Israeli strikes destroy Syria’s weapons of war as ousted Assad laments country’s fall into ‘hands of terrorism’

Damascus — A CBS News crew drove by a Syrian military air base on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus, on Monday, and the devastation caused by Israeli airstrikes was crystal clear. Israel has said it is determined to destroy weapons and other military equipment that The deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad and his father spent half a century accumulating it, before it could fall into the hands of extremists.

The Israeli military has relentlessly attacked Syrian military infrastructure since Assad fled to Russia earlier this month, forced to retreat by a rebel offensive after a decade of civil war that, until about two weeks ago, had reached an apparent stalemate. .

The damage inflicted on Assad’s old war machine has been staggering. An overnight attack on the coastal city of Tartus, for example, was so massive that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group cited a scientist in Turkey as saying it had registered on the Richter scale as the equivalent of a 1,000 magnitude earthquake. category 3.

Until Moscow’s ally Assad fled Syria, Russia maintained its only major naval base outside Russian territory in Tartus. Satellite images (below) showed that most Russian ships disappeared from the port of Tartus quickly after Assad’s fall, but the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday it was still figuring out what to do with its military equipment and personnel in the country, in conversations. with the country’s new de facto rebel rulers.

Meanwhile, Israel’s military says it has destroyed most of Assad’s heavy weapons and air defenses. In a statement on Monday, the Israel Defense Forces said that in recent days its fighter jets had “inflicted serious damage to Syria’s most strategic weapons: fighter jets and helicopters, Scud missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, missiles cruise, precision-guided land-to-sea missiles. missiles, surface-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles, radars, rockets and more.”

The IDF said its strikes had destroyed “more than 90% of the identified strategic surface-to-air missiles” of the ousted regime.

The lightning takeover of Syria a week ago by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al Sham, or HTS, has also seen Israeli forces carry out a ground incursion that extends beyond the occupied Golan Heights region into a previously demilitarized buffer zone inside Syria.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, head of HTS and Syria’s new de facto leader, criticized what he described as Israel’s “uncalculated military adventures” and said he and his group (which, before publicly distancing itself from extremist ideology, was a al-Al Qaeda affiliate, was more interested in state building than in opening another conflict with Israel.

The attacks on Syrian military sites have also revealed deep negligence on Assad’s part. Years of corruption and a decade of civil war had depleted the nation’s armed forces, contributing to the collapse of its regime. Much of the hardware left behind by his forces when they surrendered to the rebels or simply threw off their uniforms and fled is old and clearly lacking maintenance.

Meanwhile, Assad’s office issued the first statement attributed to the deposed leader since he was forced to flee his country. In it, he states that he never considered resigning or fleeing, but that he took refuge at the Russian air base in Hmeimim when the rebels approached, and when that facility came under sustained drone attack, he says an evacuation was ordered on On December 8, the day after HTS rebels took the capital, Damascus.

He said he ultimately left for Russia because there was nothing else he could do in Syria, lamenting the country’s fall “into the hands of terrorism.”

The statement was published on the Syrian Presidency’s official channel on the Telegram messaging application, with a note saying that it had been published after several failed attempts to publish it through Arab and international media outlets. The statement was relatively quickly removed from the Telegram channel, without any explanation, before reappearing there and on the presidency’s Facebook page.

While the broader international community is still trying to figure out how to deal with HTS, which has said it will respect Syrians of all faiths and appears determined to be seen as a secular interim administration, though it has not said what will come next country of a three-month transition period: Israel and the United States have largely focused on securing Assad’s stockpiled weapons.

For Israel, that has meant the fiercest airstrikes carried out in Syria in years, and they continued on Monday, just over a week after Assad’s sudden departure.

Whoever ends up controlling Syria will inherit a largely tattered military infrastructure. Judging by the IDF’s statement on Monday, claiming that its strikes amounted to “a significant achievement for the Israeli Air Force’s superiority in the region,” that might be exactly what was intended.