Israel faces up to threat of Russian missiles as Bashar says first ones have arrived
“What we need them to do,” he said of other rebel units, “is come to the outskirts of the city and attack the checkpoints so we can get routes in and out of the city.”
There was little immediate sign, however, of military relief or of a negotiated settlement that might end the fighting.
Harsh words from Moscow against the Syrian opposition’s insistence on Assad’s removal as a precondition for talks, and Russian criticism of Washington for considering a no-fly zone to help the rebels, underlined the geopolitical stakes in the war.
And an exchange of fire across the Turkish border on Thursday was a reminder that all Syria’s neighbours risk being sucked into a regional conflict.
Rebels at Qusair and others encircled near Damascus, who also appealed for reinforcements, face shortages of weapons. Fears of the Islamists in the rebel ranks have deterred western powers from supplying them, despite wanting to see Assad fall.
The result, after two years of fighting and more than 80,000 deaths, has been an increasingly sectarian stalemate in which Assad has lost control of swathes of territory but remains in power.
Taking back Qusair would help secure access from Damascus to the coastline populated by his minority fellow Alawites.
For the rebels, mostly drawn from the Sunni Muslim majority, Qusair secures supply lines from sympathisers in Lebanon and from further afield, notably Sunni-ruled states in the Gulf.
The rebel commanders at Qusair warned of dire consequences if help fails to arrive for men who have been fighting house to house for
over a week against a force armed with tanks and rocket-launchers and spearheaded by Lebanese fighters from Hezbollah, seasoned in a 2006 war against Israel.
“If all rebel fronts do not move to stop this crime being led by Hezbollah and Assad’s traitorous army of dogs,” said the statement, “we will soon be saying that there was once a city called Qusair.”
Shells were landing by the minute and the attackers seemed to be advancing more quickly after seizing a nearby air base.
Elsewhere, rebels blockaded in eastern suburbs of Damascus said Assad’s forces were “preparing to commit more massacres”.
ISRAEL could overcome advanced S-300 antiaircraft missiles if they were deployed in Syria but any strikes on the system would be difficult and risk alienating its supplier, Russia.
Israel has pledged to take preventive action, seeing a future Syrian S-300 as a “game-changing” threat to its own airspace as well as to the relative free rein with which it now overflies its northern foe and neighbouring Lebanon.
Experts agree that Israeli sabotage or open force to disrupt delivery by Russia is extremely unlikely – a view seemingly shored up by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s announcement yesterday that the first missiles had arrived.
That leaves Israel lobbying Moscow to slow down the shipment in the hope it would be overtaken and scrapped if Assad fell to the rebellion, while in parallel preparing counter-measures to neutralise the S-300 on the ground in Syria.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted national security adviser yaakov Amidror as warning European diplomats that Israel would “prevent the S-300 missiles from becoming operational”.
That may be achieved by ensuring Assad does not get the full system, experts say, or by disabling it militarily if he does. “The S-300 would be the pinnacle of Russian-supplied arms for Syria,” Colonel Zvika Haimovich, a senior Israeli air force officer, said. “Though it would impinge on our operations, we are capable of overcoming it.”
The Israelis excel in electronic warfare. In 1982, they “blinded” Soviet-supplied Syrian anti-aircraft units in Lebanon, then destroyed 19 of them without Israeli losses.
Similar technologies helped Israeli jets destroy a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007 and, this year, to hit Syrian targets on at least three occasions to prevent what intelligence sources called attempts to move advanced weaponry to Hezbollah.
A source close to Russia’s defence ministry agreed that the Israelis “likely have a million ways to combat the S-300 electronically”. But he questioned their feasibility because they had not been tested in war. “So, whether the S-300 would fail or not cannot be known”.
Robert Hewson, an IHS Jane’s analyst, predicted Israeli prowess would prevail in Syria while cautioning the S-300 would be the most formidable air defence system it had ever faced. “Israel has had nasty surprises before,” he said, noting its losses to the Soviet anti-aircraft missiles used by Syria and Egypt in the 1973 war.