Last Thursday, a day after Americans were nursing Fourth of July hangovers, tracking the Trayvon Martin case at home, or the fallout from the coup in Egypt, mysterious explosions occurred at a weapons depot in the Mushayrafet al-Samouk district of the Syrian coastal city of Latakia. Fighter jets were reportedly seen over the nearby city of Al-Haffah, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights quoted residents in Latakia who claimed missiles fired from unknown locations were responsible for the blasts. The Observatory also said that several Syrian troops were killed and wounded.
Qassem Saadeddine, the spokesman for the Supreme Military Command (SMC) of the Free Syrian Army, told Reuters yesterday: "This attack was either by air raid or long-range missiles fired from boats in the Mediterranean." The only plausible party responsible would therefore be Israel.
Regime media have kept silent about what happened beyond saying that a "series of explosions" were reported at the site. Hezbollah's Al-Manar, meanwhile, citing a "military source," claimed that the explosions were caused by rockets or missiles launched from a different army base; this one close to a village some 20 kilometers north of Latakia.
One Syrian war expert told me that the reported blast seemed "too small" to be another Israeli raid, and anyway, the Salafist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham has been pounding Latakia for quite some time. Many rebels outside of the SMC's office, which thinks "everything is Israel," tend to believe that militants from this outfit were in fact responsible, though the source added that this could just be idle boasting.
As against the massive IAF bombings of Iranian weapons caches deep inside Damascus last May, the fiery aftermath of which was caught on video and uploaded instantly to YouTube, there's been no confirmed documentary evidence of what happened in Latakia last week. When asked about the incident on July 6, Israeli Defense Minister (IDF) Moshe Ya'alon claimed that Israel hasn't "intervened in the Syrian bloodshed in a long time." A month and a half ago is evidently a long time to Ya'alon, though he offered the cagey stock response to any question of Israeli responsibility for recondite military operations abroad: "We have set red lines in regards to our own interests, and we keep them. There is an attack here, an explosion there, various versions - in any event, in the Middle East it is usually we who are blamed for most." More intriguing is that Reuters quoted a "former senior Israeli security official" who confirmed that the area of Latakia hit was used to store Yakhont anti-ship missiles.
If Israel took the trouble to powder a consignment of SA-17 surface-to-air missiles, as it did last January in its first sortie in Syria since the conflict began, then it would certainly take the trouble to eliminate a warehouse full of Yakhonts, which would pose a clear threat to the Israeli navy and the transport of oil and gas tankers in the Mediterranean. The New York Times reported in May that a new consignment of these supersonic "ship killer" missiles, which can travel as far as 300 kilometers and evade air-defense and electronic countermeasures, had already been delivered to Syria. And The Wall Street Journal cited Israeli and Western intelligence officials who believed at the time that these missiles could easily be transferred to Hezbollah "within days." Note that this was before Assad's army, joined by irregular sectarian militias led by Hezbollah, retook Qusayr from the rebels, a strategically vital gateway in the Syria-Lebanon supply corridor.
