BEIRUT - Israel’s weekend airstrike on a military complex near the Syrian capital of Damascus killed at least 42 Syrian soldiers, a group of anti-regime activists said Monday, citing information from military hospitals.
The Syrian government has not released a death toll, but Syrian state media have reported casualties in Sunday’s pre-dawn airstrike, Israel’s third into Syria this year.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said about 150 soldiers are normally stationed in the area that was targeted, but that it was not clear how many were there at the time of the strike.
Rami Abdel-Rahman, the head of the group, said his sources at Syrian military hospitals gave him information on 42 Syrian soldiers killed in the Israeli attack.
Israel’s government has not formally confirmed involvement in strikes on Syria. However, Israeli officials said the attacks were meant to prevent advanced Iranian weapons from reaching Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, an ally of Syria and a foe of Israel.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss covert military operations.
Israel on Monday signaled a return to “business as usual,” with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arriving in China for a scheduled visit, but Syria and Iran have hinted at possible retribution for the strikes.
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi warned Monday that Israel was“playing with fire,” according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
Syria’s government called the attacks a “flagrant violation of international law” that has made the Middle East “more dangerous.”
Israeli officials have indicated they will keep trying to block what they see as an effort by Iran to send sophisticated weapons to Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia ahead of a possible collapse of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Israel has repeatedly threatened to intervene in the Syrian civil war to stop the transfer of what it calls “game-changing” weapons to Hezbollah, a Syrian-backed group that battled Israel to a stalemate during a month long war in 2006.
Since carrying out a lone airstrike in January that reportedly destroyed a shipment of anti-aircraft missiles headed to Hezbollah, Israel had largely stayed on the sidelines. That changed this weekend with the pair of airstrikes, including an attack near a military complex close to Damascus early Sunday that set off powerful explosions.
A senior Israeli official said both airstrikes targeted shipments of Fateh-110 missiles bound for Hezbollah. The Iranian-made guided missiles could fly deep into Israel and deliver half-ton warheads with pinpoint accuracy.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing a covert military operation.
Israeli defense officials have identified several strategic weapons that they say cannot be allowed to reach Hezbollah.
They include Syrian chemical weapons, the Iranian Fateh-110s, long-range Scud missiles, Yakhont missiles capable of attacking naval ships from the coast and Russian SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles. Israel’s airstrike in January destroyed a shipment of SA-17s meant for Hezbollah, according to U.S. officials.
Israeli officials said theFateh-110s reached Syria last week. Friday’s airstrike struck a Damascus airport where the missiles were being stored, while the second series of airstrikes early Sunday targeted the remnants of the shipment, which had been moved to three nearby locations, the officials said.
None of the Iranian missiles are believed to have reached Lebanon, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence assessment.
Tzahi Hanegbi, an Israeli lawmaker who is close to Netanyahu, said Monday that Israel’s aim is to “keep advanced weapons from Hezbollah” and avoid “escalating tension with Syria.”
“If there is activity, then it is only against Hezbollah, and not against the Syrian regime,” he told Israel Radio.
Hezbollah fired some 4,000 rockets into Israel during the 2006 war, and Israel believes the group now has tens of thousands of rockets and missiles.
Meanwhile, as Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Russia on Monday for talks with the Assad regime’s most powerful ally, the administration remained tight-lipped on both Israel’s weekend air strikes and their implications for Washington decision-making.
Russia, alongside China, has blocked U.S.-led efforts three times at the United Nations to pressure Assad into stepping down. Officials said Kerry hopes to change Moscow’s thinking with two new arguments: American threats to arm the Syrian rebels and evidence of chemical weapon attacks by the Assad regime.
On Monday, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called for the U.S. to provide weapons to vetted Syrian rebels. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., introduced legislation that would allow for arms, military training and nonlethal aid to rebels that meet certain criteria on human rights and don’t have links to terrorism.
Until now, U.S. efforts to bolster the rebels’ fighting skills and gather intelligence on the groups operating inside Syria have been limited to small training camps in Jordan, said two U.S. officials,who weren’t authorized to speak about secret activities and demanded anonymity.
Officials said arming the rebels is the most likely escalation, and targeted strikes are likely to be considered only after uncontested proof emerges of chemical-weapons use. President Barack Obama has described the use of such weapons as a “red line,” and the administration is weighing its options.
Kerry, the U.S. officials said Monday, hopes the new arguments may be enough to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to support, or at least not veto, a fresh effort to impose U.N. sanctions on Syria if Assad doesn’t begin transition talks with the opposition.
However, the chemical-weapons argument is now under attack, with former war-crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte saying over the weekend that she and fellow members of a four-member U.N. human-rights panel have indications the nerve agent sarin was used by Syrian rebel forces, not by government forces.
Del Ponte, who in the past took on the Italian Mafia and prosecuted former Serb President Slobodan Milosevic in proceedings at The Hague, said investigations so far have yielded “no indication at all” that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons.
“According to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions - but not yet incontrovertible proof - of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,” she said.
“I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got, they were about the use of nerve gas by the opposition,” Del Ponte told Swiss- Italian public television Sunday.
Despite a clarification from the U.N. that it has yet to make any definitive determination on chemical-weapons use, Washington pushed back on Del Ponte’s assertion, saying it’s highly likely that the Assad regime, and not the rebels, has been behind any chemical weapons use in Syria.
“We are highly skeptical of suggestions that the opposition could have or did use chemical weapons,” Carney said.
The State Department said the administration continues to believe that Syria’s large chemical weapons stockpiles remain securely in the regime’s control.
The U.N. panel “has not reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria by any parties to the conflict,” according to an e-mailed statement. The findings of the commission, set up in 2011 to probe allegations of violations in the Syrian conflict, will be released June 3.
The uprising against Assad began in March 2011, quickly turning into an armed insurgency and then a civil war. More than 70,000 people have been killed and millions displaced, while Assad and those trying to topple him remain deadlocked on the battlefield.
On Monday, Syrian rebels shot down a military helicopter in the country’s east, killing eight government troops on board as Assad’s troops battled opposition forces inside a sprawling military air base in the north for the second straight day, activists said.
As Assad’s warplanes pounded rebel positions inside the Mannagh air base in the north, government troops also regained control of six villages along the strategic road that links the northern city of Aleppo with its civilian airport, the country’s second largest.
Information for this article was contributed by Josef Federman, Karin Laub, Bradley Klapper, Matthew Lee, Barbara Surk, Ian Deitch, John Heilprin, Donna Cassata, Jim Kuhnhenn, Josh Lederman, Kimberly Dozier and Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press; and by Flavia Krause-Jackson, Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and Dana El Baltaji of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/07/2013