Pummel the bases, miss the men — Israel’s invisible war in Syria
The general who led the operation to stop Iran winning Middle East hegemony recalls the ‘thousands of attacks’ on Tehran’s forces
January 12 2019, 6:00pm, The Times
Israel’s military chief has for the first time spoken in detail about the war being waged in the shadows between his country and Iran.
Israel has been in direct conflict with Iran for the past two years on Syrian soil, according to Lieutenant-General Gadi Eisenkot, who planned, initiated and directed the covert operations.
“In January 2017 we began attacking the infrastructure the Iranians were building in Syria,” Eisenkot told The Sunday Times in an interview in his 14th-floor office in Tel Aviv. “The critical mass was from mid-2017,” he added. “We began attacking systematically a number of times each week. Without making any statements. Beneath the radar.”
Eisenkot, 58, who is retiring this week as Israel’s military commander after 40 years as a soldier and officer, said that Israel’s main enemy in this hidden war had been Iran’s Revolutionary Guards — notably their expeditionary Quds Force in Syria. “We carried out thousands of attacks without taking responsibility and without asking for credit,” he says. In 2018 alone, Israel dropped 2,000 bombs on Iranian targets in Syria, he said.
For the past four decades, since the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran’s theocratic leadership has been committed to Israel’s destruction. But the countries have never directly confronted each other militarily.
When the war in Syria began in 2011, Israel started to carry out airstrikes against convoys shipping Iran-supplied weapons from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. But it took care not to attack the Iranians themselves.
Towards the end of 2016, the war against Isis, being pursued by the American-led coalition in Syria and Iraq had passed its decisive point. Iran, said Eisenkot, was planning to use the vacuum created after the downfall of the Isis to achieve “regional hegemony”.
He went on: “We identified the Iranian strategy. They planned by the end of 2018 to have up to 100,000 Shi’ite fighters in Syria. They were bringing them in from Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. They built intelligence bases on the Golan Heights [along Israel’s border] and simultaneously built wings at all the Syrian air force bases and brought in civilians to begin a process of indoctrination in schools and population centres.”
Attacking the Iranians head-on was not an easy decision. Eisenkot believed the plan would work and the repercussions would not be severe since “the Iranians chose the wrong playing field” by trying to entrench themselves in Syria, just across from Israel’s border. “We have intelligence superiority in this area. We enjoy complete aerial superiority, a strong deterrence.”
At the time, Iran had just over 20,000 men under its command in Syria, including 3,000 of its Quds Force, 10,000 Shi’ite militia members and 8,000 Hezbollah fighters.
Eisenkot presented his plan to the cabinet, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, telling them: “We don’t have a choice. If we prefer short-term considerations of keeping the quiet, we will pay a price in the long term.” His plan was approved unanimously.
Most of the attacks on Iranian targets in Syria were airstrikes, but they also included ground-based missiles and raids by special forces. Some of the explosions across Syria were reported in the media. But Israel rarely took responsibility for them at the time.
To avoid giving the Iranians a reason to retaliate, care was taken to avoid harming Iranian personnel, targeting only infrastructure. The general estimated that “only a few dozen Iranians were killed in the attacks”.
The Iranians, of course, knew who was attacking them, but Israel, by not taking responsibility “allowed them an area of deniability”. But on February 10 last year, the Iranians launched a retaliatory, explosive-laden drone into Israeli airspace. Apache attack helicopters shot it down.
It was the first time Iran had attacked Israel directly, rather than through its proxies — notably the Lebanese Shi’ite militia Hezbollah. Israel retaliated by hitting the Syrian airbase from where the drone had been launched with a series of airstrikes. This time it did not try to avoid casualties.
“We killed 10 Iranians — the most senior of them was a colonel [in the air wing of the Revolutionary Guards],” the general said. “Following this the Iranians decided to retaliate and attack northern Israel. We identified on May 8 serious preparations for a missile attack, led by Quds Force.”
Israeli operations prevented some of the missiles from being launched, and when the Iranians fired their remaining rockets the next night, most fell short of Israel’s borders. Four missiles that entered Israeli airspace were intercepted and destroyed. Israel then launched airstrikes against 80 Iranian targets in Syria.
Israel has declared that rather than taking sides in the Syrian civil war it is preventing the entrenchment of Iran across its border. Eisenkot acknowledged for the first time, however, that Israel had supplied rebel groups in the border area with light weapons “for self-defence”.
Israel was a hidden player on a crowded Syrian battlefield. The US-led coalition against Isis, which includes British Tornado and Typhoon fighters, was carrying out bombing missions each day, and the Russian military, which had arrived in Syria in September 2015 to prop up the Assad regime, controlled much of the airspace.
“We operated in an area controlled by the Russians, sometimes attacking targets a kilometre or two from Russian positions,” said Eisenkot, who flew to Moscow with Netanyahu in 2015 to meet President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s military chiefs. The plan was to ensure Israel could continue operating in Syria.
Eisenkot’s enemy counterpart was the Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, the shadowy commander of Quds Force and all Iranian external military and clandestine operations.
Soleimani “saw an opportunity to further Iran’s regional interests”, said the general. It was the normally cautious Soleimani who decided to reinforce the Iranian and Shi’ite forces in Syria and build permanent bases there.
Eisenkot believes that now there is a shared interest in reining in the Iranians. “Bashar al-Assad [the Syrian president] needed them when he had his back against the wall and now he doesn’t need them.” Israeli intelligence believes that Iran has invested about $16bn in propping up Assad — not out of love for him but as part of a regional strategy of creating a “Shi’ite crescent” stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean. But unlike other countries involved, the Shi’ites in Syria are a small minority, representing only 4% of the population. “We identified Syria as the weak link, where we could cut the Shi’ite crescent,” Eisenkot said.
Favouring this was the power struggle in Iran between the Revolutionary Guards faction, led by Soleimani, who is exporting the Islamic revolution, and the more moderate faction led by President Hassan Rouhani, who wants to invest in the tottering economy rather than wars abroad. For the time being, though, Israel’s war in the shadows continues, even if Soleimani may have abandoned plans for permanent bases in Syria.
Last week, Israel attacked and blew up an Iranian listening post that had been built near its border on the Golan Heights. Its main concern now is that Iran will revert to working with proxies, upgrading the capabilities of Shi’ite militias, in Lebanon and Iraq, to fire accurate missiles at Israel.