Israel Monitoring Syrian Long-Range Missile Tests


(IsraelNN.com) The military released classified information confirming that Israel has been monitoring recent Syrian missile tests. Included in the arsenal the Syrians are said to be testing are long-range missiles based on the Scud missile, of which
The Syrian missile batteries can target most key locations in Israel.
Damascus has approximately 1,000, as well as shorter-range rockets.

IDF officials revealed that the Syrian tests were detected by Israeli radar and missile defense systems. The Syrian missile batteries can target most key locations in Israel, either with the inaccurate Scuds or with more precise smaller surface-to-surface medium-range rockets and missiles.

The Scud missile, with a range of 300 to 700 kilometers (186-435 miles), can hit within Israel as far south from Syria as the Negev and Eilat. One version of the Iraqi Scuds fired at Israel during the first Gulf War in 1991, the Al-Hussein, had a maximum range of about 630 kilometers (391 miles); however, Iraq had reportedly developed a modified Scud called the Al-Abbas with a range of 800 kilometers (497 miles), if not more.

The Syrian arsenal is also believed to include chemical and biological warheads of Syria's own manufacture. In addition, there have been persistent, although unverified, reports that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent his army's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to Syria for safekeeping ahead of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. United Nations inspection teams regularly reported in the 1990s that the Iraqi regime had developed chemical and biological warheads for the Al-Hussein missiles, but these have not been definitively located.

Last month Defense Minister Ehud Barak told US Vice President Dick Cheney that "the number of missiles in the hands of Hizbullah has doubled, if not tripled, and that the range of the missiles has been extended. And this has been accomplished with the close assistance of the Syrians." In March, an anonymous source told the Associated Press that Hizbullah held new Iranian rockets capable of striking as far south as Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility in the Negev.

In response to the Syrian missile threat, the IDF has conducted exercises simulating a combined, multi-level Syrian-Lebanese-Iranian strike on the Israeli homefront.

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