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Israel Bombs Syria as the U.S. Weighs Its Own Options
Israeli Airstrike in Syria Was Directed at Missiles From Iran, U.S. Officials Say
(about 3 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Israeli aircraft bombed a target in Syria overnight Thursday, an Obama administration official said Friday night, as American officials said they were considering military options, including carrying out their own airstrikes.
WASHINGTON — The airstrike that Israeli warplanes carried out in Syria was directed at a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran that Israel believed was intended for Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese organization, American officials said Saturday.
American officials did not provide details on the target of the Israeli strike. The Associated Press quoted Israeli officials on Saturday as saying the target of the raid was a shipment of advanced missiles bound for the Hezbollah Shiite militia in Lebanon. While saying the shipment did not include chemical arms, the official described the missiles as “game changing,” an apparent reference to the capability of the missiles.
It was the second time in four months that Israel had carried out an attack in foreign territory aimed at disrupting the pipeline of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. The missiles, known as Fateh-110s, had been sent to Syria by Iran and were being stored at an airport in Damascus when they were struck in the attack, according to an American official.
In late January, Israel carried out airstrikes against SA-17 antiaircraft weapons, which the Israelis feared were about to be moved to Hezbollah.
Syrians with knowledge of security and military matters confirmed the strike, which took place overnight Thursday, saying that Iran had sent arms and rockets to the Damascus airport intending to resend them to Hezbollah.
Israel has been worried that chemical weapons and advanced arms might be transferred to Hezbollah from Syria, and the Israeli military has made clear that it is prepared to take action to stop such shipments.
Israel officials have declined to publicly discuss the operation. But Israel has repeatedly said it is prepared to take military action to stop the shipment of advanced arms or chemical weapons to Hezbollah. If transferred to Hezbollah, the missiles would extend the organization’s ability to strike targets deep inside Israel.
“Chemicals maybe get a lot of press and attention, but one of the clear things worrying us is advanced conventional weapons,” said one senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition he not be named because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad are believed to possess Fateh-110 missiles. Some American officials are unsure whether the new shipment was intended for use by Hezbollah or by the Assad government, which is believed to be running low on missiles in its bloody civil war with Syrian rebels, now in its third year.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has long had a close relationship with Hezbollah, and Syria has been a gateway for shipping Iranian weapons to the militia.
But one American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing intelligence reports, said the warehouse that was struck in the Israeli attack was believed to be under the control of operatives from Hezbollah and Iran’s paramilitary Quds force.
Hezbollah has sent trainers and advisers to Syria to help Mr. Assad with his war against the Syrian opposition, American officials say, and Syrian opposition officials report that Hezbollah fighters are also involved in the conflict.
Details of the Israeli airstrike are sketchy. Israeli warplanes did not fly over the Damascus airport during the raid. Instead, they fired air-to-ground weapons, apparently using the airspace of neighboring Lebanon.
The Lebanese government confirmed on Saturday the Israeli warplanes flew over its airspace overnight Thursday, circling over Beirut and its suburbs, although it was not immediately clear if they were the same jets that carried out the strike in Syria, which was first reported by CNN.
The Lebanese Army said in a statement that Israeli military aircraft “violated the Lebanese airport” on Thursday night and early Friday morning and were flying in circles over several areas of the country.
Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official, addressing an audience in southern Israel, said Saturday that Israel was trying to preserve peace and security amid historic changes in the region.
A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington declined on Friday night to comment on the airstrike, saying only in a statement, “Israel is determined to prevent the transfer of chemical weapons or other game-changing weaponry by the Syrian regime to terrorists, specially to Hezbollah in Lebanon.”
A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington said Friday night in a statement that “Israel is determined to prevent the transfer of chemical weapons or other game-changing weaponry by the Syrian regime to terrorists, especially to Hezbollah in Lebanon.”
The Fateh-110 is a mobile, solid-fueled missile that is more accurate and represents a considerable improvement over the liquid-fueled Scud missile. Several variants have been produced, and American officials have said it has the range to strike Tel Aviv and much of Israel from southern Lebanon. A Pentagon official said in 2010 that Hezbollah was believed to already have a small supply of Fateh-110s.
Mr. Gilad said that Hezbollah was not in possession of chemical weapons.
In late January, Israel carried out similar airstrikes in Syria against a convoy carrying SA-17 antiaircraft weapons. The transfer of those weapons to Hezbollah would have jeopardized the Israeli Air Force’s ability to operate in Lebanese airspace.
Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli defense analyst, wrote on the news site Walla.com that it was no surprise that Syria and Hezbollah did not acknowledge the strike.
Israeli officials have also refused to publicly confirm the January attack. But in a February security conference in Munich, a former Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, appeared to refer to it as “another proof that when we say something we mean it.”
“Any admission by either Syria or Hezbollah that the Israeli Air Force had attacked a weapons convoy, which would obligate them to retaliate, would only serve to paint them into a corner,” Mr. Issacharoff wrote. “The Syrian Army currently lacks the manpower to face Israel on the ground — and certainly not in the air. A conflagration with the IDF is liable to result in the loss of the only advantage that Assad has over the opposition forces — the Syrian Air Force.”
Israel’s official silence reveals the broader dilemma it faces in how to handle Syria’s upheaval. After 40 years of quiet on its northeastern border, Israel is now deeply worried about violence spilling over into its territory and about a post-Assad Syria being a vast, ungoverned area controlled by Islamist or jihadist groups, with no central authority to control militant activity.
The Israeli attack came as the Obama administration — as part of its examination of possible responses to obtaining conclusive proof that Mr. Assad has used chemical weapons — is considering military options with allies. Those options include attacking Syria’s antiaircraft systems, military aircraft and some of its missile fleet, according to senior officials from several countries.
But leaders in Jerusalem believe that they have few options beyond the targeted attacks on convoys or warehouses to affect the situation in Syria, seeing any direct action by Israel as likely to backfire by bolstering or uniting anti-Israel forces.
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.
Jonathan Spyer, an expert on Syria and Hezbollah at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, called Thursday’s strike “extremely significant,” and predicted more such attempts to transfer weapons — and Israeli efforts to stop them — in the coming weeks and months.
But attacking Mr. Assad’s main delivery systems, the officials say, 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.”
“Clearly Hezbollah is hoping to benefit from its engagement in Syria, and clearly Israel is committed to preventing that,” he said. Mr. Spyer said that in striking the warehouse, Israel was taking a “calculated risk” that its limited intervention would provoke a limited response, if any.
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 used 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, in the 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.
The Israeli attack came days after Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, issued some of his strongest statements yet of support for Mr. Assad, edging closer to confirming that Hezbollah is backing him militarily, not merely tolerating border crossings by some of its members to defend Lebanese citizens in Syria, as Hezbollah has long maintained.
“There are a lot of options on the table, and they’re generally carrying equal weight at the moment,” a senior administration official said Friday. He declined to discuss the others, though Mr. Hagel talked on Thursday about arming rebel groups
He said Hezbollah — using the word “we” — would not allow Syria to fall to an armed assault that he said was backed by America and Israel, and embraced a mission by Hezbollah fighters to drive Syrian rebels from Qusayr, a city in Homs Province, near the Lebanese border.
So far, President Obama has been reluctant to get involved in the Syrian conflict. He has ruled out placing American forces on the ground, a stance he reiterated on Friday at a new conference in San José, Costa Rica, where he was meeting with Latin American leaders.
Michael
R. Gordon reported from Washington, and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger from Washington; Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon; and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria.
Mr. Obama told reporters he did not foresee 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,” adding that he had consulted with leaders in the Mideast who agree.
When asked in recent days whether recent evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria crossed the “red line” he set in August, Mr. Obama described 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.
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 fire 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.
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.
Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington and Jodi Rudoren reported from Jerusalem. Reporting was contributed by David E. Sanger 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.
