Residents, experts say site was chemical weapons facility
Ynet, Jan 31 2013
Israeli warplanes attacked a military research center in Damascus province at dawn on Wednesday, Syria’s military command said, denying reports that the planes had struck a convoy carrying weapons from Syria to Lebanon. Local residents and experts claim the target was a chemical weapons production center. Two people were killed and five wounded in the attack on the site in Jamraya, which Syria described as one of a number of “scientific research centers aimed at raising the level of resistance and self-defense.” The building was destroyed, the military command said in a statement carried by state media. It said the planes crossed into Syria below the radar level, just north of Mount Hermon, and returned the same way. The Jamraya area contains many military facilities as well as what is likely a chemical weapons production and storage site. The area also houses training camps for Hezbollah combatants who are learning to operate advanced Russian weapons systems. The army statement further noted that the attack occurred after terrorist groups tried and failed to take control of the site several times, saying:
This proves that Israel is the instigator, beneficiary and sometimes executor of the terrorist acts targeting Syria and its people.
Residents near Damascus told AFP that missiles had struck a military site for unconventional weapons on Tuesday at 11:30 pm. According to them, the center, which is located in Al-Hameh, about 15 km north-west of Damascus, was hit by six missiles and partially destroyed, causing a fire and killing at least two people. A Lebanese news website quoted a Syrian source as saying that the target of the Israeli strike was a chemical weapons center. The Damascus source said that the attack took place at 1:30 am at a scientific research center in the Jamraya area. He added that four security guards were killed in the attack and that the blast could be heard as far as Damascus. Syrian rebels posted a video allegedly documenting a series of blasts at the center shortly after the attack had taken place. The video could not be authenticated. On Wednesday, several rebel leaders claimed that they had attacked the site with mortar shells. Israel’s intelligence community has been aware of the military research center for decades. Some of the center’s studies have been presented as civilian in nature. Yiftah Shafir of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv said:
It is a secret governmental body that answers directly to Assad and aggregates all of Syria’s military research institutes.
Clearly all the above is nonsense, because:
Israel didn’t target chemical weapons
Mitch Ginsburg, Times of Israel, Jan 30 2013
Israeli warplanes that reportedly struck near the Lebanese border with Syria would either have bombed a convoy of conventional weapons or the nontoxic component of a chemical agent, according to a leading Israeli expert on chemical weapons. Lt-Col (Res) Dr Dany Shoham, a BESA Center fellow and expert on chemical and biological weapons in the Middle East, told The Times of Israel:
The chances of bombing a chemical weapons convoy without causing significant environmental damage are very small. Chemical agents are often diffused over time and space. The toxic element is carried by the wind, at times spreading for up to 20 km, and though some could be burnt off by the heat and fire of a bomb strike, the effects would still have a bigger impact than what we have seen so far. Chemical weapons of the sort Syria possess can come in two forms, binary and unitary. A binary weapon is composed of two final precursors, in the technical jargon, that must be mixed together to create the ultimate, toxic result. One component is toxic, the other not so much. Theoretically, Israeli planes could have hit the less toxic agent, which is possible in principle but hard to imagine in practice. A binary agent could be packed in 10 containers to a single truck. A unitary agent, either the final product of a mixed agent or not, is already toxic. A nerve agent in that state would likely be already loaded into the warhead of a missile, bomb or artillery shell, meaning that it would require a large convoy to transport. To target something of such known extreme toxicity would be unthinkable.
The commander of the Israel Air Force, Maj-Gen Amir Eshel, spoke on Tuesday of a defensive, offensive and intelligence effort that has taken the form of “a campaign between wars,” and said that while the IAF was making every effort to keep its actions beneath the threshold at which war breaks out, “if there is no choice, it may break out.” The IAF’s spokesman confirmed that Israel was deeply concerned not just by non-conventional weapons transfers but by an array of state-of-the-art Russian weapons, including surface-to-sea missiles and advanced radars that could change the balance of power between Israel and Hezbollah.
Niqnaq 