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Mortar Shells Hit Damascus Airport Administration Includes Military Strikes in Possible Syrian Options
(about 7 hours later)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Insurgents lobbed two mortar shells at Damascus International Airport outside the Syrian capital on Friday, the official SANA news agency said, in a possible riposte to days of what antigovernment activists have called furious assaults against rebel enclaves elsewhere. WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, as part of its examination of possible responses to obtaining conclusive proof that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has used chemical weapons, is considering military options with allies that include attacking Syria’s antiaircraft systems, military aircraft and some of its missile fleet, according to senior officials from several countries.
The mortars crashed into a kerosene tank and an out-of-service commercial airplane parked at the airport, causing “huge” material damage to the plane, SANA said. Those officials say that attacking the chemical stockpiles directly has been all but ruled out. “You could cause exactly the disaster you are trying to prevent,” a senior Israeli military official said in an interview last week in Tel Aviv.
The brief dispatch did not give details about where the shells were fired from, but in recent weeks, loyalist forces have been seeking to dislodge rebels from the fringes of the capital, Damascus, while insurgents have launched bomb attacks in some of the city’s most guarded central neighborhoods. But by attacking Mr. Assad’s main delivery systems, the officials say, they would curtail his ability to transport those weapons any significant distance. “This wouldn’t stop him from using it on a village, or just releasing it on the ground, or handing something to Hezbollah,” said one European official who has been involved in the conversations. “But it would limit the damage greatly.”
SANA said firefighting crews had brought the blaze under control and the airport was functioning normally. The airport lies about 20 miles southeast of the capital, and there have been reports of fighting in the area for months, most recently, according to opposition activists, on Monday. The topic was alluded to on Thursday, when Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met with his British counterpart and talked about “the need for new options” if Mr. Assad uses his chemical arsenal, the officials said. But while the military has been developing and refining options for the White House for months, the discussion appears to have taken a new turn, officials say, as they struggle to determine whether the suspected use of sarin gas near Aleppo and Damascus last month was a prelude to greater use of such weapons.
While the rebels have claimed in the past to have attacked the airport, the government has not generally acknowledged such claims. Several airlines have canceled flights because of the perceived hazards of flying in and out. Asked about the planning, a senior administration official said Friday that “there are a lot of options on the table, and they’re generally carrying equal weight at the moment.”
The development at the airport came a day after Syrian forces attacked insurgents in the central city of Homs, seeking to snap a stalemate there, moved against rebels ensconced in a seaport near Russia’s naval station and apparently destroyed a historic bridge in the contested city of Deir al-Zour. He declined to discuss the others, though Mr. Hagel talked on Thursday about arming rebel groups, something Mr. Obama said on Friday he was unwilling to do. “As a general rule, I don’t rule things out as commander in chief because circumstances change,” the president said at a news conference in San José, Costa Rica, where he was meeting with Latin American leaders. He added that he did not forsee a situation in which “American boots on the ground in Syria would not only be good for America but also would be good for Syria.”
The fighting reported on Thursday may have left dozens of people dead just in the area of the seaport, Baniyas, and a nearby village, Bayda, according to activists affiliated with two antigovernment groups, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees. Some activists said more than 100 were killed in Bayda, including entire families, among them the mayor and his children. Mr. Obama noted that he had consulted with leaders in the Mid East who “agree with that assessment.”
Efforts to corroborate those reports were difficult because of restricted access for journalists in Syria. State news media said nothing about civilian casualties in the seaport combat, which SANA described as part of a campaign to seize weapons in a “raid against terrorists’ dens.” So far, Mr. Obama has been reluctant to get involved in the Syrian conflict. He has ruled out placing American forces on the ground, and when asked whether recent evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria crossed the “red line” he set in August, Mr. Obama described a lengthy series of questions he would need to have answered — including when and how chemical weapons were used — before he would take action. Even then, he made clear, he may choose something well short of military action.

Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

By Israeli estimates, Syria has 15 to 20 major chemical weapons sites, many near airfields that would make transport by plane relatively easy. Military planners say they would want to avoid hitting the chemicals for fear of creating toxic sites that could injure or kill civilians.
Ideally, one American commander said, the stockpiles would be surrounded, protected and then incinerated, much as the United States has done with its chemical arsenal. But that takes years, and as one official said, “We don’t have years, and we can’t keep troops there.”
That is why attacking the delivery systems seems like the next best option to many in the administration. Israel was believed to be behind an attack on some Syrian missiles in February as they were about to be transported, presumably to Hezbollah. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israeli lawmakers that a Hezbollah missile attack, using chemical weapons, was one of his chief concerns.
If Mr. Obama and his allies proceeded with an attack on air defenses, missiles and the Syrian Air Force, they would most likely use Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from ships in the eastern Mediterranean and fighter jets that might be able to launch missiles without entering Syrian airspace. But it is unclear how effective those would be.
Mr. Obama has always made clear that any action should be taken with allies and neighbors. But NATO has been reluctant, and Russia, which keeps a naval base in Syria, has been opposed. Israeli officials have said that they do not want to go into Syria, fearing that any Israeli attack would fuel Mr. Assad’s argument that the civil war in his country is the result of foreign provocations. Some Israeli officials have argued that the Arab League should be in the vanguard of any attack, but it has shown little interest in direct military intervention in the Syrian conflict.
That has left the same trio that led the attack on Libya in 2011: the United States, Britain and France. There has been constant discussion among their militaries about “options of every kind,” one official involved in the talks said this week. “Clearly, an airstrike would be much more complex than in Libya,” the official said, noting that most of the targets there were in the desert.
The deliberations on how to respond militarily to any confirmed use of chemical weapons was taking place against the backdrop of some of the most intense conventional fighting in the two-year-old Syrian conflict, which has left more than 70,000 people dead.
Opposition activists and fighters in Syria accused Mr. Assad’s military of carrying out attacks for the second straight day on the Mediterranean seaport of Baniyas and the village of Bayda, where dozens of civilians including children were found dead Thursday, some stabbed and burned. The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main anti-Assad political group, said in a statement that the attacks constituted another war crime by the government.
Syria’s official SANA news agency said nothing about civilian killings in Baniyas or Bayda in its dispatches on the fighting, asserting that its forces had “destroyed a number of terrorists’ dens and gatherings in several areas, killing and injuring many terrorists.” It also said insurgents had lobbed mortar shells at the Damascus airport, temporarily disrupting operations.

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington; Alan Cowell from Paris; Hania Mourtada and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon; Rick Gladstone from New York; and Michael D. Shear from San José, Costa Rica.