Why is Israel still bombing Syria?

Since December 8, Israel has regularly bombed Syria, sometimes striking what it has said are “strategic” weapons formerly possessed by the regime of Bashar Al Assad, which it claims could one day pose a threat.

The arms have either been abandoned or inherited by security forces of the new Syrian administration led by Ahmad Al Shara and his coalition of groups in Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, which includes several extremist factions.

Israel and Syria, bitter foes since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, fought multiple conflicts during the Baathist rule of the Assad dynasty after 1971, including one of the largest modern air battles in 1982.

Mr Al Sharaa has said Syrians are war-weary and not seeking new conflicts, although he has been unable to stop massacres of Alawite civilians committed by allied factions.

Recent Israeli attacks hit port infrastructure in Latakia and Tiyas airbase, also known as T-4, one of Syria’s largest and previously home to Iranian advisers and equipment, including drones.

The second round of strikes on Tiyas on March 22 hit remaining SU-24s, outdated aircraft that had been flying for at least 30 years.

Syria has called the attacks a “flagrant” violation of the country’s sovereignty, also condemning an expanded Israeli occupation of a zone near the Golan Heights, which was meant to be demilitarised based on a 1974 ceasefire. Israeli forces, claiming to be protecting minorities, particularly the Druze community, have seized weapons caches and clashed with locals.

A once mighty army

From a military standpoint, the ground and air raids raise the question of how many arms were left in Syria after the fall of Bashar Al Assad’s regime, once one of the most heavily armed in the Middle East with powerful air defences and one of the largest tank forces in the world.

The answer, if recent strikes are anything to go by, is a substantial amount, even after devastating attacks on Syria’s navy at the start of the campaign, destroying 15 vessels previously unscathed from the country’s 14 year conflict. A key target of Israeli anti-naval operations would have been powerful Yakhont anti-ship missiles.

Two days into Israel’s operation Bashan Arrow to destroy the weapons stockpiles and abandoned aircraft, Israel said it had destroyed “most of the strategic weapons stockpiles in Syria."

An air strike a week later indicates how much material was left, when a blast near Tartus on December 16 registered as a magnitude 3 seismic event.

For comparison, the US Geological Survey said the 2020 Beirut port blast, which killed over 200 people and damaged thousands of buildings in the Lebanese capital, registered at magnitude 3.3. The poorly stored fertiliser which exploded at Beirut port – 2,494 tonnes of it – was the rough equivalent of about 1,000 tonnes of TNT, giving an idea of how much explosive detonated in the hills near Tartus.

An amount of TNT that size could fill approximately 1,000 Syrian Scud B missiles or many thousands more smaller rockets – although Assad is highly unlikely to have had that many of the huge 600 kilometre range missiles in storage.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, Syria likely had around 300 of the Soviet-era Scud missiles stockpiled in the mid-90s. Janes, a British defence consultancy, believes North Korea assisted Syria in domestic Scud B production after 2008. Even accounting for Scuds used in the civil war or bombed by Israel until Assad’s fall, there could be many left.

In the final year of the Assad regime, Israel also raided and heavily bombed underground missile production at Masyaf, said to have been built with Iranian help.

These weapons, according to Israeli intelligence in 2015, were among the 90 per cent of Syria’s total missile arsenal expended in the 2011-2024 civil war.

Missiles are still a top priority target for Israel, with the December 16 strike hitting the former Syrian Army’s 107th missile brigade. Exactly how much is left in storage is uncertain but a single shipment from Iran, intercepted in 2009, contained around 2,000 122mm rockets.

Depending on how many were sent to Hezbollah or have been bombed so far, remaining caches could be very large, like the one that hit in Tartus.

Air defences are still being targeted, although Assad’s forces failed to use the capability to shoot down an Israeli jet since 2018, when an F-16I was downed during a day-long exchange of strikes.

Israel had destroyed most air defence systems in a long air campaign against Iranian resupply of Hezbollah in Lebanon through Syria even before Assad fell.

According to local witnesses, an abandoned air defence battalion site was bombed near Tartus on March 3. Even with the help of former Assadist air defender support, it’s not clear how effective remaining systems would be in the hands of HTS, with many dating back decades – apart from some Russian Pantsir systems delivered in 2008.

A future crisis

Either way, it is obvious that Syria is being violently disarmed, with uncertain regional consequences.

“In some ways this campaign makes no sense, because we have to remember, if you want HTS to fight against ISIS, or against the Iranian presence in Syria, you need them to have capabilities, and adding to that, if they don't have the capabilities then of course, Turkey will be happy to supply these capabilities,” says Danny Citrinowicz, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer and non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programme.

“Let's see if Israel is willing to bomb Turkish equipment that will arrive to HTS. It's not a smart move, but it's connected to the Israeli strategy now in Syria, weakening Ahmed Al Sharaa, making sure that he's not able to control Syria. Because we don't know whether he’s a violent jihadi or not.”

Israel’s foreign Minister Israel Katz said that the army had been ordered to "establish a sterile defence zone free of weapons and terrorist threats in southern Syria,” but now this has become an open-ended operation on Syrian soil.

“Of course, there is the operation preventing Al Sharaa from operating in the south near Golan, preserving Israel presence in Herman mount and in the buffer zone. So all of this activity is actually connected to the strategic logic of ‘we are not going to support Al Sharaa. On the contrary, we're going to weaken him.’ We will prevent Syria from being controlled again as a central regime by someone who you don't know his intention, because maybe in a few years’ time, he'll do A, B and C.

“This is, I think a counterproductive policy. It’s quite different to that of the US or the EU in that regard. They are saying that they're sceptical of Al Sharaa and his motives, but they want to give him some sort of benefit of the doubt.”