The 5 July attack on a munitions storage facility near Latakia in Syria was far more extensive than previously believed, suggesting it was not launched from a submarine as claimed by some sources, according to IHS Jane's satellite imagery analysis.
The incident was first revealed by Syrian opposition sources, which said an unidentified aircraft or naval vessel had attacked a facility used to store P-800 Yakhont anti-ship missiles. CNN and The New York Times subsequently cited unidentified US officials as saying Israel had launched an air strike to destroy the anti-ship missiles, while The Sunday Times claimed that an Israeli Dolphin-class submarine had carried out the attack.
As usual, Israeli officials did not confirm or deny responsibility, but restated the threat to destroy any advanced weapons that Syria tried to transfer to the militant Lebanese group Hizbullah.
On 13 July Israel's Channel 2 revealed the precise location of the strike when it published satellite imagery taken on 7 July showing a destroyed building surrounded by launch pads around 15 km inland from Latakia.
The same imagery obtained by IHS Jane's shows the building is 80x20 m with a 6.75 m-wide entrance, making it large enough to handle transporter-erector launchers (TELs) for Syria's Bastion coastal defence version of the Yakhont system.
However, historical imagery shows the building was built between July 2003 and December 2004, and the three 23 m-diameter launch pads are even older, so the site was not built as a dedicated facility for the Yakhonts that Russia delivered to Syria from 2010-11. The access roads to the launch pads are overgrown, indicating they were no longer in use.
In contrast, two new large depots that were built to the northeast sometime around early 2011 remain intact. The imagery shows a lot of activity at these sites in the wake of the strike.
It also shows that 16 bunkers at a munitions storage facility to the east of the destroyed building no longer exist, probably because they were razed by the Syrians after they were hit during the strike. If these bunkers were targeted, it would indicate that large numbers of highly accurate precision-guided munitions (PGMs) were used as they were just 8x6 m and surrounded by revetments to minimise the risk of sympathetic explosions.
The type of land-attack missiles that are carried by Israel's Dolphin-class submarines have not been revealed, but the most likely option is that they are capable of launching a GPS-guided version of the UGM-84 Harpoon from their six 533 mm torpedo tubes.
The number of PGMs that were apparently used against the Syrian munitions storage facility on 5 July consequently suggests that they were launched from aircraft, rather than a submarine.
One of the more likely possibilities is that GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs) were used to destroy the bunkers. Strike aircraft can carry four SDBs in place of a single larger bomb, giving them the ability to strike many more targets, while the GBU-39's pop-out wings give it a stand-off range of around 110 km.
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