The Syrian regime led by President Bashar Assad risks losing its Damascus International Airport if Iran continues to use the site to smuggle advanced weapons to Hezbollah, the head of research at an Israeli defense research center has warned.
Speaking just days after international media reports said Israel struck its latest blow against Damascus International, Maj. (res.) Tal Beeri, head of the research department at the Alma Center, told JNS: “The message is clear. So long as Iran’s air corridor for smuggling weapons from Iran to Syria and Lebanon continues, the Syrian state will be seen as responsible by the attacking party. So long as Syria won’t act, the airport will continue to be a target.”
Future attacks could include a “roof knock”—dropping empty munitions to serve as a warning—on the airport’s control tower and destroying it after it is evacuated, assessed Beeri, or strikes on the airport’s radars.
“If the message isn’t received, attacks could escalate further, to the point that serious damage is caused to the airport, and it will take more than a few days to repair,” he said. “The messaging is not aimed at Iran—that is a lost cause. It is determined to continue trafficking arms to Hezbollah. It is aimed at Syria.”
Such strikes place Damascus in a dilemma and force it to conduct a cost-benefit analysis, he argued. Iran’s stepped-up weapons smuggling is also enabled by the fact that Russia’s attention is focused on its war on Ukraine and less on Syria these days.
“In the end, the Syrians are in a trap,” said Beeri. “They invited the Iranians to assist them in the civil war. That has a cost, which is heavy because they ended up with a foreign entity on their soil that operates almost with full independence to pursue Iranian interests and goals, not Syrian ones.”
1 comment:
Damascus will end up losing much more than their airport. No one will want to fly into a city that no longer exists and glows in the dark. Not much of a tourist destination.
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