Israel and HTS are systematically assassinating Syria’s military engineers and scientists, ensuring the country remains defenseless and strategically crippled against future aggression.
The Cradle's Syria Correspondent
Amid the chaos, Armenian born professor Yervant Arslanian was assassinated by a suspected HTS sniper while attempting to flee the assault.
Arslanian had previously worked in Italy on weapons systems and was chief of the Syrian advanced weapons research design team at the Arab School of Science and Technology in Aleppo at the time of his death.
Following the assassination, Syrian-Armenian journalist Kevork Almassian speculated that HTS was not acting alone.
“Guess who's also obsessed with Syria's scientific researchers? Israel,” Almassian wrote on the social media site X.
Arslanian’s killing marked the beginning of what appears to be a symbiotic Israeli-HTS campaign to eliminate both Syria’s advanced weapons and the scientists and military engineers vital to their development. As Israel bombed Syria’s military infrastructure, HTS targeted its scientists, systematically eroding the country’s ability to defend itself against Israeli aggression and expansion.
Syria’s scientific research centers
The roots of Syria’s chemical, biological, and advanced weapons programs trace back to the 1970s, when then-president Hafez al-Assad established scientific research centers, most notably the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC), with its headquarters in the town of Jamraya in the Damascus countryside.
After its establishment in 1971, the SSRC immediately became the “principal engine” for the local development of advanced weapons for the Syrian army, wrote Dany Shoham of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel.
Public statements made by Hafez al-Assad and other Syrian military officials over the years left “little room for doubt about the Syrian motive: Syria sees its [chemical and biological] arsenal as a counter to Israel’s nuclear arsenal,” Shoham observed.
Opening the door for Israel
On 8 September 2024, Israel carried out multiple airstrikes on an SSRC facility near the city of Masyaf in the Hama countryside. The strikes killed 14 people and injured 53, Syrian state media reported.
Two regional intelligence sources alleged to Reuters that the strikes targeted a major military research center for chemical arms production believed to house a team of Iranian military experts involved in weapons production.
After a similar strike in 2022, Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz claimed that Iran was using the SSRC in Masyaf to produce advanced missiles and weapons for its military and for Lebanon’s resistance movement, Hezbollah – Israel’s primary regional adversary.
480 strikes in 48 hours
After capturing Aleppo with little resistance on 30 November 2024, HTS militants swiftly advanced toward Hama and Homs. On 8 December, HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa – former Al-Qaeda in Iraq commander who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani – entered Damascus triumphantly, ending over 50 years of Assad family rule.
With the collapse of the Syrian army and former president Bashar al-Assad’s flight to Russia, Israel wasted no time in dismantling Syria’s military capabilities. Over 48 hours, the Israeli Air Force launched 480 airstrikes, obliterating Syrian airfields, air defenses, missile stockpiles, drones, fighter jets, tanks, and weapon production sites – destroying 70 to 80 percent of Syria’s strategic arsenal.
The Fahel Massacre
As HTS consolidated control and Israel intensified airstrikes, the targeted killing of Syrian scientists and engineers continued. On 26 January, HTS militants massacred 13 military engineers in Fahel, a village in Homs province.
“The bodies were brought to the entrance of the village, and we labelled them, photographed them. Most of the bodies were killed by a gunshot wound to the head at near point-blank range,” a source speaking with The National said.
The engineers were killed even though they had not served in combat roles and had already followed the reconciliation process with the new HTS-led government, Rami Abdulrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) told BBC Arabic.
Two other residents of Fahel were pulled off the bus and massacred after militants identified them as Shia Muslims.
The fact that most of the victims were military engineers was largely overlooked in media reports, given that the killings were carried out amid a flurry of additional sectarian killings of Alawites in the Hama and Homs countryside, which HTS leader Sharaa acknowledged were “normal and may continue for two or three years.”
Summoned to Damascus
On the day of the massacre in Fahel, renowned Syrian scientist Dr Hasan Ibrahim was summoned to Damascus by officials in the HTS-led government. Contact with him was soon lost, and his lifeless body was found five days later near Maraba in the Damascus countryside.
Dr Ibrahim, from Brisin village in the Sheikh Badr region of Tartous, had worked in the energy field at Syria’s Higher Institute for Scientific Research (HISR) in Damascus.
The following day, military engineer Afif Abboud was assassinated while traveling home on the highway near the Qadmus Bridge at the entrance to the city of Banias in Tartous province.
Abboud had been contacted by authorities in the new Syrian government, who assured him he could return to his position at the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) in Damascus.
As a local source tells The Cradle:
“Afif Abboud is an Alawite from an Alawite village, but I'm sure he's not involved in any military actions. The HTS militants get orders, information, and weapons and are ready to kill, kidnap, or do anything. In fact it's a chaotic situation and we have many operators. Each has his own agenda, like Iran, Turkiye, and Israel. It’s difficult to know exactly who is doing what.”
Additionally, Oday Dahi, a disabled young man (he was mute and deaf), was killed alongside Abboud. Dahi owned a small coffee kiosk on the road outside Banias and happened to be in the same place at the time Abboud was assassinated.
Investigated by masked men
Several more scientists from Syria’s research centers vanished after being summoned by HTS’s Military Operations Department. On 6 February, the SOHR reported that Dr Tayseer Issa, Ali Ibrahim, and Mustafa Abu Tarab had been arrested days earlier, their fate unknown.
Several others were summoned by the Military Operations Department, but were allowed to return home. The academics told the SOHR they were being “investigated by a committee of three masked men carrying weapons.”
On 13 February, reports emerged of the brutal murder of military engineer Shawkat al-Ahmed and his wife, Nijah Suleiman, in Basirat al-Jared, Tartous. HTS-aligned militants executed Ahmed with a gunshot to the head, then strangled his wife with a belt, leaving her to suffocate. Their bodies were found in a chicken coop.
A knowledgeable source speaking with The Cradle states that other scientists and military engineers are now in hiding. Some have survived assassination attempts in the past, including before Assad fell. The source adds that Israel is believed to be behind the killings.
Without these engineers and scientists, Syria will be dependent for years to come for its weapons and defense on regional states, all of which are clients and close allies of the US, and by extension, Israel.
Destroying Syria’s chemical weapons
Israel’s current campaign follows its previous success in dismantling Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile. This was achieved after the August 2013 false-flag chemical attacks in Ghouta, Damascus.
With help from Saudi intelligence, the militant group Jaish al-Islam, led by Zahran Alloush, fired several rockets with small amounts of sarin at multiple locations in Ghouta.
The group then filmed the bodies of hostages it had massacred (likely using carbon monoxide or cyanide) and posted the videos online, while blaming the deaths on Assad and the Syrian army.
The western and Arab press quickly disseminated the videos worldwide, while a team of UN investigators had conveniently arrived in Damascus two days before the attack, allowing them to confirm – despite clear signs of crime scene manipulation – that sarin was used in the rockets, but not confirm that sarin had caused the victims’ deaths.
Both the grisly videos and reports from UN investigators cemented the claim in the public mind that Assad had carried out a chemical attack against his own people, killing some 1,400, including many children.
Crucially, the Ghouta false flag attack provided the justification to claim that Assad had crossed former US president Barack Obama’s “red line.” A year before, Obama had stated that if chemical weapons were used in the increasingly bloody conflict, the US military and its European allies would have no choice but to intervene on the side of the opposition, including the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, led by Sharaa (Julani) at the time.
Following the Ghouta attack, journalist Seymour Hersh, who enjoys close ties with US and Israeli intelligence, reported that the initial scale of the planned western intervention was massive. He explained that the target list was meant to completely “eradicate any military capabilities Assad had.”
However, western intervention was evaded after Obama proved reluctant to order a bombing campaign that he knew would be illegal, unpopular domestically, and could possibly lead to his impeachment by Republican lawmakers.
A ray of light for Israel
Significantly, Obama insisted on calling off the bombing campaign despite intense pressure from Israel. Israeli military intelligence had provided the “bulk of evidence” falsely claiming Assad’s guilt, while senior Israeli security officials visited the White House just days after the Ghouta false flag to pressure Obama to order the intervention, according to The Guardian.
Further, “Obama’s red line” was not the president’s at all. It was introduced to the White House by Israeli officials in July 2012, and only repeated by Obama after secretary of state Hillary Clinton, a close ally of Israel, also began promoting it, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Obama’s decision to call off the bombing campaign in support of Julani’s Nusra Front was cemented after Assad agreed to a proposal presented by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to the next US secretary of state John Kerry: western intervention would be taken off the table if Syria would give up its chemical weapons.
Because western intervention was averted, many viewed this as a victory for Assad and the Syrian state, who were trying to prevent the black flag of Al-Qaeda from flying over Damascus. However, the US and Russian deal to have the Syrian government destroy 1,300 metric tons of chemical warfare agents was a clear win for Israel.
Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic that the agreement won president Obama “praise from, of all people, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister,” and that Syria’s loss of its chemical weapons cache represented “the one ray of light in a very dark region.”
In the wake of the Ghouta false flag massacre, Uri Sagi, Israel’s former chief of military intelligence, explained that “For many years, until the civil war broke out, the Syrians were the last army to pose a serious threat to Israel, and therefore the investment of our intelligence resources in that direction was enormous.”
Though Israel’s desire to completely “eradicate any military capabilities Assad had” would have to wait until the Nusra Front (by then HTS) conquered Damascus in December 2024, Tel Aviv nevertheless scored a huge victory by eliminating Syria’s deterrent to an Israeli nuclear attack.
The OPCW returns to Syria
On 8 February, as the killing of Syria’s scientists and military engineers was in full swing, a delegation from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) visited Damascus for talks with Syria’s new government.
OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias said the meetings had focused on the support he could offer in “eliminating the remnants of Syria’s chemical weapons program.”
But why is the OPCW seeking to return to Syria if the remnants of the country’s chemical weapons stockpile were dismantled years ago under the US–Russian deal with Assad?
In April 2013, as the UN sought to investigate multiple alleged chemical attacks in Syria, Syrian information minister Omran al-Zouabi warned that the aim of the western powers was “to repeat Iraq’s scenario.”
During exhaustive weapons inspections in Iraq in the 1990s, information discovered by the UN investigators about Iraqi conventional weapons and defense capabilities was quickly passed to western and Israeli intelligence agencies.
As former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter noted, the UN team “wasn’t in control of anything. It became a United States operation, not a United Nations operation.”
Israel has long sought to destroy Syria’s conventional and chemical weapons capabilities. It is therefore likely that, in addition to obliterating Syria’s remaining conventional military capabilities through bombing, Israel has a hand in the current HTS campaign to murder Syria’s remaining military scientists and engineers.
These men hold the knowledge any future Syrian state would need to develop a weapons industry to protect the country from further occupation and attacks by Israel in the future.
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