What Israel Has Just Accomplished in Syria

While launching nearly 500 airstrikes on Syrian military assets, including missile warehouses, three military airbases housing fighter aircraft and helicopters, storehouses of chemical weapons and chemical weapons production plants, air-defense systems, weapons stockpiles, and the entire Syrian navy, the IDF has also taken over the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, and the summit of Mount Hermon, which gives the Israelis an uninterrupted sightline to the capital Damascus. More on what Israel has done to make sure, in just three days, to ensure that jihadists in Syria cannot threaten the Jewish state, can be found here.

Unsurprisingly, Israel was quick to destroy both Assad’s chemical weapons plants and his stores of chemical weapons, relieving the world of the worry that they might be used not only against Israel and against the Syrian people, but also against Western countries, should they fall into the hands of ISIS. Even before the Biden administration announced that it would work with “partners in the area” to destroy “chemical weapons,” the IDF was already completing that task.

That was their first target, on Sunday, Dec. 8. A day later, the IDF destroyed the Assad regime’s storage sites housing long-range missiles, both surface-to-surface and air-to-surface, and its weapons research facilities, and hit Syria’s three main military airbases, destroying many dozens of fighter jets and helicopters. It also hit weapons production and research facilities.

In sum, these were the results of IAF attacks from Saturday to early Monday: the destruction of all chemical weapons stores and production plants, weapons research offices, missile storehouses and manufacturing plants.

By Tuesday, the IAF had hit a total of 310 targets, which included the military airbases at Homs, Qamishli and Damascus, as well as weapons depots and other strategic military sites. On Tuesday morning, the IAF destroyed Syria’s navy at Latakia. Now Syria is essentially without either an air force or a navy; both have been blown to smithereens. The IDF estimates that, as of early on Tuesday, some 70%-80% of the capabilities of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s military have been destroyed.

The Israelis, of course, have made themselves, and everyone else threatened by Islamic jihadists, safer by destroying these weapons that could, at some future time, fall into the hands of ISIS and similar groups. The Israelis cannot bet their security on the possibility that Mohamed al-Jolani is in truth a moderate as he now claims to be, or other members of the Hayat Tahrir al-Shams jihad group are similarly moderate. And even if al-Jolani has had a change of heart on the road to Damascus, and is no longer the jihadist he has been all his adult life — which is most doubtful — what will happen in the future? Who in the end will hold power? Israel cannot assume that ISIS, which has a continuing presence in eastern Syria, would not succeed in seizing some of the weapons left behind by Assad’s disintegrating forces and use them against Israel. In the chaos and confusion, the IDF acted sensibly to remove as much of the potential threat from Syria as it possibly could.

Israel cannot take chances with the jihadist threat from Syria, a country that has been at war with Israel ever since 1948. The IDF had to take advantage of this unparalleled and unrepeatable opportunity, with the Syrian military disbanded, and weapons lying unattended all over the country, to destroy as many of Syria’s military assets as it could.

And so it has done, surpassing all expectations, by destroying 70-80% of those assets.

One commentator summed up the three days of airstrikes thus: those 72 hours “stood out even for people who thought they had already seen everything.” And the result was that the Israeli Air Force, according to defense journalist Yoav Limor, “didn’t strip the Syrian military of specific capabilities only – it sent it back to the starting line, bereft of any significant strategic capabilities.” As a result, Israel, and the world, are much safer.