When Olmert expressed concern about the possibility that the Syrians would preempt Israel and activate the reactor, Barak downplayed the risk of attacking a hot reactor. On Tuesday, September 4, the air force conducted its last mock maneuver in advance of the attack. "Initial indications are that this strike has severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and support infrastructure and equipment at Shayrat airfield, reducing the Syrian government's ability to deliver chemical weapons.". In some public opinion polls, the level of support for the premier didnt rise above the single digits. Al-Hariri led a brigade from the Syrian front towards Israel, while Ba'athists were able to gain control of a second brigade stationed in Suwayda. No longer a secret: How Israel destroyed Syria's nuclear reactor We set out around 10:30 P.M., recalls Amir. Olmert, a few of the ministers and some of the army officers who clearly favored the prime minister, suspected Barak of being driven by hidden personal motives. I cant remember him ever hugging me on any other occasion but this time he was all smiles. In the pictures, the inside of the reactor is visible, and in it are fusion cylinders and bars and also some Korean workers. As the months went by, the suspicion grew that beneath the broad roof of the building hid President Bashar Assads secret flagship project: a nuclear reactor produced in North Korea, intended to provide the younger Assad with the achievement that had eluded his father, Hafez Assad, on the battlefield and between wars and to lead toward a point of strategic balance that could cancel out Israels clear military and technological advantage. Despite the shadow of failure in Lebanon, if all these claims are true, the Olmert administration demonstrated an aggressive and particularly active line against the nuclear threat and against the threats of terrorism and guerrilla warfare in neighboring countries. However we, under his orders, did not let go of it for a long time.. The committee decided state policies before the sessions of the NCRC, and by doing so became the real seat of power. On December 19, 2003, a Saturday morning, I turned on the radio and heard on a news broadcast that the Americans and the British had persuaded Libya to dismantle its nuclear program, says Amnon Sufrin, who was then head of the intelligence division at the Mossad. Syrian nuclear reactor attack: Step by step, The Intelligence Failure Surrounding the Syria Strike, The Real Fallout From Israel's Attack on Syrian Reactor. WebA U.S. official told ABC News that there were two new attacks late Friday on two U.S. facilities in Deir ez-Zor Province in eastern Syria after another one earlier in the day and He hoped that perhaps the George W. Bush administration would take it upon itself to destroy the reactor. [1] The coup was met by indifference in the population at large. Moreover, it continued to be taken seriously by Arab leaders. The prime minister dwelled in particular on the meaning of life in Israel under the shadow of a nuclear threat and warned that this was a condition that was liable to cause profound demoralization of Israels populace. Concurrently, the preparations began in the IDF for the possibility of things going sour, but in order to maintain the secrecy of the operation, it was necessary to tailor a false narrative for most of the commanders, and later also for the public and the media. At the Mossad they remained skeptical. [6], The mandate was dissolved in 1946 because of a British ultimatum to France, and Syria became an independent country on 17 April 1946. The surrender of the 70th Armoured Brigade took longer than expected, putting Assad's forces behind schedule. 2 yr. ago It was about the "Headwater Diversion Plan" adopted by the Arab League to divert two of the three Hariri was appointed chief of staff. On July 13, Bush informed Olmert in a conversation over the direct and secure red phone line between the White House and the Prime Ministers Office in Jerusalem that he opposed a military attack on the reactor. Akram al-Hawrani founded the Arab Socialist Party (ASP) in 1953 the Ba'ath Party was established through a merger of the ASP and the Arab Ba'ath Party. According to what had agreed upon in advance, there was no communication between the planes: We maintained complete silence during the flight. [22] The military committee ordered a group of junior officers to recruit the leading independent Colonel Ziad al-Hariri, the commander of the front facing Israel, to their cause. Syria We made certain five times that it was all systems go., Even today, he remembers the moment of impact. The Syrian branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party was able to recruit youth from radical peasant movements and thus was able to mobilise large sectors of the population. For me, today it connects with our ability to remove threats in distant countries in the third circle [meaning, Iran]. According to David Makovsky, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in addition to eight attack planes, a number of other aircraft also took part in the operation. Its only rarely that a Mossad chief calls and says: I have to see you. The Mossad chief arrives and sits in my office. In Israel they saw this mendacious statement without many details as reinforcement of the assessment that Assad intended to show restraint. At a distant and isolated site called Al Kibar, less than a kilometer west of the Euphrates River, the Cube aroused their interest in particular. According to Sufrin, The Koreans and the Syrians built a camouflage structure on top of the reactor that made it look like a factory from the outside. Amir, one of the F-15 pilots who took part in the attack, was dual: to advance the operation without most of the crews knowing what it was about and at the same time to prepare the rest of the squadron for the possibility that as a result of the operation, hostilities might break out, and all this while this group was not privy to preparations for the attack itself. [19] The new middle class alone could only produce instability, but together with the peasantry, the revolution became possible. The Syrian conflict began unfolding 11 years ago, in early March 2011. [36] While al-Hariri was away, the Committee used the opportunity to undertake a purge of about 30 elite officersmostly political independentsunder al-Hariri's command. Each plane drops two bombs. When Assad's forces reached the outskirts of the base, it was broad daylight. For the coup to be successful, the military committee needed to gain the support of some of the Syrian officer corps. Explore in 3D: The dazzling crown that makes a king. And then we started to fly back, in accordance with the planning, at a low altitude. strikes that killed civilians in Syria In the meantime, final preparations were under way in the air force. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has denied ever having used chemical weapons. However, Israel began to pay serious attention to that inclination only after the discovery of a serious intelligence gap in another country: Libya. [21] The Damascus faction was the enemy of the military committee because of their support for Nazim al-Kudsi's Government and the Hawranist were considered as rivals because of their stance against pan-Arabism. The Arab states decided to deprive Israel of 35% of the National Water Carrier capacity, by a diversion of the Jordan River headwaters (both the Hasbani and the Banias) to the Yarmouk River. The squadron commander and his deputy take the ones on whom they agree hands down will get the bombs to the target.. Instead, they had become deeply hostile to pan-Arabist thought and had become radical socialists instead. It was a square building with an area of about 1,600 square meters (more than 17,200 square feet), which was 20 meters (close to 66 feet) high. The majority of Syrians continued to see themselves as Arabs rather than Syrians. It is far from any settlement. Syria The people who were seen nearby mostly arrived on motorcycles; it looked as though the structure stood empty at night. Web8 Sep 2022 Israels bombing of Syrias Aleppo International Airport on Tuesday was the second time it had been attacked in less than a week. Syrian Baraks behavior, says one of the top defense people, was simply deplorable, Especially taking into account the disagreement about bombing the nuclear sites in Iran, which erupted two years later. [45], The failure of Alwan's revolt marked the end of significant Nasserist influence in Syria's military and civilian institutions, and with the pro-Nasser forces largely defeated, the Military Committee became the sole power center of the country. Its a very long flight, secret, on a dark night and a low altitude of 100 meters above sea level. The military committee decided it had to capture al-Kiswah and Qatana, two military camps, seize control of the 70th Armoured Brigade at al-Kiswah, the Military Academy in the city of Homs and the Damascus radio station. Israel and the West, he said, would lose the element of surprise. At the cabinet meeting I had already warned the ministers: Anyone who talks will be responsible for Assad reacting. Fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and Iranian-backed Iraqi militias supporting the Syrian army on the ground are also believed to have used Shayrat. The Alawites, the Druzes and the Isma'ilis for instance, were religious groups with low social class who began to embrace a radical form of Arab nationalism, e.g. I meet with him as a matter of course. Assad sent an emissary to tell the commanders that he would start shelling the base if they did not surrender. Several branches had not followed orders and had not dissolved during the UAR years. Iran was the focus of our interest, Sufrin says now, but we delegated a team of researchers to examine the possibility of a nuclear program in Syria. The military's introduction to the Syrian political scene destroyed the oligarchy enabling the middle class to participate in Syrian politics. Nevertheless, the Arab states were not prepared to coexist with a project which seemed likely to make a major contribution to Israel's economic growth. And then you get to the target area, climb a bit higher, pulling into execution mode. Dagans weekly meeting with the prime minister in Tel Aviv was scheduled for 8 A.M. the next day. A quiet and relatively clandestine action would probably be perceived in Syria less emotionally but in such a case, there would be no certainty that the nuclear threat had been eradicated. This was, of course, one of the two scenarios that had been feared in Israel during the summer. [26], 820 people were reported killed during the takeover and another 20 were executed shortly afterwards. We were over the target for two or three minutes. The southernmost, and also the largest, stretched from the south-eastern part of the Sea of Galilee eastwards to the Yarmuk River where the borders of Israel, Jordan and Syria converge. [6] He was waiting for us outside the plane as we landed, with hugs. Later, somewhat larger forums were also convened. Bombing of Shallal | Historica Wiki | Fandom At the time, the officer corps was split into five different factions; the Damascus faction which supported the Syrian Government, supporters of Akram al-Hawrani, a Nasserist faction, a Ba'athist faction and a group of independents. General Mohammed Suleiman, commander of the Syrian shadow army, was the contact person for the Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders and for Imad Mughniyeh, who headed Hezbollahs terrorism effort. The vast majority of those who took part in the meetings describe a very sharp, determined leader, almost chomping at the bit. Y. reached the conclusion that they were looking in the wrong place. Husni al-Za'im became the first military dictator of Syria in 1949, but in 1950, military officer Adib Shishakli gained power behind the scenes, and by 1953 had established another military dictatorship. The revolution was led by an anti-oligarchical alliance of a radicalised lower middle class, strategic members of the officer corps, marginalised minorities and a significant number of peasants who were mobilised for agrarian conflict. The intelligence people say they told him: There are no more question marks. In his memoirs, Bush wrote that following Haydens assessment, he told Olmert at their meeting on June 19 that he could not justify an American attack on a sovereign state. The explanation that was offered was concern about the possibility of hostilities breaking out over mutual miscalculations: Israel and Syria are suspicious of each other and exchanging threats in the context of the results of the last war in Lebanon. She is familiar with this.. Overthrow of Syrian Prime Minister Nazim al-Kudsi by the Ba'ath Party, The Nasserist cabinet members who resigned were Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Minister, National Council for the Revolutionary Command, Arab Socialist Revolutionary Ba'ath Party, List of modern conflicts in the Middle East, Political Studies and Public Administration Department of the American University of Beirut 1963, 19471948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, Incapacitation of the Allied Control Council, On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, North Yemen-South Yemen Border conflict of 1972, Struggle against political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, List of Eastern Bloc agents in the United States, American espionage in the Soviet Union and Russian Federation, United States involvement in regime change, Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, Intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine, Islamic State insurgency in Iraq (2017present), Ba'athist Arabization campaigns in northern Iraq, General Military Council for Iraqi Revolutionaries, National Alliance for the Liberation of Syria, Background and causes of the Syrian Civil War, Syrian government reactions to the Syrian civil war, Inter-rebel conflict during the Syrian civil war, Cities and towns during the Syrian civil war, Sectarianism and minorities in the Syrian civil war, Syrian Desert campaign (December 2017present), Humanitarian aid during the Syrian civil war, Human rights violations during the Syrian civil war, Civil uprising phase of the Syrian civil war, Early insurgency phase of the Syrian civil war, International reactions to the Syrian civil war, Foreign involvement in the Syrian civil war, American-led intervention in the Syrian civil war, Relations between Syrian government and Kurdish groups in Syria, Al-Hasakah Governorate campaign (20122013), Rif Dimashq offensive (Nov 2012Feb 2013), Battle of Tell Hamis and Tell Brak (DecJan), East Ghouta inter-rebel conflict (AprMay), September Urum al-Kubra aid convoy attack, Turkish military operation in Idlib Governorate, Syrian Liberation FrontTahrir al-Sham conflict, Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party Syria Region, National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, International demonstrations and protests, First Northern Syria Demilitarization Deal, Second Northern Syria Demilitarization Deal, Fourth Extraordinary Session of the Islamic Summit Conference, International recognition of the Syrian National Council, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1963_Syrian_coup_d%27tat&oldid=1147881169, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Attempts to establish a federal Arab union with, Purges within the military and Alawitization of, This page was last edited on 2 April 2023, at 19:43. If a certain weapon or one of the platforms didnt work, there would be something to cover for it, says Amir. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. The "War over Water", also the Battle over Water, was a series of confrontations between Israel and its Arab neighbors from November 1964 to May 1967 over control of water sources in the Jordan River drainage basin. USS Shamal - Wikipedia Its a story that ended well, says Amos Yadlin. Olmert consulted, individually, three of the previous prime ministers: Shimon Peres (who a few months later was elected president of Israel), leader of the opposition Benjamin Netanyahu and citizen Ehud Barak. Assad conducted the nuclear project in great secrecy, with very few partners to the secret. We had a big hug. Syria Why Now? The latter's anti-UAR government had also been overthrown by pro-UAR officers in 1963. [7] The same elite that had governed Syria during the mandate continued in power, and they ruled in the same manner. The Syrian military said the strike had left six personnel and a number of others injured, and caused "huge material damage". We said to Barak: For every baby who is born in the next 200 years along the Euphrates with a deformity or a genetic defect, they will blame us straightaway. In a meeting on August 1, Barak forbade head of the IDF Planning Directorate Ido Nechushtan (who two years later would replace Shkedi as commander of the air force) to screen a presentation that reviewed the strategic picture and recommended a swift attack. Barak, shouting, argued that he had not authorized the presentation. I see on the thermal system I have on the plane and also outside the bombs are hitting the structure. Though the relations between Olmert and Barak were fairly good, and it appeared that Olmert wanted Barak in Defense, Barak had voiced some harsh criticism of the prime ministers conduct during the war in Lebanon. Mapcarta, the open map. The silence on the Israeli side, which overall was maintained in accordance with the advance planning, helped reduce the sense of humiliation felt by the Syrian president and gave credence to his range of plausible deniability. Peres, who as leader of the opposition at the time of the bombing of the reactor in Iraq had expressed reservations about that attack as well, surprised Olmert with the suggestion that Israel should attempt to talk with the Syrians first. A Syrian military statement did not give details about the Wikipedia However the British, who had helped establish the state after World War I, made a secret agreement (Sykes-Picot Agreement) with France and established the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon. Saber Falhout, a Druze who was later known as "the poet of the revolution", wrote and announced the first communique of the plotters. In one plane, a problem was solved, after [it had become clear that] not all the systems were working. This is very serious.. The greatest challenge, relates Col. Shayrat airbase was the target of the US' first deliberate direct attack on Syrian forces since the start of the war six years ago. Syrian Civil War | Facts & Timeline | Britannica If the ground-to-air-systems wake up, you are in a vipers nest. The Israeli leadership began to converge on the decision bombing of the reactor in the near term and the selection of the more limited action by the air force. Attacking a hot reactor was liable to create tremendous environmental pollution. Syrian artillery units opened fire on the construction site. Barak, however, began raising reservations. [25], On the night of 78 March, tanks and units loyal to the conspiracy began moving on Damascus. But the flight to the target was relatively calm, without our getting discovered and without any direct threat. There is a bit of excitement before the bomb hits. At the same time, Israel increasingly began bombing targets in Syria said to belong to Iran-linked militias, including Hezbollah. The disagreement between them was a meeting between a certified lightweight who had never approved any real operational planning (Olmert) and a professional who had engaged in that for decades, from the days of Sayeret Matkal (the elite commando force Barak had led), and up through the weekly discussions on operations and incursions in the defense ministers and the chief of staffs offices (Barak). Yet no less, it is also a story of a big intelligence failure the worst since the Yom Kippur War, according to a number of top intelligence people in which Israel somehow managed for years not to notice a reactor being built right under its nose, in a neighboring country on whose surveillance Israel was spending vast amounts of money. Some 59 cruise missiles were When the intelligence people analyzed the material from Vienna, they were appalled. Rights groups have said the suspected Russian bombing of chicken farms and water stations in Idlib, one of Syria's last rebel-held areas, is meant to push out displaced locals. Israel was still grappling with its disappointment after the Second Lebanon War. The new chief of staff initiated a process of rehabilitation but when he was shown the findings from Othmans computer, Ashkenazi realized that he was facing a series of problems completely different from what he had been preparing for: how to get rid of the new threat in a way that would not spark a new war with Syria and Hezbollah and if a war did break out how to ensure that the IDF would win this time. Russia said the Syrian jets had hit a rebel depot full of chemical munitions, but Mr Trump said "there can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons". The air force dubbed the plan with the code name Soft Melody (the general staff operation had a different code name, Ein Habasor, while at Military Intelligence they referred to the preparations as Outside the Box). Top Israeli officials, most of them intelligence people, set out for Western countries and a number of friendly countries in the region to share the incriminating information about the secret Syrian reactor. While Aflaq needed the military committee to seize power, the committee needed Aflaq to hold on power without Aflaq they would have no support base. Olmert conducted himself in this affair with courage and skill and did not shy away from making decisions. According to the plan, upon hitting the target, all the planes were required to report to the others over the communications network. The Syrian pro-opposition website, Orient News, meanwhile said the jet's pilot had been identified as the commander of an Su-22 squadron at Shayrat. May I suggest they appoint a liaison officer to communicate their views to us? WebA U.S. service member suffered a concussion injury from Monday's attack by the terrorist group al-Shabab at a U.S. military airfield in Somalia, according to U.S. Africa Command [31][32], However, between 28 April-2 May, the Ba'athist-dominated Military Committee virtually renounced the agreement when it purged over 50 Nasserist officers from their high-ranking positions in the armed forces, leading to a wide-scale propaganda campaign by Egypt via radio denouncing the Ba'ath (Nasserist-leaning newspapers had been previously shut down.) And it was also the start of the intense hostility between that prime minister and his defense minister, which took root during that summer of 2007, and of the impassioned war over who among the top brass in the military organizations deserved the credit. To make sure the reactor would be destroyed, it was necessary to deploy tremendous firepower, in the form of a relatively extensive aerial bombardment. Shallal Shallal is a village in Shallal is situated close to the villages El Mazyunat Khaddzh Khasan and Jubb as Safa. In a one-on-one conversation Olmert tried to resolve their differences of opinion, but according to him Barak continued to try to convince ministers that a premature bombing of the reactor would cost Israel a war. On 17 April a new stage-based unity agreement was reached that would include the three states in a federal union with Nasser as President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. The detailed intelligence helped convince those countries of the justice of the Israeli move and neutralized the possibility that the attack would become the cause of an international scandal. [26] Captain Salim Hatum, a party officer, seized the radio station. The national struggle was shaped by ideologies such as Arab nationalism, pan-Islamism and Greater Syrianism. A large, cubical building that was still under construction in the heart of the Syrian desert, not far from Deir al-Zour, was a focus of the Israeli defense establishment starting from the end of 2006. The advisers, as well as a number of ministers, first and foremost Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, were for the most part summoned individually for personal meetings with the prime minister at his residence, where they were informed about details of the affair, mostly by Yadlin and Dagan. On 9 March, the NCRC ordered Salah al-Din al-Bitar, one of the Ba'ath Party founders, to form a government, and to implement the policies of the NCRC. Is climate change killing Australian wine? Considering that the members of the Military Committee were all too young to be perceived as the real leaders of Syria by the populace, the Military Committee appointed Colonel Amin al-Hafiz to the post of Minister of the Interior. One of the key figures who led to the decision to bomb the Syrian reactor, the head of the Mossad at the time, Meir Dagan, died in March last year. Therefore, the findings from the reactor were presented as findings at a low level of certainty. In Israel they were surprised by that conclusion. WebA bomb attack on a military bus in central Damascus has killed 14 people, Syrian state media say. Some of its planes had been ordered to bomb rebel positions. The first research breakthrough occurred in November 2006. Any report in the media was liable to awaken the Syrians out of their complacency, alter their defensive preparedness around the reactor and deny the IDF the advantage of surprise. Syria war: Why was Shayrat airbase bombed? - BBC News We had a number of kinds of weapons, a mix that wouldnt leave you with a single malfunction point without the ability to compensate for it. Immediately after the attack, Israel embarked on a diplomatic blitz that had been prepared in advance by the Prime Ministers Bureau, the Mossad, MI and the Foreign Ministry. Assad was building a plutonium nuclear reactor, he argued. While Atassi and Hariri held powerful posts, they did not possess enough personal or political power to threaten the NCRC. Localities. Why now? [3], The mandate was feudal in character, and it rested on a semi-liberal oligarchic social base. [13], The Ba'ath Party faced a significant dilemma: take power through competitive elections or forceful takeover. [11] However, the Ba'ath Party was not a purely middle-class party, and from the very beginning, it sent party cadres to rural areas to recruit new members and form new party organisations. [1] The issue of water sharing from the JordanYarmuk system turned out to be a major problem between Israel, Syria and Jordan. In early November 2015, just over a month after launching an air campaign against Mr Assad's opponents, the Russian military reportedly began using Shayrat as a forward operating base for Mi-24 and Mi-35 attack helicopters. On Tuesday, US military radar systems monitored a Syrian Air Force fixed-wing aircraft take off from Shayrat and fly over Khan Sheikhoun on two occasions - at 06:37 local time (03:37 GMT) and 06:46. [28], Umran was first given the command of the 5th Brigade in Homs, but was promoted in June to become commander of the 70th Armoured Brigade. Some 59 cruise missiles were fired at the Syrian Air Force facility in response to what President Donald Trump said was a chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town three days before. Meir Dagan was skeptical about the findings; Syria was not a top priority for Mossad activity and the assessment did not constitute a breakthrough in the gathering of substantial proof. [13] While the Ba'ath Party was strong, its decision to recruit members from across society led to tribalism and clientelism within the party. However, you must avoid aerial dogfights with enemy planes. Israel has fired several missiles at Syrias border province of Quneitra, causing material damage.

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