant [file] Photo: REUTERS
A report claiming that a mysterious blast rocked the Fordow uranium enrichment facility in Iran last week made headlines in Israel on Sunday, but remained unverified.
An Iranian official on Sunday night denied the reports, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
The deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization Seyyed Shamseddin Barbroudi was quoted by the IRNA as dismissing the report.
According to the report, penned by former Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Reza Kahlili, for the WND.com website, the explosion “destroyed much of the installation and trapped about 240 personnel deep underground.”
Kahlili, who says he turned CIA agent in the 1980s and 90s, cited a “source in the security forces protecting Fordow” as saying that the blast occurred last Monday at Fordow, which is located deep inside a mountain to protect it from aerial attack.
“The blast shook facilities within a radius of three miles. Security forces have enforced a no-traffic radius of 15 miles, and the Tehran- Qom highway was shut down for several hours after the blast,” the report added.
The existence of the Fordow enrichment plant was kept secret by Iran, until it was discovered by Western intelligence in 2009, and the question of how long it had been in operation remains unanswered.
Emily Landau, director of the Arms Control and Regional Security Project at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, noted on Sunday that Iran is enriching uranium to 20 percent at Fordow, “and it raises concerns because it is buried deep in a mountain.”
She added, “There have been many references to the fact that Israel doesn’t have strong enough bombs to penetrate it from the air, but the US MOP [massive ordnance penetrator] is reported to be able to penetrate it.”
Landau added that reports surfaced six months ago saying that the MOP is operational.
The shutting down of Fordow is one of the three demands made on Iran by the P5+1 nations during talks with the Islamic Republic.
According to a 2011 IAEA report, Iran is testing detonators for nuclear blasts at its secret base in Parchin, and has refused to allow UN inspectors access to the site.
Air Force personnel in front of a mock-up of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., home of the nation’s B-2 force that would carry the 30,000-pound bomb.
After fretting for months that a “critical part” of the world’s biggest bunker-busting bomb was flawed, the Pentagon declared last week that the mammoth blaster is at last fixed and ready for use – against Iran, or any other nation the U.S. decides is developing weapons of mass destruction deeply underground.
There’s as much psychological gamesmanship at play here as pyrotechnics, as the U.S. and Iran continue their showdown over Washington’s insistence that Tehran abandon its nuclear-weapons program, and the Iranians’ assertion that their program is only for peaceful purposes.
Make no mistake about it: the declaration that the Air Force’s Massive Ordnance Penetrator is ready for action is the latest volley in a high-stakes game that could lead to war before the year is out.
The Defense Department’s Operational Test and Evaluation office makes clear that, after more than a year of vague Pentagon-expressed concerns that there were technical problems with the MOP, the 15-ton bomb is now ready for prime time. The green light comes after a series of tests through the fall at Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range, both in New Mexico, showed that the redesigned weapon “effectively prosecuted the targets.”
“The MOP is a GPS-guided weapon designed to reach and destroy targets located in well protected facilities,” the testing synopsis reads. “The sled test results and the additional weapon drops indicate that the weapon re-design is adequate for the successful prosecution of all of the elements of the currently defined target set.”
While no one will say so, Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordo – buried up to 80 meters beneath a mountain near the Shiite holy city of Qom, at a former missile base controlled by Iran’s unpredictable Revolutionary Guards – is at the top of that target list. And Tehran now knows it is officially vulnerable to attack.
“The warhead case is made from a special high performance steel alloy and its design allows for a large explosive payload while maintaining the integrity of the penetrator case during impact,” the test report notes. “Combatant Commanders use MOP to conduct pre-planned, day or night attacks against defended point targets vulnerable to blast and fragmentation effects and requiring significant penetration, such as hardened and deeply-buried facilities.”
Having the MOP in its quiver does two things for the U.S.: first of all, for the Iranians, it makes clear that the U.S. has a non-nuclear option to pulverize much of its nuclear-development effort – peaceful or otherwise – and delay it for years. But the neat twist is that Israel doesn’t have such a weapon, and its relatively puny 5,000-pound bunker-busters could do far less damage to Iranian targets. That, some U.S. officials say, should act as a brake on any unilateral Israeli action.
Nearly a decade ago, the Pentagon concluded that dropping its one-ton bombs on buried targets was like using a peashooter against an elephant. “Our past test experience has shown that 2,000-pound penetrators carrying 500 pounds of high explosive are relatively ineffective against tunnels, even when skipped directly into the tunnel entrance,” a 2004 report said. “Instead, several thousand pounds of high explosives coupled to the tunnel are needed to blow down blast doors and propagate a lethal air blast throughout a typical tunnel complex.”
Tehran acknowledged Fordo’s existence in 2009, once it learned the West had detected it and was ready to announce its discovery. That was about the same time the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency — charged with reducing the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction – was wrapping up initial tests on the MOP’s design before handing the program over to the Air Force.
The Air Force said it wanted a “Quick Reaction Capability” to “defeat a specific set of Hard and/or Deeply Buried Targets.” The weapon, the service said, would “maximize effects against Hard and/or Deeply Buried Targets (HDBTs), while minimizing time over target.” The service said it needed the weapon to meet “Urgent Operational Needs requirements” – generally a plea from a battlefield commander who doesn’t think he has the weapons he needs to accomplish a mission assigned to him.
“The system will hold at risk those highest priority assets essential to the enemy’s war-fighting ability, which are heavily defended and protected,” the Air Force said in February 2011 budget documents. It would provide “a critical global strike capability not currently met by inventory conventional weapons.”
The $15 million MOP has six times the heft of existing GBU-28 bunker busters. Glided into its destination by GPS-guided lattice-type fins, its alloy steel hull – some 80% of its weight – is designed to remain intact as it drills through rock or reinforced concrete before setting off its 5,300-pound warhead. Air Force officials say it represents a “bridge” capability between existing bunker busters and nuclear weapons themselves.
Pentagon documents detail the kind of target Fordo is believed to represent (“all data with regard to this Scenario are notional,” the government says, “and do not represent any known target”):
…the HDBT is assumed to be a tunnel complex with two portals built into the base of a granite mountain. The granite over layer is assumed to be 60 meters thick over both portals and 80 meters over the facility’s mission space. Metallic blast doors are closed and hermetically sealed at both portals. The two tunnels are assumed to be 100 feet in length with directional turns. The facility is constructed on a single level and occupies between 10,000 and 20,000 square feet.
The HDBT makes use of state-of-the-art computers and communication equipment. It is tied to the local electricity grid but has a large capacity diesel generator to produce its electricity when the need arises. The facility draws fresh water from an internal deep well. Sewage is held in holding tanks and removed periodically. All incoming air passes through state-of-the-art biological/chemical filters.
The Pentagon doesn’t have an unlimited supply of MOPs: it initially bought 20, for $314 million. The Boeing-built weapon can only be carried by the Air Force’s B-2 stealth bomber.
It’s also extremely shy: there are few photographs of the real thing. But the Air Force has released a pair of photographs of a MOP mockup. It’s a safe bet the mockup has been tweaked from the actual weapon to avoid betraying its precise design and dimensions.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was asked about the MOP’s possible use against Iranian targets in September. “Without going into the particular capabilities we have,” Panetta told CBS, “we think we’ve got the ability to be able to strike at them effectively if we have to
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