SyriaIsrael attacks in Syria, destroying Hezbollah-bound arms

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) launched two attacks on targets located inside Syria army bases – the first attacks took place on the night between Wednesday and Thursday, and the second wave of attacks took place the night between yesterday (Friday) and today (Saturday).

Two Arab media outlets – Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya – report that the targets destroyed in the attacks were Iran-made long-range missiles which the Assad regime stores and maintains for Hezbollah, the Shi’a Lebanese militia.

SANA, Syria’s official news agency, did not acknowledge the attacks, but several pro-government outlets reported explosions near the town of Qateyfah.

In the first half-hour or so of the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the IAF destroyed nearly all of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. Iran has been arming Hezbollah with some of the most advanced weapon systems in the Iranian arsenal, but to make it less likely that Israel would attack and destroy these systems, Iran and the Assad regime – Hezbollah’s backers – have decided to store and maintain these systems on Syrian soil, on the assumption that Israel would be more reluctant to attack targets inside Syria than targets in Lebanon.

This post-2006 approach by Iran — keeping its more advanced military supplies to Hezbollah in Syrian military bases close to the Lebanese border — has largely worked. The exceptions have occurred when Iran or the Assad regime tried to take these systems out of storage and deliver them to Hezbollah. In at least some of the cases, the decision to take these advanced systems out of storage and put them on convoys to Lebanon was made when anti-regime rebel forces were gaining ground and closing in on the storage sites. Fearing that these systems would fall into rebels’ hands, Iran, on a few occasions, decided to move them across the border into Lebanon.

When Israeli intelligence spotted these convoys – or noticed preparations at the Syrian storage sites to load such convoys – the IAF was sent to destroy the convoy, the storage facility, or both.

Since January 2013, the IAF conducted ten such attacks – the attacks Wednesday night and Friday night were attacks number nine and ten. The previous attacks took place on 30 January 2013, 3 May 2013, 5 May 2013, 5 July 2013, 18 October 2013, 30 October 2013, 26 January 2014, and 24 February 2014.