The coup was planned by the military committee, rather than the Ba'ath Party's civilian leadership, but Michel Aflaq, the leader of the party, consented to the conspiracy. Russia is reported to have used Shayrat as a base for its Mil Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships, The US said these were the paths of the Syrian Air Force jets that bombed Khan Sheikhoun, The Russian defence ministry claimed that only 23 Tomahawk missiles reached Shayrat, This photograph taken after the missile strike appears to show a damaged hangar at Shayrat, The secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure. The purges prompted the protest resignations of Nasserist officials, including Defense Minister al-Sufi, Deputy Chief of Staff al-Qutayni, and four other Nasserist cabinet members. He hoped that perhaps the George W. Bush administration would take it upon itself to destroy the reactor. The greatest challenge, relates Col. The senior members of the newly established regime were Umran, Jadid and at last, Assad. They were concerned about the possibility of a blunder that could develop from mistaken intelligence information, as had happened to the Americans in the affair of the weapons of mass destruction (that were not found) on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003. This is the story of a single night more than a decade ago, and a daring, hair-raising operation executed by the Israeli air force, army and intelligence community that destroyed an atomic plant in northeastern Syria. Why now? Its only rarely that a Mossad chief calls and says: I have to see you. The Mossad chief arrives and sits in my office. The Syrian branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party was able to recruit youth from radical peasant movements and thus was able to mobilise large sectors of the population. Olmert, according to Barak, tended to act almost automatically, without due consideration. The detailed intelligence helped convince those countries of the justice of the Israeli move and neutralized the possibility that the attack would become the cause of an international scandal. And then you get to the target area, climb a bit higher, pulling into execution mode. Each of us solved things in his own cockpit, after dilemmas and misgivings. [19], In 1962, the military committee of the Syrian Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party spent most of its time planning to take power through a conventional military coup. The move was denied by the Russian defence ministry, but further satellite images taken at the end of March 2016 showed several Ka-52 Alligator and Mi-28N Night Hunter attack helicopters had also arrived, according to IHS Jane's. We were over the target for two or three minutes. Barak also thought an attack could embroil Israel in a war with Syria, in which it would again become clear that the IDF and the home front were not properly prepared. [31][32], However, between 28 April-2 May, the Ba'athist-dominated Military Committee virtually renounced the agreement when it purged over 50 Nasserist officers from their high-ranking positions in the armed forces, leading to a wide-scale propaganda campaign by Egypt via radio denouncing the Ba'ath (Nasserist-leaning newspapers had been previously shut down.) All his arguments, he says, were to the point. Al-Hariri led a brigade from the Syrian front towards Israel, while Ba'athists were able to gain control of a second brigade stationed in Suwayda. We began to suspect that there, in broad daylight, a reactor was hiding.. The prevailing conspiracy theory held that Barak was waiting for the final version of the Winograd commission investigative report on the second Lebanon war, which was to be published within a few months, in the expectation that the commission would obligate Olmert to resign. [37][38] Al-Hariri was ordered to take a direct flight to the Syrian embassy in the United States, where he was reassigned as the embassy's military attache. The Nasserist officers were also given notable offices with Muhammad al-Sufi becoming Minister of Defence and Rashid al-Qutayni becoming deputy chief of staff. Come to think of it the court of history. Russia said the Syrian jets had hit a rebel depot full of chemical munitions, but Mr Trump said "there can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons". In his memoirs, Bush wrote that following Haydens assessment, he told Olmert at their meeting on June 19 that he could not justify an American attack on a sovereign state. [40][41] The Army Headquarters, personally defended by al-Hafiz, and the broadcast station were attacked, and the ensuing battle left hundreds of people dead, including several civilian bystanders. Shamal was laid down 23 September 1994 by Bollinger Shipyards, Lockport, The material left no room for doubt: The plutogenic reactor that Y. had written about did indeed exist it had been found in the heart of the desert and was in advanced stages of construction, and nearing completion. He believed that the operational plans the IDF had formulated for attacking the plant had not yet matured sufficiently and did not ensure complete success. Prime Minister, trust the air force pilots. Y. reached the conclusion that they were looking in the wrong place. bombing of shallal Eco-bois On July 13, Bush informed Olmert in a conversation over the direct and secure red phone line between the White House and the Prime Ministers Office in Jerusalem that he opposed a military attack on the reactor. And during the time that passed, the IDFs preparedness for war was improved immeasurably. Asia. Dagan asked: Mr. The Ministry of Defence headquarters were seized without a fight, and General Zahr al-Din, the commander-in-chief, was put under arrest. What actually is/was 'Shallal'? I can't find mention of it anywhere. The Mossad led several overseas operations as part of that intelligence gathering. Before taking control, the Ba'ath Party gambled that it would be allowed to share power with Gamal Abdel Nasser in the United Arab Republic (UAR). US bases in north-east Syria have come under attack before, with the US responding with air strikes. Attacking a hot reactor was liable to create tremendous environmental pollution. Dagan assigned us the task of finding out whether or not there was a nuclear project, says Rami Ben-Barak, a senior Mossad official at that time. Yet in 2008, IAEA inspectors found traces of radioactive substances there, and the agency said there was a high probability that a nuclear reactor had been in operation at the site. [23], While it planned the coup, the military committee and its members were frowned upon by civilian Ba'athists. But the flight to the target was relatively calm, without our getting discovered and without any direct threat. The new defense minister believed that before any attack on the reactor, the IDF had to be 98 percent prepared, not 80 percent., With the approach of summer, temperatures inside the conference rooms also rose. Later, six civilians were given membership in NCRC, three Ba'athists (Aflaq, al-Bitar and Mansur al-Atrash) and three Nasserists. At a distant and isolated site called Al Kibar, less than a kilometer west of the Euphrates River, the Cube aroused their interest in particular. [43] They were released exactly a year later and exiled,[44] after lobbying by Nasser and Iraqi President Abdul Salam Arif. Considering that the members of the Military Committee were all too young to be perceived as the real leaders of Syria by the populace, the Military Committee appointed Colonel Amin al-Hafiz to the post of Minister of the Interior. "[27] From that day, Umran gave the civilians a faint idea of what the committee members were planning. [6] No one is going to solve them for us. At times, Barak told someone, he had the feeling that Olmert was playing the role of a leader based on what he had seen in American movies. And before that, at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, came the Israeli military operation known as Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza. We were able to say with certainty: This reactor is intended to produce plutonium and for military purposes only, says Yadlin. In manning the crews, We choose the best. This small and secret coterie headed by Suleiman was directly subordinate to the president; in Israel it was called the shadow army.. Olmerts behavior toward top people in the defense establishment seemed too folksy to him too much hugging and backslapping, not enough considered judgment. We had satellite pictures of a large building in the middle of the desert, with no explanation, says the MI chief at the time, Gen. (res.) Trump: "Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children". The plan was that Assad would lead a company from al-Hariri's brigade to capture the air base before dawn to prevent air strikes. Prime Minister, what do we do? Olmert replied: We destroy it.), In a rare public reference to these developments while giving testimony in the trial against him in the affair involving Morris Talansky (involving unlawful acceptance of gifts of cash from a New York businessman), the prime minister related: The head of the Mossad called me. [b], Modern Syria was first established in 1920 as the Arab Kingdom of Syria under King Faisal I. Now there are only exclamation points. The prime minister breathed a sigh and asked: What do we do with this? We said to him: We destroy. (In Olmerts circle, as often happens in such cases, they remember an opposite course of events. So why was it chosen? [14] The UAR would prove to be Egypt-dominated, and the Ba'ath Party was forced to dissolve itself, but in 1961 the UAR collapsed because of a military coup in Syria. The next morning I assembled my people and I said we had experienced two total failures here: Wed had absolutely no idea that such a program even existed and, second, we didnt know that negotiations to dismantle it had been going on for eight months. Shkedi emerged from the control booth [in the command post] only after the planes were out of the range of danger. Why now? Shamal. In the air force it was decided to brief only the top command in each of the two operational squadrons about the nature of the target that was to be attacked. Suddenly a moment comes when all the theoretical discussions become the here and now, and it could be that this will lead to a war, she relates. VideoThe secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure, LGBT troops take love for Eurovision to front line, Why an Indian comedian is challenging fake news rules. I was very much in agreement with the decision to attack, even though it was with a heavy heart., Ashkenazi went back to the General Command building in Tel Aviv.
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