Agence France-Presse,
WASHINGTON (AFP): Speculation over the target of an Israeli air strike in Syria has deepened with weekend press reports highlighting a possible North Korean nuclear connection, or a “dry run” for an attack on Iran.
New accounts in US and British newspapers of the September 6 raid went much further than initial claims by US Pentagon officials, that the attack was a warning to Syria against rearming the extremist Hezbollah group in Lebanon.
The Washington Post quoted an unidentified US expert on the Middle East as saying the target was a northern Syrian facility officially described as an agricultural research center on the Euphrates River, near the Turkish border.
After interviewing Israeli participants in the mysterious raid, the expert “reported that the attack appears to have been linked to the arrival three days earlier of a ship carrying material from North Korea labeled as cement.”
“The expert said it is not clear what the ship was carrying, but the emerging consensus in Israel was that it delivered nuclear equipment,” the Post said Saturday.
Interviewed on Fox News Sunday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates refused to comment on the raid.
Neither would he confirm the veracity of leaked intelligence reports suggesting that North Korea may be helping Syria build a nuclear weapons facility.
“But all I will say is we are watching the North Koreans very carefully. We watch the Syrians very carefully,” he said.
If North Korea were flouting its UN obligations to disarm its nuclear program and Syria were pursuing weapons of mass destruction, “I think it would be a real problem,” Gates added.
Syria angrily denied as US “lies” suggestions that it was receiving nuclear material from North Korea, while the Stalinist state for its part said the reports were “groundless.”
In London, the Sunday Times quoted an Israeli source as saying the raid destroyed what could have been a “devastating Syrian surprise for Israel.”
“We've known for a long time that Syria has deadly chemical warheads on its Scuds (missiles), but Israel can't live with a nuclear warhead,” the source told the newspaper.
The New York Times, citing a US administration official, reported that Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria to take pictures of possible nuclear installations staffed by North Korean engineers.
“The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” the official said last week, according to the report.
North Korea could either be trying to evade UN inspections of its nuclear weapons program, or the material could be bound for Iran, the Sunday Times said.
Another British paper, the Observer, headlined its account Sunday: “Was Israeli raid a dry run for attack on Iran?”
It said the attack involved a flight through the airspace of Israel's ally Turkey by up to eight aircraft, including cutting-edge F-15s and F-16s equipped with 500-pound (227-kilogram) bombs and Maverick missiles.
Israel had shown that “if Syria's ally, Iran, comes close to acquiring a nuclear weapon, and the world fails to prevent it, either through diplomatic or military means, then Israel will stop it on its own,” the Observer said.
In keeping with an official wall of silence on the event, Israel's military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin told lawmakers Sunday he would not address the incident directly.
But he said the Jewish state had now recovered its “deterrent capability” following the 2006 war against Hezbollah, Israeli public radio reported.
