Israeli Special Forces Assassinated Senior
Syrian Official
By Matthew Cole
July 15, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"The
Intercept" - On Aug. 1, 2008, a
small team of Israeli commandos entered the waters near
Tartus, Syria, and shot and killed a Syrian general as he
was holding a dinner party at his seaside weekend home.
Muhammad Suleiman, a top aide to the Syrian president, was
shot in the head and neck, and the Israeli military team
escaped by sea.While Israel has
never spoken about its involvement, secret U.S. intelligence
files confirm that Israeli special operations forces
assassinated the general while he vacationed at his luxury
villa on the Syrian coast.
The internal National Security Agency
document, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden,
is the first official confirmation that the assassination of
Suleiman was an Israeli military operation, and ends
speculation that an internal dispute within the Syrian
government led to his death.
A top-secret entry in the NSA’s internal
version of Wikipedia, called Intellipedia, described the
assassination by “Israeli naval commandos” near the port
town of Tartus as the “first known instance of Israel
targeting a legitimate government official.” The details of
the assassination were included in a “Manhunting Timeline”
within the NSA’s intelligence repository.
According to three former U.S.
intelligence officers with extensive experience in the
Middle East, the document’s classification markings indicate
that the NSA learned of the assassination through
surveillance. The officials asked that they not be
identified, because they were discussing classified
information.
The information in the document is labeled
“SI,” which
means that the intelligence was collected by monitoring
communications signals. “We’ve had access to Israeli
military communications for some time,” said one of the
former U.S. intelligence officers.
The former
officer said knowledge within the NSA about surveillance of
Israeli military units is especially sensitive because the
NSA has Israeli intelligence officers working jointly with
its officers at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.
Brig. Gen.
Suleiman was a top military and intelligence adviser to
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, and was suspected of being
behind the Syrian government’s efforts to facilitate Iran’s
provision of arms and military training to Hezbollah in
neighboring Lebanon. Suleiman
was also reported to have been in charge of the security and
construction of Syria’s Al Kibar nuclear facility, which
Israel destroyed in a 2007 air attack. The NSA document
described part of Suleiman’s responsibilities as “sensitive
military issues.”
Israel’s involvement in Suleiman’s
assassination raises questions about both the purpose of the
killing, as well as whether Israel violated international
law in conducting the operation.
“The Israelis may have had many good
reasons to kill [Suleiman],” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a
professor of international law at Notre Dame. “But under
international law it’s absolutely clear that in Syria in
2008, they had no rights under the laws of war because at
the time there was no armed conflict. They had no right to
kill General Suleiman.”
The Assad government withheld news of the
assassination for four days before announcing Suleiman’s
death. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its
involvement.
According to a classified State Department
cable published online by WikiLeaks, the Syrian
government’s investigation into the killing turned up $80
million in cash in Suleiman’s home. “[Assad] was said to be
devastated by the discovery, and, fearing [Suleiman] had
betrayed him, redirected the investigation from solving his
murder to finding out how the general had acquired so much
money,” the cable noted.
Last year, Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah told journalists that the Israeli government
killed Suleiman, and that the assassination was “linked” to
Suleiman’s role in the July 2006 war between Israel and
Hezbollah.
“For them it’s not only payback, but
mitigates future operations,” said one of the retired
intelligence officers, who has worked with the Israelis but
does not have direct knowledge of the Suleiman
assassination. “They will take a target of opportunity if it
presents itself.”
The Israeli assassination of Suleiman came
less than six months after a joint Mossad-CIA team
assassinated a top Hezbollah operative in the heart of
Damascus, according to several current and former U.S.
military and intelligence officials. U.S. and Israeli
involvement in that attack, which targeted Hezbollah
operative Imad Mughniyeh, was first reported in detail by
the
Washington Post. The CIA had long sought Mughniyeh
for his role in several terrorist attacks against Americans,
including the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut,
Lebanon, which left 241 American service members dead.
The NSA declined to comment. A
spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister did not respond
to several requests for comment.