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The Jewish Press » » Reports of Israeli Attack on Syrian Chemical Weapons Site.

There were many reports that Israeli jets flew over Syrian President’s palace on Saturday, but did they also bomb a chemical weapons site nearby?

Did the Israeli Air Force bomb a chemical weapons site outside Damascus on Saturday?
Photo Credit: IDF blog

According to reports from the main Syrian opposition group, the Free Syria Army, the Israeli Air Force bombed a chemical weapons site in Syria, near Damascus, on Saturday, April 27.

The Israeli jets flew over Syrian President Basher Assad’s palace, as reported elsewhere, and then allegedly struck a chemical weapons compound nearby.

Although there were reports that Syrian defense forces fired at the IAF, the Israeli jets left Syrian airspace unharmed.

Last week the Israeli military published intelligence findings that President Bashar Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons repeatedly in recent months. The U.S. was initially reluctant to embrace those findings, and even after admitting that Syria had used chemical weapons “on a small scale,” was remained reluctant to take immediate action.

A second report emanating from Syria potentially supported the claims that Israel struck the chemical weapons site, although this report did not mention Israel’s purported role.

This report from Lebanon’s Daily Star discussed heavy fighting near the “Scientific Studies and Research Centre on the foothills of Qasioun Mountain in the northern Barzeh district,” which, according to American defense experts, is a way Syrians are likely to refer to the chemical weapons site.

A retired U.S. naval intelligence officer, J.E. Dyer, believes it is possible Israel engaged in the strike.  For one thing, as noted in the Daily Star report – Assad’s forces are engaged in an all-out effort to retake the area around the SSRC compound from the rebels. Given the fighting in the area, the danger increases that the chemical weapons inventory would fall into rebel hands, “including Islamist jihadists, including Hezbollah, Hamas and al Qaeda.”

But Dyer had several caveats.  First, she said, taking down the SSRC would be a big job, likely requiring sequential strikes. “There’s a lot of industrial square footage to thump; the IAF would want to put more than a couple of strike fighters over the target.”

And Dyer doesn’t imagine Israel would take the risk of entering Syrian airspace and fail to complete a specific job.  “Either you go in to take it out for the duration of the civil war, or you don’t hit it at all,” is how she put it.

Therefore it is possible the IAF attacked something else near the SSRC on Saturday. Perhaps there was a discrete reachable target that presented itself and Israel took the opportunity to reduce the dangerous materials so close to her own border.  This could have been an attack like the one in late January when Israel struck a truck convoy near Damascus which was moving sophisticated  Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Tehran presses Assad to send Hizballah sophisticated anti-air interceptors.

Self-propelled SA-17 anti-air interceptor

Israeli Air Force jets were reported flying over Damascus in the last few hours by foreign sources. According to debkafile’s Iranian and intelligence sources, Iran has been pushing Bashar Assad hard to let Hizballah have sophisticated weapons, including self-propelled SA-17 interceptor missile systems. Tehran is reminding the Syrian ruler of the debt he owes Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah who was ready to deploy 5,000 out of Hizballah’s 8,000 combat-ready fighters to Syrian battlefields to fight rebel forces and keep the Assad regime in power.
Assad is therefore in no position to spurn Tehran’s demand.
And so, preparations for sending those weapons systems across to Lebanon have been sighted in the last few days at Syrian military bases. Israeli Air Force are said to be overhead monitoring these movements after Israel repeatedly warned Damascus any attempts to make such transfers would draw a reaction.
On Jan. 30, Israel bombed a convoy passing through Jamraya near Damascus on its way to Lebanon with a consignment of sophisticated weapons systems for Hizballah.
The drone launched on April 25 from Lebanon, which Israeli fighter planes shot down opposite Haifa, is seen now as a counter-warning from Tehran that if Israel strikes another arms convoy on its way from Syria to Lebanon, the next drones flying over Israel would be armed and come in numbers.

The Israeli security cabinet held a long session on the Syrian question Sunday, April 28, headed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. They reached a number of decisions on how to handle the latest developments on the Syrian front, including evidence of the use of chemical weapons.
Earlier Sunday, debkafile ran the following exclusive report:

Israel and Turkey agreed last week to start pooling their incoming intelligence on the Syrian civil war, debkafile’s intelligence sources report exclusively. Exchanges will take place at the highest level between Mossad Director Tamir Pardo and Hakan Fidan, head of Turkey’s MIT.

The United States will also provide additional security for Syria’s southern neighbor by the relocation of US Patriot missile interceptors from West Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to northern Jordan opposite the Syrian border.

US Patriots were deployed on the Turkish-Syrian border last year.

The new Patriot deployment indicates that the Obama administration is now treating the peril to its allies from Syria as greater than the Iranian menace.
Things are also on the move in the Turkish-Israeli arena.
Advantage was taken of the Israeli delegation’s visit to Istanbul Monday, April 22, for negotiations on the amount of compensation to be paid out to the families of the nine Turks who died in a clash of arms with Israeli naval commandoes in May 2010, when their ship, the Mavi Marmara, was stopped from completing its mission to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
As first reported by the last DEBKA-Net-Weekly, the negotiating session was brief. Criteria for determining the amounts of the payouts were settled in less than an hour. A joint Israeli-Turkish group is to calculate the sums and refer their estimates back to the delegations for approval.

The two delegations then got down to the brass tacks of the most pressing issues of interest to them both.

A day earlier, US Secretary of State John Kerry had urged Turkey to hurry up and restore its relations with Israel because of the urgent security interests they shared with one another and the United States in the Middle East:

The turbulence in Syria and Iran’s drive for a nuclear bomb posed extreme perils to all three nations.
The delegations responded by launching into an intense discussion of ways to further their military and intelligence cooperation for the common benefit.

One immediate decision was for Turkey and Israel to set up a joint mechanism for sharing intelligence on the Syrian conflict.

Turkey and Israel are reputed to have the best Syrian intelligence in the business, but their methods of gathering information, its content and their sources vary.

The Turks use Syrian rebels and Lebanese informants operating in Syria. They don’t command the electronic resources which Israel possesses. The two agencies also maintain contact with different rebel militias.
It was quickly recognized that both agencies have much to gain from a arrangement for sharing their input without further delay.

Reports: IAF Aircraft Fly over Damascus.

Or Heller

28/4/2013

According to various reports from Syria, Israeli Air Force aircraft flew earlier today this morning above the presidential palace in Damascus, potentially as a message of sorts intended for Bashar al-Assad.
Several days ago, the head of the research division at the IDF Directorate of Military Intelligence, Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, said that the Assad regime has made use of chemical weapons. “There is a vast arsenal of chemical weapons in Syria. In our assessment, the regime has and continues to use lethal chemical weapons in a series of events, including those that occurred on March 19. The developments are disturbing – the very use of chemical weapons without appropriate global response may signal that it is legitimate. With regards to how this will develop, people should be very troubled over the possibility that chemical weapons might fall into the hands of less responsible elements who do not calculate gains and losses,” Brun said.
In the past, there have been several reports that claimed IAF aircraft flew over the presidential palace in Syria.
Furthermore, last January, foreign sources reported that Israeli aircraft attacked a weapons convoy moving from Syria to Lebanon. At the time, Syria claimed that the attack was directed at a research facility in the region of Damascus, and Syrian rebel forces told news agencies that the facility that was attacked served for the development of chemical weapons, among other things.
The IDF has declined to comment on the reports.