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Dayr-a-Sawr in northeastern Syria
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| By Israel Insider staff November 2, 2007 |
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The September 6 raid over Syria was in fact carried out by the US Air Force, Al-Jazeera's Web site reported in Arabic Friday, quoting unnamed Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two strategic US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons executed the attack on a nuclear site under construction.
The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets only provided cover for the US fighter-bombers, which carried one tactical nuclear weapon apiece. The site was hit by one bomb and totally destroyed. The use of nukes might account for the fact that the suspected plant was effectively erased from the earth, with few if any traces remaining, according to satellite photos.
On October 28, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the cabinet that he had apologized to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan if the Israeli airplanes violated Turkish airspace during a strike on an alleged nuclear facility in Syria last month:"In my conversation with the Turkish prime minister, I told him that if Israeli planes indeed penetrated Turkish airspace, then there was no intention thereby, either in advance or in any case, to -- in any way -- violate or undermine Turkish sovereignty, which we respect."
It is now generally believed that the target of the September 6 raid was a partly constructed nuclear reactor in Dayr-a-Sawr in notheastern Syria. On October 17, Syria denied that one of its representatives to the United Nations told a panel that an Israeli air strike hit a Syrian nuclear facility and added that "such facilities do not exist in Syria."
If the facilities were wiped out by Israelis or Americans, that statement would be correct, in the present tense. However, a A UN document released by the press office paraphrased an unnamed Syrian representative as saying that a nuclear facility was indeed hit by the raid. The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, SANA later claimed that media reports, apparently based on a UN press release, misquoted the Syrian diplomat.
If the Al-Jazeera report is true, it would be the first use of nuclear weapons in the world for a non-test purpose since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
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