In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [94]
I arrived early to the offices of Syria Today the morning of September 6, 2007, trying to avoid the daytime heat as much as I could. Reading through the state papers, I was researching recent parliamentary discussions on the Syrian fiscal budget, which amounted to a record $4 billion. Nicholas Blanford, a good friend and the correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Beirut, called.
“The Syrians are saying they chased Israeli aircraft out of eastern Syria last night,” he said. “What could that be?”
The wheels started spinning in my mind. I had spent time in Washington the previous spring at various think-tank events concerning relations with Syria. At a particularly good seminar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, I was surprised that many analysts were predicting a possible war between Syria and Israel that summer. While they were not specific about the source of the tension, I assumed that Israel wanted to restore the psychological deterrence it had “lost” during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War.
Eastern Syria was not normally Israel’s area of operations, however. In 2003 Israel had bombed the Palestinian camp at Ain Saheb outside Damascus, and in 2006 Israeli jets had buzzed Bashar’s palace near the Syrian port city of Latakia. There was plenty of talk in the press and in op-ed pages about the likelihood of an Israeli raid on Iran’s nuclear program, especially in light of European attempts that had repeatedly failed to convince Tehran to stop its enrichment of uranium. So after I made a few phone calls, I gave Nick what I thought was the safe answer: “There seems to be a consensus here that the Israelis were testing Syrian air defense systems.”21
Downstairs in the newsroom, I found Othaina sitting at his computer terminal, reading the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) site and watching Al Jazeera on a TV set anchored to the wall above his desk. Othaina was from Deir Ezzor, a city in eastern Syria along the Euphrates River, so news of an Israeli incursion in northeastern Syria was a national and local concern for him. He motioned for me to step outside the office with him for a smoke.
“There are reports that people heard four or five jets around Tal al-Abyad on the Turkish border,” he said. “I’m hearing the jets were Israeli, and there were American jets, too. Some people heard loud booms as well. What the hell is going on?”
Over the next few days, the story took an unexpected turn.22 On September 7, SANA reported more details on the raid, saying that the jets had “infiltrated Syrian airspace through the northern border coming from the direction of the Mediterranean and headed toward the north-east territory, breaking the sound barrier…. The Syrian Arab Republic warns the government of the Israeli enemy and reserves the right to respond according to what it seems fit.”
Information Minister Bilal told Al Jazeera that Syria was “giving serious consideration to its response … to this aggression…. This shows that Israel cannot give up aggression and treachery.” Reuters quoted a Syrian official saying that the Israeli jets “dropped bombs on an empty area while our air defenses were firing heavily at them.” The next day, Turkey asked Israel for clarification on two fuel tanks that it had found in the Turkish provinces of Hatay and Gaziantep along the Syrian frontier. Prime Minister Olmert continued to deny all knowledge of the incident, telling reporters, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”23
After a few days’ lull, a US official stated on September 11 that the incursion was a raid that had been targeting weapons destined for Hezbollah. On September 13, the Washington Post reported, quoting a former Israeli official, that the attack had targeted “a facility capable of making unconventional weapons.” On September 15, there was another, much bigger bombshell. The same newspaper, quoting American sources, reported that Israel had recently provided the United States with evidence that North Korea was cooperating with Syria on a nuclear facility of some type. The evidence included “dramatic