I went to Olmert. [The threat] at the existential level is of an unprecedented order of magnitude.. The weather along the way surprised us in a number of places. At the time, the members were bound together by their goal of building a prosperous nation. In 1965, there were three notable border clashes, starting with Syrian shootings of Israeli farmers and army patrols, followed by Israeli tanks and artillery destroying the Arab heavy earth moving machines that were used for the diversion plan. In the pictures, the inside of the reactor is visible, and in it are fusion cylinders and bars and also some Korean workers. The reason for the armyparty alliance in the first place was to safeguard the party from repression. The material was analyzed on a Wednesday night, recalls Amnon Sufrin. The "War over Water", also the Battle over Water, was a series of confrontations between Israel and its Arab neighbors from November 1964 to May 1967 over control of water sources in the Jordan River drainage basin. Web8 Sep 2022 Israels bombing of Syrias Aleppo International Airport on Tuesday was the second time it had been attacked in less than a week. Saber Falhout, a Druze who was later known as "the poet of the revolution", wrote and announced the first communique of the plotters. [19] The new middle class alone could only produce instability, but together with the peasantry, the revolution became possible. He had been killed in 2008 in Damascus while leaving a reception at the Iranian embassy. [1] The coup was met by indifference in the population at large. [19] Without the peasantry there could not have been a Ba'athist revolution in Syria. The scheme was only marginally feasible, as it was technically difficult and expensive. Mostly it went according to plan, but not everything. The trio met just before 6:00 P.M. in a room adjacent to the government meeting room, heard Ashkenazi, Dagan and Yadlin, and afterward remained with just the chief of staff. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has denied ever having used chemical weapons. The attacks were claimed by Islamic State group militants. WebThe 1963 Syrian coup d'tat, referred to by the Syrian government as the 8 March Revolution ( Arabic: ), was the successful seizure of power in Syria by the Their mission this time was not to take down enemy aircraft. According to him, he did not recommend attacking a hot reactor, but rather said that it was necessary to prepare for any eventuality and that the reactor becoming operational should not cause the decision-makers in Israel to despair. Authorize the operation.. The area thereby functioned as one of France's colonies, and the newly established state was viewed unfavorably by most Syrians, with many of them regarding it as a vassal of European imperialism. Middle East. Olmert was a very unpopular prime minister. We had a number of kinds of weapons, a mix that wouldnt leave you with a single malfunction point without the ability to compensate for it. WebA bomb attack on a military bus in central Damascus has killed 14 people, Syrian state media say. Explore in 3D: The dazzling crown that makes a king. Olmerts behavior toward top people in the defense establishment seemed too folksy to him too much hugging and backslapping, not enough considered judgment. On Tuesday, September 4, the air force conducted its last mock maneuver in advance of the attack. WebA U.S. official told ABC News that there were two new attacks late Friday on two U.S. facilities in Deir ez-Zor Province in eastern Syria after another one earlier in the day and 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. Everyone there is jumping up and down in excitement, like in a Hollywood movie. It isnt there any more.. Y. reached the conclusion that they were looking in the wrong place. Cheney, as usual the rapacious hawk, wanted the United States to attack and destroy the reactor as a public and deterrent message, a warning against the development of additional secret nuclear programs in other countries. However, an extensive action was liable to be perceived as a humiliation by President Assad and push him into a corner so that he would feel obliged to retaliate. Satellite imagery obtained by Stratfor that December showed construction work to improve the airbase. [41] President Lu'ay al-Atassi subsequently resigned, signalling his disapproval of the executions. Gates and some of Bushs advisers believed that an attack should be left in Israels hands. We set out around 10:30 P.M., recalls Amir. The southernmost, and also the largest, stretched from the south-eastern part of the Sea of Galilee eastwards to the Yarmuk River where the borders of Israel, Jordan and Syria converge. The executions were a rare punitive action used to deal with the participants of a failed coup in Syria, with the typical punishment being exile, imprisonment or reassignment to a foreign diplomatic post. There is a brief moment when you feel excellent, because you have achieved what was required and then you are very vigilant. Sources told the Guardian newspaper that US intelligence officials believed Russian personnel were at Shayrat "when Sarin was loaded on to a Syrian jet", but that "they have not established whether the Russians knew it was happening". At the time, the officer corps was split into five different factions; the Damascus faction which supported the Syrian Government, supporters of Akram al-Hawrani, a Nasserist faction, a Ba'athist faction and a group of independents. Capt Davis stressed that the US had taken "extraordinary measures" to avoid civilian casualties and that planners "took precautions to minimise risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the airfield". He recently recalled: I looked at the dancing guests and I said to myself: Five hours from now, we could be waking them up with sirens and Scud missiles falling in the center of the country. A U.S. airstrike targeting facilities used by Iran-backed militias in Syria appears to be a message to Tehran delivered by a new American administration still figuring out its approach to the Middle East. No security arrangements fences or guards were visible there nor had batteries of ground-to-air missiles been stationed there for defense from air strikes. WebAluf Benn. Syrian artillery units opened fire on the construction site. 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. The group was successful, and they promised al-Hariri that "If we succeed, you can become chief of staff. The chief of staff asked the prime minister to convene the cabinet urgently and vote on approving the attack. In the preparations for the operation, we practiced ways of arriving, implementation, routes, distances, without telling the pilots and the navigators who were taking part what the target was. 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. Did this woman die because her genitals were cut? The trick was not to take responsibility and immediately after the bombing to push ahead with a diplomatic effort that would convince other countries of the reliability of the information about what the Syrians were preparing and spur them to act to restrain him., Two different air force strike options were on the table, the difference between them was the size of the aerial force that would be used. And then we started to fly back, in accordance with the planning, at a low altitude. After the attack, Ashkenazi sent MI chief Yadlin to the Turkish chief of staff to explain the considerations and circumstances and to reassure him that there had been absolutely no violation of Turkish sovereignty during the operation. 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. After the coup, the Ba'athist Military committee initiated a series of purges that altered the structure of the Syrian armed forces; by replacing 90% of its officer corps with Alawites. The Syrian conflict began unfolding 11 years ago, in early March 2011. Barak, in a conversation with Haaretz, rejects the claims against him outright. [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. Israel has never officially acknowledged or accepted responsibility for it, and the following is based on an investigative report published by American journalist David Makovsky in The New Yorker in 2012. The researchers believed that this was the sign of the existence of a cooling system, an essential element in a reactor. Ten years of silence on Syria strike. He looked at me I knew that from that moment on nothing would be the same. The air force dubbed the plan with the code name Soft Melody (the general staff operation had a different code name, Ein Habasor, while at Military Intelligence they referred to the preparations as Outside the Box). The official Sana news agency reported that nine civilians living in villages near the airbase, including four children, had also been killed in the strike. The Mossad intelligence division distributed a document with an assessment to that effect in February 2004. AP Photo/Hassan Ammar. While Atassi and Hariri held powerful posts, they did not possess enough personal or political power to threaten the NCRC. There was successful cooperation here among the intelligence organizations and between us and the government. USS Shamal (PC-13) is the thirteenth Cyclone -class patrol ship. Before successful strike, Israel's most resounding intel failure. Picture taken from a U.S. intelligence presentation. Shallal is situated nearby to Kur Udani and Ranhebas. However, Hayden added a reservation: No other elements of such a program were identified, such as development of a warhead. Come to think of it the court of history. Do you remember something in the north that was bothering me? said the prime minister to the president. Prime Minister, trust the air force pilots. Amir says he never told his wife about that night in eastern Syria. Nevertheless, the Arab states were not prepared to coexist with a project which seemed likely to make a major contribution to Israel's economic growth. He was a far more formidable opponent than al-Kudsi, and the Iraqi Regional Branch managed to take power through an alliance not only with military officers, but also with segments of the middle class. Meir Dagan was very determined. All the intelligence people who knew Bashar told me: Its not like Bashar. Read about our approach to external linking. His chief of staff, Yoram Turbovich, in a state of total euphoria, said to Olmert: You can resign now. There was unease because the home front was not aware of what might be waiting for it. That was no simple matter, a year after Lebanon., An existential threat to the State of Israel arose here and we dealt with it, the way the air force had dealt with the reactor in Iraq in the past, says Col. Amir, the F-15 pilot who took part in the attack. I said to him: The air force did what it was assigned to do., The prime minister celebrated the achievement by raising a toast. Even the liberal and democratic-inclined founding leaders were partial to forceful takeover, citing the corrupt electoral process. However, this did not change the balance of power, and the officers still controlled the country. Why Now? There is no reason for anyone to be in this area except for herdsmen. The people who were seen nearby mostly arrived on motorcycles; it looked as though the structure stood empty at night. [4] Agricultural revenues were highly skewed the top two percent of the population received 50 percent of the income, while the middle class (merchants or middle landowning groups), which was 18 percent of the population, earned 25 percent of agricultural revenues. DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) Two bombs attached to a bus carrying Syrian troops exploded in Damascus during the Olmert, according to Barak, tended to act almost automatically, without due consideration. In January 1964 an Arab League summit meeting convened in Cairo and decided: The establishment of Israel is the basic threat that the Arab nation in its entirety has agreed to forestall. One of the American media organizations had asked the Pentagon a question about the presence of a nuclear installation in Syria. 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Though the relations between Olmert and Barak were fairly good, and it appeared that Olmert wanted Barak in Defense, Barak had voiced some harsh criticism of the prime ministers conduct during the war in Lebanon. Barak, shouting, argued that he had not authorized the presentation. 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. A large, cubical building that was still under construction in the heart of the Syrian desert, not far from Deir al-Zour, was a focus of the Israeli defense establishment starting from the end of 2006. They negotiated their surrender even though, according to Assad himself, their forces could have defeated his rebel company in combat. The initial diversion capacity of the National Water Carrier, without supplementary booster pumps, was 320 million m3, well within the limits of the Johnston Plan. On the way back, in order to reduce weight and save fuel, one of the planes jettisoned an empty fuel container. 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. Hezbollah accused Israel of the hit, but Israel never officially responded. However, that day the military intelligence raided the apartment where the plotters were planning to assemble. In January 2007, a pipeline leading from the Cube to the Euphrates was identified in satellite photos. I said to them: You are going to do something of incredible significance. 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. Alongside the urgent necessity of removing the surprising new threat in Syria, Olmert was keen to mend the flaws revealed in his functioning in Lebanon as well as the publics impression of him. When he looked outside, he saw larges areas on fire, he said. An event with a relatively small footprint, a sharp and quiet action at a site far from where people were living, if Israel did not take responsibility for it and if its leaders did not prattle in its aftermath, would enable Assad to downplay the event. We were very focused on the escape route because it could elicit surprises.. Bidens bombing of Iraq and Syria: the normalization of war. Amir relates that a number of years later he watched a video that had been filmed in the command post during the attack. Capt Davis said they targeted "aircraft, hardened aircraft shelters, petroleum and logistical storage, ammunition supply bunkers, air defence systems, and radars", describing them as "things that made the airfield operate". Then, he in fact presented opposite arguments: Suddenly there wasnt a problem in rushing to bomb, even though an attack in Iran was a far greater challenge than bombing in Syria. WebThe Bombing of Shallal occurred on 23 January 1965 during the War over Water when the Israeli Air Force bombed the Syrian water pumping station at Shallal to prevent the [8] The failure in the 1948 ArabIsraeli War led to the downfall of the traditional elite and the rise of the military in politics. There is a tremendous explosion that you see in the darkness and after that, total destruction. Most populous nation: Should India rejoice or panic? Some 59 cruise missiles were At 8 P.M. he summoned leader of the opposition Netanyahu to the prime ministers residence. what does the bible say about lost spirits, complaint letter to health insurance company,
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