During the night from Sunday to Monday, Israel very violently bombed military installations that belonged to the Syrian army. The airstrikes were carried out for six hours on the coastal city of Tartous, in western Syria, and targeted ammunition and surface-to-surface missile depots, causing an explosion such that it caused an earthquake of magnitude 3 on the Richter scale. The noise of the explosions was heard even in Lebanon.
A resident of the village of Bmalkah, 10 kilometers from the city, said: “It started shortly after midnight and continued until 6:00 am. It was like an earthquake. All the windows in my house exploded.” “The town didn’t sleep a wink all night. The children were crying. There are no windows left in the houses,” another resident explained to the AFP news agency.
These attacks are all the more worrying because they affected military infrastructure near the naval base that Russia has in the city of Tartus, a provocation aimed directly at that country. The Tartous base, a strategic position for Moscow, allows Russian forces to project into Africa and the Mediterranean. Evacuated a few days ago, it would be a major strategic setback for Russia if it were destroyed while the Kremlin tries to negotiate with the new regime to maintain its positions in Syria.
Since the fall of the Assad regime, Israel has opened a fourth front in Syria and is committed to methodically destroying the Syrian army’s reserves and equipment. As researcher Armenak Tokmakyan explains, “Israel’s main objective appears to be the destruction of Syria’s strategic capabilities, such as anti-aircraft missile systems, chemical weapons and local missile production, as well as the military infrastructure created by Hezbollah and “Iran. They appear to be taking the opportunity to inflict as much destruction as possible, ensuring that the future Syrian army will take decades to recover.”
While the Israeli regime has bombed Syria 473 times since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8, Israel has also expanded its control over the Golan Heights, colonized in 1967 and annexed in 1981. A colonial and illegal occupation from every point of view. On Sunday, Israeli authorities also announced that they wanted to double the population of Israeli colonies in the Golan Heights, to demographically reinforce their presence in these territories, thus announcing a new wave of colonization. 10 million euros have been allocated to the project and will finance the installation of new settlers.
Seeing in the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime a tactical opportunity to strengthen its positions in the Middle East, the State of Israel launched a campaign of mass destruction to permanently weaken Syrian military capabilities, while taking advantage of the situation to expand its colonial rule. These brutal attacks could cause further escalation in the region if they affect Russian interests, reinforcing the growing interconnection of the situation in the Middle East with the war in Ukraine.
As Israel continues its genocidal campaign in Gaza while strengthening its control in the West Bank and continuing its relentless aggression against Syria with complete impunity, the urgent mobilization of the Arab masses has rarely been of as much importance for Palestine as for Syria. Although the fall of Assad weakens the reactionary regimes in the region, which such as Egypt or Jordan support Israel, the mobilizations could expand their demands and cause the fall of other reactionary leaders, depriving the Israeli State of the support of its neighbors.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
