Kurdish-led fighters backed by the U.S. prepare for battle against Islamic state group militants, in Raqqa, on June 22, 2017. (Hussein Malla/AP)
TEL AVIV - The battle plans had been drawn up years ago, and when the Syrian state fell suddenly, Israel wasted no time putting them in motion.
The hundreds of strikes Israel carried out across Syria this week constituted one of the largest single operations in its history, experts said - effectively destroying its neighbor’s military capabilities in a matter of days. In parallel, Israeli forces have seized military posts in southern Syria, beyond a U.N.-monitored buffer zone established after the 1973 Yom Kippur war.
The goal, said Avi Dichter, an Israeli minister and member of the security cabinet, “is to establish facts on the ground,” even as the ground shifts rapidly, with Syrian rebels seeking to cement their rule over the fractured country after nearly 14 years of civil war. Israel, like much of the world, was shocked by how rapidly the armed Islamist rebels moved through Syria, according to Dichter, and at how little resistance they encountered from Bashar al-Assad’s army. As the triumphant fighters arrived in Damascus on
Sunday, raising their revolutionary flag over state buildings and promising a fresh beginning after more than 50 years of dynastic rule, Israeli leaders saw a chance to impose their own new reality.
“In Hebrew, we call it the plan in the drawer,” said Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer in the Israeli military who has been briefed on security deliberations. For many years, she said, Israeli intelligence had catalogued the movement of Syrian forces, Iranian personnel and Hezbollah fighters.
By the time Iranian military advisers and allied forces withdrew in the face of the rebel advance, and Assad fled to Russia, “we had all the targets, all the information,” Eisin said, describing IDF maps annotated with suspected chemical and biological weapons facilities, armored divisions and airfields.
In meetings of the Israeli security cabinet on Thursday and Saturday, officials green-lit the ground and aerial campaign, describing it as preemptive in nature - aimed at eliminating future threats from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Syria’s leading rebel group and de facto governing authority, which began as an offshoot of al-Qaeda.
Israeli officials discussed the operations with their American counterparts within hours of Assad’s toppling, said a person familiar with Cabinet discussions, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about sensitive matters.
U.S. officials told The Post that Washington had given its blessing years ago to Israeli freedom of action in Syria, including airstrikes, as a self-defense measure, and that it extended to the present. The officials emphasized that Israel neither needed nor asked for
U.S. approval or assistance for its operations in Syria since the rebel takeover.
From the Israeli perspective, “the need for the buffer zone action was clear from day one,” said the person familiar with Cabinet discussions. “No one wanted to see the rebels on Mount Hermon, looking down into Israel,” the person said, referring to the strategic summit on Israel’s northern border.
In the skies, meanwhile, Israeli airplanes began by targeting “chemical and biological weapons and long-range ballistic missiles,” said Eisin.
Encouraged by the success of the first wave of attacks, which unfolded without reports of civilian casualties, commanders decided to go further, according to Eisin. “At that point you say, ‘wow, let’s just finish it,’” she said.
Successive waves of strikes, the military said, took out Syrian missiles, drones, fighter jets, attack helicopters, tanks, radar systems and the country’s small naval fleet, sitting unprotected in the western port of Latakia.
The goal was to take Syria’s military “back to the starting line,” Yoav Limor, a military commentator wrote in the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom on Wednesday.
Israel was careful not to strike Russian military sites, Dichter said, which are dotted throughout Syria. Throughout the Syrian civil war, Netanyahu said that Israel coordinated its strikes with Moscow and, in exchange, was afforded mostly free rein to launch covert attacks against Iranian assets in the country.
“Again now, the Russians have their area, the rebels have their areas, Israel has its areas, and there is a kind of respect between the sides,” said Dichter.
Publicly, Russia has criticized the Israeli bombardment. Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the ministry of foreign affairs, said Wednesday “these military actions obviously do not serve the purpose of stabilizing the situation in Syria, and, on the contrary, they further aggravate the already extremely difficult situation.”
HTS has been strikingly silent about Israel’s aerial attacks. Asked about them Wednesday by Channel 4, spokesman Obeida Arnaout said “our priority is to restore security and services, to revive civilian life and institutions.” Pressed again for a response, he would say only that “we want everyone to respect the sovereignty of the new Syria.”
Iran was pivotal to propping up Assad during the civil war and, in exchange, the Syrian dictator allowed his country to be a conduit for Tehran to send money and weapons to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, the linchpin of Iran’s regional proxy network.
Though HTS and other Sunni opposition groups fought for years against Iranian-backed forces, Dichter said Israel is still “preparing for the possibility that the rebels reach an agreement with Iran, with Hezbollah.” Hezbollah is reeling from a devastating war with Israel, but Israeli officials fear the militant ground will work swiftly to rebuild its capabilities.
On Wednesday, the commanding officer of Israel’s 210th Division said that at least seven brigades, including special combat forces, were operating along the Syrian border and inside Syria.
IDF international spokesman Nadav Shoshani said in a briefing Tuesday that the deployment of troops in the buffer zone “and a few additional points” was temporary, but set no end date. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that troops would remain “until security on our border can be guaranteed.”
Israel needs “to first see how [the rebels] build their state and their army,” said Dichter. “Like the U.S., we are waiting.”
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Thursday during a visit to Israel that the response of its closest Middle East ally was “logical,” having seen “the collapse of a structure that had been in place for a long time, and the potential for it to be filled by a threat.” He added that the United States will remain in close touch with Israel, and with stakeholders in Syria and across the region.
Israel’s Arab neighbors have uniformly condemned its military actions as illegal and have been joined by the U.N., France and other European nations in calling for its troops to withdraw from Syrian territory.
Nitzan Nuriel, a retired brigadier general and former director of Israel’s Counterterrorism Bureau, said that preventing high-end weapons from falling into the hands of armed factions - potentially turning Syria into “the Somalia of the Middle East” - was worth the expected blowback.
Israel had accomplished around 80 percent of its goals, Nuriel said. But, he added, the operation “is not done yet.” Hendrix reported from Jerusalem. Karen DeYoung in Washington, Robyn Dixon in Riga and Lior Soroka contributed to this report.
