Overnight, Israel carried out air and sea strikes against an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ammunition dump on the Russian naval base at Khmeimim/Hmeimim, Syria. The attacks avoided Russian-manned facilities and were timed to coincide with the arrival of a suspected shipment of weapons from Iran by the sanctioned Qeshm Fars airline.
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Russian and IRGC air defense systems were used, but video demonstrates their ineffectiveness to attacks from air-launched and sea-launched weapons.
Shortly after the attack, Russia began evacuating diplomats and citizens from Lebanon and encouraged the 1.5 million Russians living in Israel to leave the country “while such opportunities exist.”
Israel followed up this attack with another one on an IRGC weapons depot on the Tadmur Airbase at Palmyra, Syria. Russian mercenaries operate this base.
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This unprecedented attack drives home just how serious Israel is about prosecuting its campaign to reduce the threat from Hezbollah and Iran, and how little power Russia has in the region.
No matter what Joe Biden wants, it will be shocking if Israel does not make a run at Iran’s nuclear capability because that is all that Iran has left. As I pointed out in a previous post, Iran had used Hamas and Hezbollah as proxies to attack Israel, and to deter Israel from attacking Iran; see Israel Hammering Iran’s Proxy Armies Sends a Clear Message to Tehran That the Rules Have Changed. The theory was that Israel would not strike Iran if that might cause simultaneous attacks by its two subsidized terrorist groups. That strategy is in ruins as Hamas is nearly eradicated and Hezbollah’s leadership has been gutted, and their weapons caches methodically demolished.
Iran’s fallback position will be to manufacture and test a nuclear weapon that the Obama administration assured us could never happen, no matter how many pallets of used, nonsequential small-denomination bills were sent there. Israel has to take some action against the nuclear threat. I expect that any military action against Iran’s nuclear weapons program will be accompanied by an array of non-kinetic attacks; think Stuxnet.
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Russia has a decision to make about its adventure in Syria. It has shown that it is unable to either prevent attacks on its areas of interest or to credibly defend those areas when they are attacked. By allying itself with Iran, its reputation is inextricably attached to Iran’s fate. If it continues to let IRGC thugs snuggle up to its facilities, inevitably, Russians are going to be killed, and then the Kremlin will have a whole new level of humiliation to contend with.