It has become almost routine: Not a week goes by without some foreign media reporting on an alleged Israeli strike against Syria. Usually, these attacks are under the cover of darkness to help Israeli aircraft, but also so as to minimize the potential harm to non-combatants. But they do happen in broad daylight as well because sometimes the intelligence is actionable only if it is acted upon immediately or if it is determined that Syria would get the message much more resoundingly if it were carried out during the day.
The Israeli public has become used to these reports, some of which are no longer reported in the Israeli media or just get minimal coverage. But the other side is very much engaged on this issue. It is true for Syria, where the strikes take out many of its assets, and it is true for Iran, which is perhaps the only reason for Israel's intense involvement in the northern arena and in Syria in particular.
The main objective of these reported attacks is to frustrate Iran's entrenchment in Syria through the militias it trains and arms, as well as to interdict the weapon shipments to its proxies in the region – chiefly Hezbollah. These weapon deliveries are carried out in a two-pronged fashion. The first, using arms that are manufactured in Iran and then transported to Syria by air, land, or sea, and from there to Lebanon. Israel has reportedly attacked these routes hundreds of times in recent years: through targeting Iranian naval vessels or by hitting the long overland route stretching from Iran to Syria; as well as by attacking aircraft, airfields, and hangars where arms were stored after arriving from Syria via official or disguised flights.
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The systematic attacks have cost Iran dearly and derailed its plans to arm Hezbollah with a massive amount of precision-guided munitions to the point it would have been able to set up a Hezbollah-like military force within Syria that would challenge Israel's security from the Golan Heights. In order to overcome the difficulties posed by these strikes, Iran has adopted an alternative method: using Syria's indigenous production capabilities for its own benefit, thus manufacturing the arms it needs or that its proxies in the region need. This has made the conveyance route shorter, and saved a lot of money in the process.
This has not been lost on Israel, and it has reportedly led to dozens of strikes against Syrian infrastructure and installations that are, according to foreign reports, under the auspices of The Scientific Studies and Research Center – Syrian military industries – better known for the French name Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Scientifiques. Defense Minister Benny Gantz hinted at this when he delivered a speech in New York recently in which he revealed that there are dozens of subterranean CERS centers that Syria has been using to manufacture advanced arms that could threaten Israel's security.
What he did not say in that speech, and which is now being revealed in this article, is that Iran has been engaged in this activity under Syria's nose, often without even coordinating it with the Syrian authorities. Senior members of the Revolutionary Guards have been paying CERS bigwigs and essentially have them work for Iranian projects to consolidate its presence on Israel's northern front. This has had Israel increase its strikes against this newly built Iranian apparatus. In fact, some of the most recent attacks attributed to Israel had several goals: to damage the manufacturing assets so that they are no longer usable or are rendered out of service for a long period; to make Syria stop Iran's activity on its soil or force it to scale it down; and to deter Iran. This campaign has reached the most intense point so far. Iran is determined to continue its course, despite the setbacks it had to endure in recent years in Syria and the loss of many of its assets; Syria has been continuously spineless and powerless in exercising its sovereignty, despite the heavy price of not countering Iran; and Israel is reportedly acting non-stop in order to preserve its qualitative edge in the region and reduce the threat posed on Israelis.
The institute that got French backing
CERS was built in the early 1970s as Syria's national scientific research body, which was tasked with the R&D and manufacturing of arms. It later got a special academy that trains engineers and scientists for its various fields. It is no coincidence that it got a French name; it's partially because of France's long-held influence over Syria but also because of Paris' direct involvement in establishing CERS and in personnel training in its infancy. Many of them were sent to France (as well as Russia) to get scientific proficiency and then returned home to Syria. It is doubtful that French officials knew what CERS was becoming or that they even cared. Today it is the body that can be described as having all of Israel's defense industries rolled into a single body. It deals with every aspect, from aerospace to electronics and computing and just regular arms. It is a massive entity that has thousands on its payroll in a variety of fields, whether as professional scientists or workers dealing with manufacturing.
CERS has come to the media spotlight because of its role in developing chemical weapons. Syria launched this effort in the hopes of offsetting Israel's strategic advantage over it with its alleged nuclear arsenal, intelligence capabilities, and air supremacy. Syria thought it could accumulate a massive amount of chemical warfare agents and mount them on a variety of weapon systems (from mortar bombs to missiles) with the hope that this would deter Israel from engaging in military adventures in the northern arena.
Chemical weapons were the crown jewel of CERS, especially nerve agents (including VX and sarin). These weapons were produced in a whole host of factories scattered across the country, both because this would increase production and as a means to protect them from foreign attacks. Israel monitored this project up close and considered it a strategic threat to its existence because Syria had accumulated more than 1,000 tons of chemical warfare agents that were a clear and present danger to the majority of Israelis.
This led Israel to successfully lobby the US to impose sanctions on CERS and some of its subsidiaries, but the Syrians stayed the course. Even as they continued with this project, CERS went on to manufacture a variety of weapon systems – from rockets and missiles to surface-to-air missiles and drones, ground warfare equipment and arms (including vests and helmets), and various electronic systems. The only area in which CERS was left in the dark was the atomic program. That was no coincidence: President Bashar Assad correctly assumed that Israel was keeping a watchful eye on CERS and that if it discovered that Syria was engaged in nuclear activity, it would attack it. That's why he chose a bypass route that was compartmentalized from CERS. This route was eventually exposed in 2007 and resulted in the Israeli strike that took out the secret nuclear reactor in Syria.
During its heyday, i.e. until the Syrian Civil War broke out, CERS could be found all over the country. It was considered a highly advanced body with very professional staff that dealt with matters with the know-how that only a handful of countries had. One of them was precision weaponry: It had the capacity to develop projectiles that could hit a target with a precision of a 10m (3 ft) radius. Israel has this knowledge too, and until a decade ago its enemies could only dream of such knowledge. Iran was very far away from this capability back then, but Syria was very close and was actively engaged in extending its ability to pinpoint every location in Israel with missiles.
When the civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, CERS had to divert its attention from the strategic buildup of weapons against Israel to arming the Syrian forces so that they could counter the rebels and protect the Assad regime. This turned the organization, its workers, and its facilities into a target for anti-Assad forces, who were of the belief that if they could disrupt its activities this would severely cripple Assad's war effort and create a major breach in its defenses.
As far as Israel was concerned, this was a welcome development. Rather than working on chemical warfare and long-range missiles that could hit with precision, CERS shifted to working on tactical weapons to cater to the immediate needs of the Syrian armed forces. The string of assassinations of its various senior officials also hampered its effectiveness, and the damage inflicted on its facilities forced Syria to introduce changes in how they operate, moving them closer together so that they could be more easily defended.
When the threat to the Assad regime became increasingly real, CERS began employing its know-how and capabilities in chemical warfare to help the regime fight the local population. Its began to manufacture chemical warfare agents in barrels, chlorine bombs, and other means that could kill many people all at once and terrorize the general public so that the regime is seen in awe. The Assad government carried out several attacks using these methods in 2013, especially by means of throwing agents from aircraft, all the while trying to hide this from the world so as to avoid sanctions.
The IDF Intelligence Directorate uncovered those attacks and tried to use them to convince the Obama administration to adopt a tough posture against the Assad regime. The US, which had warned that using chemical weapons would cross a red line that would get them involved in the war, dragged their feet and rolled their eyes. Then in August 2013, Syria used chemical weapons in an attack on rebels in Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, killing some 1,800 people. The US had no choice but to get involved.
Under the threat of military force, Assad had to get rid of his chemical warfare capabilities almost entirely. Rockets and missiles were dismantled; various chemical substances were taken out of Syria and destroyed. Syria was left with only a fraction of what it had, but it retained the know-how, and the experts continued to get paid and work on R&D.
As far as Israel is concerned, dismantling Syria's chemical weapon stockpile was a dramatic development, as Israelis no longer had to be given gas masks and budgets no longer had to be allocated to defend the population as a whole. But in recent years, intelligence has picked up a renewed interest in resuming its chemical weapon program using the very experts and know-how it had back in the day under CERS. At least in two cases, this led to attacks on facilities aimed at producing and storing substances. One of the attacks was supposedly carried out by Israel, and the other by a coalition of forces from the US, the UK, and France.
"As far as we are concerned this event has strategic significance, we are watching it very closely," a senior defense official told me. "If Syria, God forbid, resumes its systematic production of large quantities of chemical warfare agents, this will force us to engage in various processes - including early detection systems and bolstering the preparedness of the home front and decontamination methods. It's best if we don't reach that point."
The attacks may have taken some of the vital systems related to chemical warfare manufacturing out of service, but the senior official admits that they did not destroy the entire project. "There is one decisive strike that could end this once and for all," the official said. "This is an ongoing effort and we have to keep those systems in check all the time because this will help us avoid a much bigger problem in the future."
Institutes in the thousands
CERS reports to the Syrian defense minister, Ali Abbas, who reports to Assad. The head of CERS Is Khaled Nasri, who runs all of its operations. All the other institutes that manufacture various types of weapons, as well as the academy that trains the engineers, report to him.
Institute 1000 is responsible for developing and producing computer and electronic systems for Syria's chemical weapons program; Institute 2000 is responsible for mechanical development and production; Institute 3000 is responsible for the actual chemical and biological components, and Institute 4000 is in charge of developing aerospace and missile systems.. The first three institutes are headquartered in the Damascus region, while the fourth operates out of two areas: Damascus and the coast, with a major concentration of facilities in the city of Masyaf in northwestern Syria, to where many Aleppo-based installations were relocated because the city had been captured by rebels during the war.
Institute 4000 is of particular interest to Israeli analysts because that is where the precision missiles are manufactured on behalf of Iran. For this reason, it has been the target of most of the attacks that Israel reportedly carried out against CERS in recent years, especially in the Masyaf area. In this institute, various projects are carried out, from the production of missile engines to surface-to-air missiles, SCUD missiles, and M600 rockets, which pose perhaps the biggest threat to Israel. Over the past 15 years, Iran has transferred hundreds of such missiles to Lebanon, with warheads of varying sizes, in order to be able to inflict massive damage on Israel's heartland. However, over the past decade, the Iranian defense industries have made a quantum leap in terms of capabilities, especially on precision. The combination of technology that used to be only at the hands of superpowers but is not easily accessible as off-the-shelf products - such as GPS and drones - with the scientific breakthroughs the Iranians have achieved has allowed them to drastically bolster their capabilities on a host of fields, from precision-guided munitions and rockets to the production of cruise missiles and various drone, with ranges that could reach some 2,000 km (1242 miles).
The common thread to all this is the ability to carry a payload of explosives for a long distance and to strike the intended target with precision. As far as Iran and its underlings are concerned, this is a breakthrough. As far as Israel and the sane countries are concerned, this creates a headache of unprecedented proportions. Iran employed such drones during its 2019 attack on Saudi Arabia's oil installations. The precise hits of Iran's weapon systems surprised the West and made it clear that Iran has sophisticated know-how and that together with a daring operational posture, it can dramatically change the balance of power in the region.
Iran has been trying for years to share these capabilities with Hezbollah. At first, it shipped fully fabricated missiles to Lebanon, which were an easy target for Israel to take out. The next level saw Iran ship only the precision kits. These kits include a small guidance computer the size of an iPad that, together with flaps, get mounted on the M-600 missiles that Hezbollah already has, turning them into precision-guided munitions. Iran wanted to arm Hezbollah with thousands of such rockets so that it can strike every point in Israel. That would have been a seismic shift. Today most of the rockets Hezbollah has have statistical accuracy - they can strike the general area of Tel Aviv but not a specific target. If it got the precision Iran wants to give it, it would be able to inflict major damage on Israeli infrastructure, major buildings, airfields, and more.
Israel has viewed this as a strategic issue and that is why in recent years it has expanded so much effort to derail those shipments. Iran has realized that it has been exposed and compromised, and its efforts to transfer these kits to Lebanon have hit a snag. Looking for a solution it found an alternative method: it started employing the CERS rocket experts. The first stage involved Iranians producing the kits while the missile parts - the engine and the warhead - were manufactured for them by CERS. IN other words, Iran manufactured the high-tech, while Syria produced the low-tech.
Israel has been able to pick up this process and since 2017 it has managed to strike CERS facilities - according to foreign reports - dozens of times. These attacks have been aimed less at the large amounts of weapon systems, but more against the actual infrastructure of CERS. They are mainly designed to target the facilities and machinery that Syria would find hard replacing due to the sanctions on the regime since the start of the civil war. Some of the targets that have been hit include factories for the production of engines, casting of warheads, manufacturing of propellants and engine casings for missiles, as well as the centers for research and development.
These attacks were not just any attacks. They are the product of pinpointed intelligence and rigorous analysis. The intelligence collection is conducted jointly by the IDF and Mossad in a variety of ways. The analysis it carried out almost exclusively by the IDF Intelligence Directorate, especially its Technology Section, where the experts study every aspect of the manufacturing and buildup of weapons in every arena. They are tasked with creating an intelligence picture that serves all security agencies and the IDF so that Israel can remove threats and preserve a strategic and military edge on all fronts. In others, to degrade the enemies and upgrade Israel.
Saving Assad
Assad Diab heads Sector 4 at CERS. Kheydar Hamdan is the chief of security at the Institute 4,000. The two have been forging ties with senior members of Iran's Qods Force (the organization within the Revolutionary Guards tasks with exporting Iranian influence, including through military means and terrorism). The Iranian official who used to run things with those two individuals, Aziz Asbar, was assassinated in 2018. His responsibilities are now handled by Ali Noruze, who is the head of the Technology and Logistics Division at the IRGC, and Abu Ali Masoud Nikhabat. The two are also directly engaged vis-à-vis Bassem Marej Hassan, Assad's close confidant.
Iran has been using their clout in Syria to its full. When the going got rough during the first few years of the Syrian Civil War, Iran and Hezbollah saved Assad. They invested billions of dollars and were willing to have many casualties on their side to further this goal, and now they seek their reward: a stake in rebuilding Syria's economy (where they are competing against the Russians), and access to Syria's facilities so as to consolidate their power through Shiite militias that could serve as a springboard to arm Hezbollah.
Syria is not too keen on granting Iran's wishes, but it is in a box. Assad and his cronies are indebted to Tehran and cannot easily free from its grip. They need the money Iran has been pouring into Syria in its effort to influence Israel's northern front. It has found it even more difficult to counter the ties Iranian senior officials have forged with practically every Syrian power center.
According to Israeli officials, the ties between the Revolutionary Guards and CERS upper echelon have not been sanctioned by Assad and his defense ministers. "Iran knows how to close deals and secure understandings without the Assad regime's involvement," a senior Israeli official told me. "Assad is hardly aware of what is going on; he is being fed lies by his people. Sometimes I know more than him about what happens in his backyard. Even when he realizes what is unfolding, he is in a conflict of interest: On the one hand, he doesn't want it to happen, on the other hand, he needs Iran and has to pay them back. Syria is paying dearly for this. Had they not given Iran such free reign, their interests would not have been so badly hit (by alleged Israeli strikes – Y.L).
Captain Nitzan, 30, is the head of the Northern Branch at the Technological Intelligence Department in the IDF Intelligence Directorate's Production and Analysis Division. He knows the projects in Syria like the back of his hand, as well as those run by Hezbollah in Lebanon. "There is a small group of directors and engineers at CERS who have been taking orders from Iran," he tells me. "They are lead by Assed Diab, the head of CERS' Sector 4, who is the direct liaison to Iran, even if this means engaging in activity that runs against the interest of CERS."
Some of the engineers, according to Nitzan, have two kinds of shifts: a day shift where they work for CERS and a night shift that is dedicated to serving the Iranians. "This is a local initiative on the part of Sector 4, carried out without approval from above. Diab gives the orders to his people and they carry them out. Some know what's going on, but others are left in the dark. We are talking about several dozen people that work with the Iranians, especially engineers, mostly people with military experience who want to get some extra sources of income."
The funds get transferred from Iran to Diab, who then pays his people for their work. Iran is mainly interested in missiles that are designed for precision kits, which get smuggled from Iran and mounted on them. Almost all the Hezbollah-held missiles have a Syrian serial number that indicates that they were manufactured by CERS. One such projectile hit the Haifa service station for Israel Railway during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, killing 8.
Several dozen missiles are produced on behalf of Iran each year, with each one designed to strike a high-profile target in Israel. A rough estimate suggests that the alleged Israeli strikes in recent years on CERS have probably destroyed several hundred of these missiles. The totality of the attacks attributed to Israel could imply that thousands of various weapon systems and arms, mainly rockets and missiles, were destroyed.
Hard work that requires professional training
First Lieutenant May, 22, is the head of the Surface-to-Surface MIssile research unit in the Technological Intelligence Unit. Israel is probably the only country where you see such a young woman deal with such a complex issue that requires the processing of so much intelligence and knowledge, which ultimately lead to precision strikes by the air force to frustrate enemy plans. "Our mission is to understand every phase of this process: Where each component is produced; what critical bottlenecks would be hard to replicate; and then find a way to damage them."
The damage could be by striking a certain facility or a specific machine, and sometimes by targeting people who are believed to be sources of know-how. This requires meticulous work and a very clear understanding of the subject matter and sophisticated knowledge. Every success leads to the removal of potential threats on Israel, and every miss could lead to the dangerous buildup of capabilities by the enemy. After every attack there is a very rigorous analysis of the operation to conduct a battle damage assessment and try to gauge what the Syrians and Iranians could restore and how quickly. "Fortunately, they are struggling to get things up and running again [after an attack] and their industry is slow to move, but the threat still exists," Nitzan says.
This whac-a-mole between Israel and Iran – and by extension Syria - has recently seen a major development. After a series of alleged Israeli strikes that led to extensive damage to CERS-related facilities (especially in the missile project in Masyaf), the Iranians started building underground facilities that involved a tunnel system where the work could be relocated to. Israel has already made it clear (including in a recent speech by Defense Minister Benny Gantz) that they would also be on Israel's target list, even if that leads to more casualties and collateral damage in Syria.
As part of these concealment efforts, missile engine manufacturing has shifted to those tunnels, as has the production of warheads. "These processes have pulled Syria even more into Iran's orbit, as the latter has been funding most of this work, and therefore also controls it," Nitzan says.
"Syria wants to return to the glory days of having CERS be a leading and independently run institution, but today it is too shackled by Iran. Some 10 years ago, Iran was no match to Syria on precision technology, but today Damascus gets most of its know-how from Tehran," he continues.
May notes that the attacks have severely crippled CERS. "The projects are being cut short, work is suspended because machines or people are hit. They have to work in a state of uncertainty. People arrive for work in the morning only to discover that their office or lab had been destroyed overnight. In case where projects continue, sometimes the quality is hurt and sometimes they have to cut corners in order to meet the demands stipulated by Iran in the contracts so that the missiles get delivered on time, and as a result, the weapon systems are not as effective."
Despite all this, Iran is determined to stay the course. According to intelligence obtained by Israel, Iran and CERS officials have already resolved to continue with the production efforts down the road. Some of these understandings have been cemented in contracts as well, others were concluded in a handshake agreement, but the goal is to manufacture dozens of missiles over the next few years and then have them transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel is worried that this collaboration will take off if a new nuclear deal is concluded between Iran and the West, which would open the spigot for massive amounts of cash to Iran from assets that are currently frozen due to sanctions. Iran also might rake-in windfall profit from exporting oil, which would allow it to invest heavily in its spheres of influence in the region, from Yemen to Iraq and Syria, as well as in Lebanon through Hezbollah and in Gaza through the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (and to a lesser extent Hamas)/.
Iran plans to arm its overseas militias with copious amounts of precision-guided munitions, from rockets and missiles to various types of drones that could have varying degrees of range. This, it hopes, would increase its regional influence and create deterrence against its rival - chiefly among them Israel. As far as Israel is concerned, this threat is real, and it's questionable if it can be successfully countered over the long haul. A senior official conceded that in light of the technological advancements the world is seeing, "Israel's challenge is on the same level as trying to deny a country cellular coverage." In other words, the official believes Iran would be able to get whatever sophisticated devices it needs on the free market, which would lead to a quantum leap in the capabilities of terrorist groups. "Iran has also been indigenously producing these systems and has its own advanced capabilities that it is determined to spread in large quantities," the official said.
The challenge for Israel is to try and have this threat kicked down the road as far away as possible before it could result in major damage to Israel in the next war. It includes targeting the entire supply network in Iran and in Syria to stall, prevent and disrupt the negative developments until such time as Israel has the means to counter them, such as a laser-based interceptor and other advanced technology. "We are playing for time," the official concluded. "We may not succeed in disrupting these efforts forever, but for the time being we have the upper hand, and our mission is to make sure this continues."
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