Israel’s attacks in Syria indicate Assad’s deteriorating position

• The third target destroyed by Israeli planes were large Hezbollah arms storage depots in the Zabadani region near the Lebanese border.
  The most striking aspect of the summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah was its start – more precisely, its first thirty-six minutes. During this half-hour, in what must be considered a brilliant combination of operational intelligence and precision bombing, Israeli planes destroyed nearly all of Hezbollah’s mid- and long-range missiles in surgical attacks on the secret storage sites of these missiles (Israel repeated this feat in the opening round of the attack on Hamas in October 2012). Hezbollah fired more than 4,000 rockets on Israel during the month-long war, but these were mostly the less-advanced, and short-range, Katyusha rockets.
  Iran and Syria saw to it that within months of the end of the war, Hezbollah was again fully armed, with more, and more sophisticated, weapons. Hezbollah, however, was not going to repeat the mistake it made in 2006, that is, keeping its most sophisticated – and, from Israel’s point of view, the most threatening – arms in storage depots in Lebanon, where they would be exposed to punishing Israeli air strikes. Instead, Iran and Syria built large storage facilities for Hezbollah inside Syria, right next to the Lebanese border.
  Hezbollah figured that Israel would not hesitate to attack targets inside Lebanon, but it – Israel – would think twice before attacking targets inside Syria. Thus, by keeping its strategic weapons on Syrian territory, Hezbollah believed it was making these system largely immune to an Israeli air attack.
  These systems, however, were stored close enough to the Lebanese border, so they could be transferred to Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon on a short notice in the event of escalating tensions with Israel.

Wednesday’s attacks are likely to be the first in a series of attacks which Israel will feel compelled to launch at an ever quickening pace as the Assad regime continues to collapse. There are three developments which Israel is worried about, and to which, it believes, air and special forces attacks could offer a solution:

• The Iranians are exerting considerable pressure on Assad to transfer some of his advanced military capabilities, including chemical weapons, to Hezbollah. The Assad regime is coming to an end, and Iran has invested too many billions of dollars in shoring up the regime’s military cap abilities to see it all go to waste. Hezbollah is the last loyal Iranian agent in the region, and Iran wants to make sure that at least some of the advanced weapon systems in Assad’s arsenal are transferred to the Lebanese Shi’ia organization.
• Hezbollah has stored most of its advanced systems in Syria to protect them from Israeli air attacks – but with Assad’s days in power numbered, the organization is now desperate to get these systems out of Syria and into Lebanon – or it would lose them.
• With the territory under Assad control shrinking, more and more chemical weapons production and storage facilities are becoming vulnerable to seizure by anti-regime rebels. Some of these rebels are Islamist jihadists, and Israel is not going to allow them to take possession of these weapons.

Israel attacked targets inside Syria before, but not too often, and only when the targets were of strategic value. Three examples of such attacks:

• On 6 September 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor, built with North Korean help, days before it was to go critical.  
• On 12 February 2008, a powerful bomb, planted in a car by Mossad operatives, killed Imad Mughniyah, the legendary operational brain behind many of Hezbollah deadlier operations.
• On 1 August 2008, Israeli snipers killed General Muhammad Suleiman, a close ally of President Assad who was in charge of Iranian-Syrian development efforts of biological and chemical weapons.

The deteriorating situation in Syria appears to have persuaded Israel that it has no choice but to renew its military operations inside Syria.