Israel bombed Syria to slow chemical weapons programme, say spies

A series of Israeli air raids on Syria this year was prompted by intelligence that the Assad regime was seeking to rebuild its chemical weapons programme, according to US reports.

The three strikes on the Damascus and Homs provinces in June were little noticed at the time, and were seen as part of a long-running campaign against targets associated with Iran and its allied militias.

However, US and other western intelligence sources were quoted in The Washington Post yesterday as saying that those on June 8 were different.

The sites targeted belonged to the Syrian regime itself, rather than Iran. They comprised a known former chemical weapons facility in the town of Nasiriyah, north of Damascus, and two sites near Homs, including a laboratory of the regime’s Scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC) in Masyaf.

The SSRC oversaw Syria’s chemical weapons programme from when it was developed with the help of the former Soviet Union in the 1980s until it was, at least in theory, closed down after the sarin attack on Ghouta, a suburb of east Damascus, in 2013.

That attack led to an outcry and threats of military action by the US, Britain and France. Russia negotiated a handover to the UN of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, whose existence had never previously been admitted.

Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes against Syria since the start of the civil war there, by the admission of its own leaders.

Its main goal is to prevent the build-up of missiles controlled by Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies on its borders with both Syria and neighbouring Lebanon.

It has mostly avoided striking regime targets. On this occasion, though, seven Syrian soldiers were reported to have been killed, including Colonel Ayham Ismail, said to be a military engineer attached to the Masyaf complex. His death was acknowledged at the time by the regime, which called him a “hero martyr” and promoted him posthumously to the rank of brigadier.

The United States was informed of the attack and the intelligence underlying it only afterwards. However, it has always believed that the regime did not hand over its entire stockpile of chemical weapons materials in 2013.

A suspected sarin attack in 2017 on the town of Khan Sheikhoun prompted President Trump to order a punitive air strike.

Another followed a suspected chlorine attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma in April 2018. The first indication of the Israeli raid’s target came in a report by the regime to the UN’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons saying the two chlorine cylinders said to have been involved in the Douma attack had been moved to Nasiriyah and destroyed in a strike there.

The Post also reported that there had been a previous pair of strikes on chemical weapons facilities near Homs, this time in March last year, related to Syria’s acquisition of tricalcium phosphate, which can be used to manufacture a sarin component.

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s prime minister, yesterday met the de facto leader of the UAE, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, in Abu Dhabi in the first visit by an Israeli leader to a Gulf state.