Israeli Air Raid on Syria, September 6, 2007

Summary: On September 6, 2007, Israeli warplanes bombed a military facility in northern Syria. Unconfirmed news reports at the time said the target was part of a Syrian nuclear program being developed with help from North Korea. Syria said the target had been an empty building, but initially refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the site. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in a New Yorker article published in February 2008 said there was no evidence of nuclear activity at the site and suggested the raid might have been a message to Syria or to Iran, and/or a test by Israel of a new Syrian antiaircraft system. The United States said in April 2008 that the target in Syria had been a nuclear facility and released photographs that it said had been taken inside the building. In November 2008 Reuters news agency quoted diplomats as saying the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors had found small traces of uranium at the site and planned further investigations, adding credence to U.S. and Israeli claims.

Date: September 6, 2007.

Place: Northern Syria, near the Turkish border.

The Incident

Israeli warplanes bombed a building in a remote area of northern Syria near the Turkish border without explaining the attack. News reports at the time speculated that Syria might have been engaged in developing nuclear weapons at the site. Neither Israeli nor Syrian officials provided any further details about the attack.

Afterwards Syria leveled the site and refused to let inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) examine the area for possible evidence of radioactive materials. Official Syrian statements about the site varied. Some statements said Israel had bombed an unused military building. A Syrian press briefing insisted it was the site of a non-military research institute. Syria lodged a protest at the United Nations but did not pursue its complaint.

Israel also refused to provide any official explanation or description of the incident. Western press reports indicated that Israeli military censors had quashed press coverage.

North Korea denounced the air raid without making explicit its reason for having spoken up.

Press reports shortly after the raid, quoting unnamed U.S. and Israeli government sources, offered different possible explanations for the attack. Some reports suggested the Syrian facility--described as about the shape and size of a North Korean nuclear reactor-- may have involved development or use of nuclear materials possibly shipped to Syria from North Korea. Other reports said the building could have been involved in missile technology being supplied to Syria by North Korea.

On September 14, 2007, the Associated Press quoted Andrew Semmel, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for nuclear nonproliferation, as saying that Syria may have several "secret suppliers" for a secret nuclear program, and that North Korea could be one of them.

The U.S. Briefing in 2008

On April 24, 2008, seven months after the raid, the White House issued a detailed statement accusing Syria of building "a covert nuclear reactor in its eastern desert capable of producing plutonium … not intended for peaceful purposes." The statement said in part:

Today, administration officials have briefed select Congressional committees on an issue of great international concern. Until Sept. 6, 2007, the Syrian regime was building a covert nuclear reactor in its eastern desert capable of producing plutonium. We are convinced, based on a variety of information, that North Korea assisted Syria's covert nuclear activities. We have good reason to believe that reactor, which was damaged beyond repair on September 6 of last year, was not intended for peaceful purposes. Carefully hidden from view, the reactor was not configured for such purposes. In defiance of its international obligations, Syria did not inform the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the construction of the reactor, and, after it was destroyed, the regime moved quickly to bury evidence of its existence. This cover-up only served to reinforce our confidence that this reactor was not intended for peaceful activities."

News reports in April 2008 said the administration's briefing included a documentary-style video that contained still photographs of a nuclear reactor similar in design to one owned by North Korea. It also showed a photograph of the manager of the North Korean nuclear reactor at Yongbyon with the director of Syria's nuclear agency. Press reports said some of the photographs appeared to have been taken as early as 2002.

The U.S. briefing offered no evidence that Syria had, or was developing, a facility to convert nuclear fuel into weapons-grade material.

Context. The attack led to news reports quoting anonymous Israeli officials as saying the bombed facility had been dedicated to a Syrian nuclear power program that could have evolved into nuclear weapons development, and that North Korea may have been a key supplier of technology and materiel. Other reports quoted unnamed officials as saying the attack was meant to test an air defense system used by both Syria and Iran, and might have been a warning to Iran that Israel could attack Iran's acknowledged nuclear development program. Seven months after the attack the Bush administration briefed members of Congress on what it said was evidence of nuclear development at the plant. That briefing coincided with two related events: a disagreement between Washington and Pyongyang over whether North Korea was abiding by an earlier agreement to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and a report that Israel was nearing an agreement with Syria to resolve the long-standing Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights.

IAEA. The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammad ElBaradei, said in April 2008 that his agency would investigate the American allegations. He criticized Israel for bombing the site before the IAEA could inspect it. ElBaradei said he regretted that the United States had delayed release of its intelligence.

In November 2008, more than a year after the attack, the Reuters news agency quoted diplomats in Vienna as saying the IAEA had found minute traces of uranium from samples of material gathered at the site in June 2008. IAEA officials refused comment on the Reuters report, but they confirmed that IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei was preparing the agency's first formal written report on Syria, and that Syria was on the agenda of the IAEA's board of governors scheduled for November 27-28, 2008.

Syrian Denials. Syria consistently denied that the bombed facility was a nuclear reactor. On April 27, 2008, Qatar's al-Watan newspaper published an interview, conducted before the American briefing, with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in which he was quoted as saying: "The truth is that the raid was at a military site under construction." The Syrian ambassador to the United States said after the April 2008 briefing: "Why did they raid it, we do not know what data they had, but they know and they see through satellites; they have raided an incomplete site that did not have any personnel or anything. It was empty."

On October 9, 2007, Syria sponsored a closely monitored visit to the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Land, an agricultural research center near Deir Ez Zor, in eastern Syria, to demonstrate that no attack had taken place there. (An Israeli press report had suggested the research center was the target of the reported attacks.)

Background News reports. Press reports in the weeks after the Israeli air strike said that a North Korean ship had recently unloaded cargo labeled concrete that could have been nuclear material for the Syrian plant.

The New York Times reported on October 13, 2007, that the Israeli raid was "directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel" and that "Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state." The latter phrase put the reported raid in the context of Iran's insistence on enriching uranium as part of its plans to develop nuclear power, and an Israeli raid in 1981 against a nuclear reactor in Iraq shortly before it was scheduled to go online.

The Washington Post on October 25, 2007, quoted physicist David Albright, a former weapons inspector in Iraq, as saying he was persuaded Syria was trying to develop nuclear weapons at the site. Syria's refusal to allow United Nations nuclear weapons inspectors to examine the site added to such fears, as did Syria's actions in razing it clean.

A New York Times report in January 2008 noted that a new facility, evidently a warehouse, had been built over the site.

The Hersh Report. In February 2008 investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a lengthy report on the September raid in The New Yorker. His report said there was no record of the Al Hamed, the ship alleged to have delivered secret material to Syria, having passed through the Suez Canal. Hersh also quoted some atomic weapons experts as saying the building was not tall enough to accommodate nuclear enrichment facilities of North Korean design, and that there had been no security facilities around the bombed building.

Related Context. The Israeli bombing came in the context of several related issues:

The refusal of Iran to discontinue its program of enriching uranium despite strong international pressure to do so. Some reports of the Israeli raid suggested it was meant to test Syrian air defenses that were said to resemble those of Iran, or to serve as a warning that Israel would not tolerate a nuclear weapons program by Tehran. In 1981 Israel unilaterally bombed an Iraqi nuclear facility.

The April 2008 American revelations about the site in Syria came shortly after bilateral talks resumed between the United States and North Korea on American allegations that North Korea had not yet fully disclosed where it had sent nuclear materiel. Such disclosures were part of the continuing six-nation (North Korea, the United States, China, Russia, South Korea, and Japan) talks about the terms under which North Korea would dismantle its nuclear programs.

News reports in April said that Israel and Syria had made progress in resolving the conflict over the Golan Heights--Syrian territory captured by Israel in 1967. Such a resolution could lead to a permanent peace treaty between the two countries. According to a report in the New York Times on April 24, 2008, former President Jimmy Carter said the Bush administration was discouraging Israel from continuing the talks with Syria, partly because of Syria's cooperative relations with Iran in the context of the war in Iraq. The indirect Israeli-Syrian peace talks, conducted with assistance from Turkey, effectively came to an end in mid-2008 after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he would resign in the wake of an unrelated political scandal. New parliamentary elections were scheduled for February 2009, leaving the talks between Damascus and Jerusalem on hold at least until then.

In October 2008 the United States conducted a commando raid on a village four miles inside Syria near the Iraqi border. Their target was the leader of a network that supplied foreign fighters into Iraq.

Bibliography

Ben-David, Alon. "Israeli attack on Syria linked to secret facility." Jane's Defence Weekly 44:48 (September 19, 2007) 1p. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=26821497&site=isc-live

Ephron, Dan, et al. "The Whispers of War." Newsweek. 150:14 (October 1, 1007) 5p. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tsh&AN=26715891&site=isc-live

Hersh, Seymour. "A Strike in the Dark." The New Yorker. February 8, 2008. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/11/080211fa%5Ffact%5Fhersh

Kessler, Glenn and Robin Wright. "Israel, U.S. Shared Data on Suspected Nuclear Site." Washington Post. September 21, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/20/AR2007092002701.html

Mahnaimu, Uzi, Sarah Baxter, and Michael Sheridan. "Israelis 'Blew Apart Syrian Nuclear Cache.'" Sunday Times (London). September 16, 2007. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle%5Feast/article2461421.ece

Mazzetti, Mark and Helene Cooper. "Israeli Attack Points to Possible North Korean and Syrian Nuclear Ties." International Herald Tribune. September 18, 2007. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/18/news/nukes.php

Mazzetti, Mark and Helene Cooper. "Israeli Nuclear Suspicions Linked to Raid in Syria." New York Times. September 18, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/world/asia/18korea.html

Myers, Steven Lee and Steven Erlanger. "Bush Declines to Life Veil of Secrecy Over Israeli Airstrike on Syria" The New York Times September 21, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/washington/21prexy.html?fta=y