Killed Syrian Aide Gave Anti-Aircraft Missiles to Hizbullah

Article Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com (uploaded with permission)

By: Hana Levi Julian


Top Syrian presidential aide Brigadier-General Mohammed Suleiman,
assassinated at the beginning of this month, reportedly supplied
Hizbullah terrorists with the advanced SA-8 anti-aircraft missile
system, according to The Times of London.

Suleiman, 49, was a key person in President Bashar Assad’s regime,
“more important than anyone else” according to the London-based Al-Sharq al-Awsat
newspaper. In a report published last week, the newspaper called
Suleiman “senior even to the defense minister,” and said, “He knew
everything.”

As operations officer, Suleiman was responsible for national
security, and for the security of Assad’s regime. He was also linked to
Syria’s dealings with North Korea and Iran, as well as the alleged
nuclear facility that was destroyed on September 6, 2007 in a remote
section in the northeastern corner of the country. Suleiman was also
Syria’s main liaison to Hizbullah.

That all ended when he was quietly killed at dawn on August 2 by a
single bullet to the head as he sat in the garden of his summer home
near the port city of Tartus in the north. Writing in The Sunday Times,
journalist Uzi Mahnaimi noted, “Nobody heard the shot, which appears to
have been fired from a speedboat by a sniper, possibly equipped with a
silencer. The expertise required to execute such a long-distance sniper
murder has led suspicion to fall upon the Israelis.”

A spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, however, that
Israel had “no direct knowledge and no comment” on the assassination.

During the prime minister’s visit to Paris last month, sources in
Jerusalem said Olmert asked French President Nicolas Sarkozy to warn
Assad that Syria was “crossing a red line” by sending weapons to the
terrorist group in Lebanon.
Last week the Security Cabinet received the latest intelligence
report on Syria’s weapons deliveries to Hizbullah – including
information on the SA-8.

The system supplied to Hizbullah by Suleiman may have been the
inspiration for the group’s announcement last week that it would soon
“stop Israeli fighter planes flying over our land.”

The Russian-made SA-8 Gecko (Russian designation 9K33 “Osa”)
surface-to-air missile system was originally developed in the late
1960s. It is a highly mobile, low-altitude, short-range tactical
system, the first mobile air defense missile system to incorporate its
own engagement radars on a single vehicle.

It is slaved to a fully amphibious, six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle
(9A33 TELAR) steered by both the front and rear wheels, able to drive
up a 60% gradient. The individual SA-8 vehicles are also equipped with
their own targeting, tracking, launching and guidance systems.