Israel continues to launch hundreds of attacks daily against what is left of the Syrian military of ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad in what Israel’s Army Radio called the biggest attacks against Syria since the Six-Day War in 1967.
As Breitbart News reported on Monday, the Israel Air Force (IAF) had carried out hundreds of attacks on Syrian military hardware in the wake of the rebel ouster of the Assad regime. Israel targeted the Syrian air force, as well as air defenses, missile stockpiles, chemical weapons sites, heavy weaponry, and other targets. Those attacks continued overnight into Tuesday, with Israeli airstrikes destroying the Syrian navy in its docks on the Mediterranean Sea.
Army Radio’s military correspondent Doron Kadosh said Tuesday — with a sense of bewilderment — that the goal appeared to be “to completely erase Assad’s military” so that it cannot threaten Israel and cannot fall into rebel hands.
Syria was once considered incredibly difficult to attack via air, due to the fact that it cannot be approached by flying low to avoid radar. Damascus is protected from the west by the Anti-Lebanon mountain range, including Mount Hermon, which requires Israeli aircraft to climb to high altitude before crossing into Syrian territory. Past attacks typically took advantage of cloud cover and ran the risk of being detected by radar and surface-to-air-missile systems.
However, the Assad regime was considerably weakened by the civil war, and Israel enjoyed greater freedom over Syrian airspace in recent years, bombing supply lines to Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as Iranian military targets.
Since the toppling of the regime, and the retreat of Iranian forces, Israel has enjoyed complete license over Syrian skies, and is attacking what is left of the Syrian military — and Iran’s forward air defenses — without any opposition.
Israel’s actions recall the advice of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in 2021, after President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, when Trump said the U.S. should bomb its abandoned military equipment rather than seeing it fall into the hands of the Taliban, where it could be used by Islamic terrorists or given to China or Russia.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
