Israeli strikes destroy Syria’s weapons of war as ousted Assad laments country’s fall into ‘hands of terrorism’

Damascus – A CBS News team drove through a Syrian military air base on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on Monday, and the devastation caused by Israeli airstrikes was quite evident. Israel has said it is determined to destroy weapons and other military hardware ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad and his father spent half a century accumulating before it can fall into the hands of extremists.

The Israeli military has been pounding Syrian military infrastructure relentlessly since Assad fled to Russia earlier this month – forced out of a shock rebel offensive after a decade of civil war that until about two weeks ago had largely amounted to an apparent stalemate.

The damage to Assad’s old war machine has been staggering. An overnight attack in the coastal city of Tartus, for example, was so massive that the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights quoted a scientist in Turkey as saying it had registered on the Richter scale as equivalent to a Category-3 earthquake.

Until Moscow’s ally Assad fled Syria, Russia maintained its only major naval base outside Russian territory at Tartus. Satellite images (below) showed that most of the Russian ships disappeared from Tartus port soon after Assad’s fall, but the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday that it was still figuring out what to do with its military hardware and personnel in the country, in negotiations with the country’s new de-facto rebel rulers.

Israel’s military, meanwhile, says it has destroyed most of Assad’s heavy weapons and air defenses. In a statement on Monday, the Israeli Defense Forces said its warplanes had in recent days “inflicted serious damage on Syria’s most strategic weapons: fighter jets and helicopters, Scud missiles, UAVs, cruise missiles, precision-guided surface-to-sea missiles, land -air-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles, radars, rockets and more.”

The IDF said its strikes had destroyed “over 90% of the identified strategic surface-to-air missiles” of the ousted regime.

The lightning takeover of Syria a week ago by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al Sham, or HTS, has also seen Israeli forces carry out a ground incursion that extends past the occupied Golan Heights region into a previously demilitarized buffer zone inside Syria.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of HTS and Syria’s new de-facto leader, has criticized what he described as Israel’s “uncalculated military adventure”, saying that he and his group – which previously publicly distanced themselves from extremist ideology were an al-Qaeda affiliate – was more interested in state-building than opening another conflict with Israel.

The attack on Syria’s military sites has also revealed gross negligence on the part of Assad. Years of corruption and a decade of civil war had eroded the nation’s armed forces and contributed to the collapse of his regime. Much of the hardware his forces left behind when they surrendered to the rebels or simply threw away their uniforms and ran away is old and clearly in need of maintenance.

Assad’s office issued the first statement attributed to the ousted leader since he was forced to flee his country in the meantime. In it, he claims that he never considered resigning or fleeing, but that he sought shelter in the Russian-run air base at Hmeimim when the rebels closed in, and when that facility came under sustained drone attack, he says that an evacuation was ordered on December 8, the day after HTS rebels captured the capital, Damascus.

He said he eventually left for Russia because there was nothing else he could do in Syria, lamenting the country’s fall “into the hands of terrorism.”

The statement was sent to the Syrian presidency’s official channel on the Telegram messaging app, with a note that it had been published after several failed attempts to release it through Arab and international media. The statement was relatively quickly deleted from the Telegram channel, though without any explanation, before reappearing there and on the presidency’s Facebook page.

While the wider international community is still trying to figure out how to deal with HTS, which has said it will respect Syrians of all religions and appears determined to be seen as a secular interim administration – even if it is not have said what comes next for the country after a three-month transition period – Israel and the US have remained largely focused on securing Assad’s stockpiled weapons.

For Israel, it has meant the most ferocious airstrikes carried out in Syria in years, and they continued on Monday, just over a week after Assad’s sudden departure.

Whoever ends up in control of Syria will inherit a largely broken military infrastructure. Judging by the IDF’s statement on Monday, which claimed that its strike was “a significant achievement for the superiority of the Israeli Air Force in the region,” that may be exactly what was intended.