The base at Abu al-Duhur had been dead for thirteen years. Wrecked in the Syrian war, out of service since 2012, its runways cratered and its hangars stripped, it sat in Idlib province about 60 kilometers from the Turkish border, useful to no air force. On the night of August 18 eight Israeli missiles fell on it. Israel said it had struck to stop Turkish troops from moving in.
Six days before the strike, Israel had gone to Washington with the same warning. Its intelligence, it said, indicated there might be Turkish movement into the airfield. The Americans took the warning and ran it down through their own agencies. Tom Barrack, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Ankara and his envoy for Syria, described what came back. “We all did our due diligence. We went back to our respective intelligence agencies. The answer we got is, no, that’s not happening.”
Click here to read more: Baiting Turkey: Israel's Strategy in Syria - Antiwar.com
No comments:
Post a Comment