Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Syria Missile Explodes, Followed By Media Blackout

I didn't do a ton of looking around, but it seems that not too many news outlets are interested in reporting the fact that it is just coming to light that a Syrian missile which exploded at a Syrian military base in May killed dozens of Iranian engineers.

It was reported in May that a missile exploded in a Syrian military site. Today, new facts are surfacing. The major media outlets do not seem to be interested, although they are very interested in analyzing a recent Israeli air strike on a military facility in northern Syria.

The new facts are that dozens of Iranian engineers were killed in the May missile explosion. The blast occurred while engineers were trying to outfit a Scud C missile with mustard gas. AFP reports

The July 26 explosion in Aleppo, northern Syria, was reported at the time. The official Sana news agency said 15 Syrian military personnel were killed and 50 people were injured, most of them slightly from flying glass.

The agency said only that "very explosive products" blew up after fire broke out at the facility and that the blaze was not an act of sabotage.

But in the September 26 edition of Jane's Defence Weekly, Syrian defence sources were quoted as saying the explosion happened during tests to weaponise a Scud C missile with mustard gas, which is banned under international law.

Fuel caught fire in a missile production laboratory and "dispersed chemical agents (including VX and Sarin nerve agents and mustard blister agent) across the storage facility and outside.

"Other Iranian engineers were seriously injured with chemical burns to exposed body parts not protected by safety overalls," the publication quoted the sources as saying.

Among the dead were "dozens" of Iranian missile weaponisation engineers, it added.

3 comments:

rmwarnick said...

If Jane's sources are reliable, this may be an indication that the Syrians are boneheads. Mustard gas is a persistent blister agent. If Syria attacked Israel with a missile armed with a mustard gas warhead it would kill very few people, and provoke a devastating counterattack.

rmwarnick said...

It's hard to know anything about secret Syrian weapons projects. This story says it was North Koreans trying to put chemical warheads on an obsolete No-dong 1 missile last July.

Darth Cheney is pushing the story of Iranian involvement:

"Some believe that the Office of the Vice President is continuing to battle any attempts at diplomacy made by the US State Department in an effort to ensure no alternative but a military solution to destabilize and strike Iran, using Syria's alleged nuclear weapons program and close relations with Iran as a possible pretext."

Anne Rettenberg LCSW said...

Well, if a missile at one of our military bases exploded, I wouldn't be surprised if it killed engineers who were Turks, Pakistanis, Iranians or whatever...because the number of engineers who are American born are shrinking every day, just like the number of doctors and nurses who are American-born.