Syria’s air defense system is so weak along its northern and western borders that U.S. authorities are brushing aside Damascus’ demands that it must sign off on any U.S.-led airstrikes within its borders.
Walid al-Moallem, Syria’s foreign minister, has welcomed U.S. help to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria with airstrikes but only if Damascus is warned first and consents to the bombing plans.
President Obama has pledged to confront Islamic State wherever the group resides and is currently weighing whether to extend airstrikes in Iraq into Syria. He will lay out a detailed plan to confront Islamic State on Wednesday in a major address to the nation.
After spending three years calling for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down, Obama is in a quandary.
Any strike against Islamic State inside Syria would be difficult to executive without civilian casualties and would inevitably strengthen Assad’s hand because the group now controls extensive swaths of the country – especially in the northern and eastern areas.
Administration officials so far say they have done nothing to coordinate attacks against Islamic State with Damascus and have no intention to do so in the future.
A knowledgeable administration source also points out that the Assad regime will have a hard time controlling what the U.S. does in the northern and western areas of the country, Islamic State strongholds, because its air defense system there is weak and basically non-operable.
Since the uprising against Assad began in 2011, some Pentagon officials and military analysts have cited Syria’s extensive air defense systems as a reason to think twice about launching an air campaign.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last year said the U.S. has the capability to defeat the system but it would be a bigger challenge and require more resources than U.S.-led forces encountered in Libya in 2011 because Syria has five times more air defense systems with a much higher and longer range.
After Israeli planes managed to take out a suspected nuclear facility inside Syria in 2007, Assad bolstered his anti-aircraft capability with newer weaponry from Russia.
But that system didn’t prevent another Israeli strike in Syria in May 2013 on weapons bound for Hezbollah. More recently, it also did nothing to prevent a helicopter carrying a team of U.S. commandoes from the U.S. Army’s Delta Force from getting inside to try to rescue James Foley and other Islamic State-held Americans.
The Pentagon so far has been tight-lipped about how the team entered the country. Typically, covert operations using helicopters fly extremely low to avoid detection by air defense systems.
Activists on both sides of the Syrian conflict reported seeing what appears to be a U.S. surveillance drone over Raqqa, a city in Northern Syria and an ISIS stronghold, ABC News reported Monday.
A report by Rand’s Center for Middle East Public Policy released in 2013 said the Soviet Union manufactured the primary components of Syria’s air defense system and gave them to Syria in the 1970s. Since then, China and Russia have provided some updates but not the most modern systems the countries use themselves.
One of the report’s key findings concluded that “neutralizing the Syria air defense system would be challenging but manageable.”
Outside experts are harsher, saying over the past year Russia never delivered its latest air defense technology leaving the system out-of-date and poorly run.
“It’s very mediocre. They did buy some new technology after the ’07 strike but since the beginning of time, they’ve never showed the ability to use it properly,” said Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and an expert on Middle East politics and military affairs.
The Syrian military has always located the majority of surface-to-air missiles and its radar in the West and the South to protect against Israel. Since Islamic State has gained control of more areas in the north and east, more components have fallen out of Assad’s control.
“The radar stations out there have either been taken over by opposition groups or abandoned by the Syrian army,” Pollack said. “It’s safe to say that the radar net in the north and east has been further degraded by the loss of territory.”
Another air power expert who asked to remain anonymous says the Syrian military is notoriously bad about doing regular maintenance en old equipment and says the mountainous areas often mask aircraft entering Syrian airspace.
When President Obama was considering launching airstrikes against the Assad regime for using chemical weapons last year, U.S. authorities expected Russia to sell a much more advance S-300 air defense systems to them in response.
“There was a lot of talk that they were going to update with Russian missiles, but it hadn’t happened as of last summer,” the expert said.
