Al Qusayr Destroyed
Our investigations could not confirm any link between Al Qusayr and the Al Kibar reactor project, however the site appeared to serve an important military purpose and long-term ongoing internal excavation was evident from satellite imagery. Our more recent analysis, including extensive commercial imagery of the site, are below:
· “Continued Activity Identified at Al Qusayr, Syria,” by David Albright, Sarah Burkhard, Spencer Faragasso, April 12, 2023, https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/continued-activity-identifie…
· “Is the facility at Qusayr, Syria an underground nuclear facility? Public Evidence remains inconclusive,” by David Albright, Sarah Burkhard, Allison Lach, and Frank Pabian, March 21, 2018, https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/is-the-facility-at-qusayr-sy…
Attack Assessment
Using a MAXAR October 5, 2024, image, the Institute’s bomb damage assessment finds that there were likely multiple strikes on each of three main buildings at Al Qusayr that had provided underground access (Figures 1 and 2). Two other bomb craters can be seen in the vicinity. One crater was centered on the Security Checkpoint at the entrance to the Al Qusayr facility (which could have damaged some service utility structures (water and power) that were known to have served the site. The second crater, measuring eight meters in diameter, was near the entrance road between the checkpoint and the underground entrance area. The likely ventilation structure uphill from the facility, identified in earlier Institute studies, had not been hit.
The Institute obtained commercial satellite imagery of the second site in Lebanon situated 3.1 kilometers from the Al Qusayr Underground Facility showing that it was also completely destroyed between October 3, 2024, and October 5, 2024. (We are naming this building as the Mrah El Zakbeh site, given that this is the name of the closest hamlet). The Mrah El Zakbeh site consisted of a single large drive-in revetted building set into a cut-out hillside where a tunnel could be accessed (See Figures 3, 4, and 5). It also had a small solar panel array on the roof as seen in Figure 4. Note that on the shadowed northwest side there appears to have been a large ventilation type grid set into the hillside. So, it was not merely a retaining wall, there is/was likely something inside the hill. Figure 5, Google Earth images from February 9, 2021 (top) and June 17, 2023 (bottom) show that the building was butted up to the hillside, and had a large drive through door on its southeast side.
A Google Earth derived elevation profile between the two destroyed sites shows that it is indeed possible that the two sites could have been connected via a tunnel. See Figure 6.
Last Word
The Israeli statement is credible that these two long-standing sites were part of a transportation system to move arms from Iran to proxies in Lebanon. It is still worth knowing, or at least eliminating the possibility that the Al Qusayr site had other purposes as well such as storage for a host of illicit materials that could have included nuclear or missile related materiel.
1. Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian, X, @manniefabian, October 4, 2023, 6:36 am, https://x.com/manniefabian/status/1842151774674903526. ↩
2. https://x.com/obretix/status/1842267448818765914. ↩
David Albright is President and Founder of the Institute for Science and International Security. Spencer Faragasso is Research Fellow, at the Institute for Science and International Security. This article is published courtesy of the Institute for Science and International Security.
