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Russia is Flying Israeli Drones Against Anti-Assad Rebels in Syria
Military hardware from the Jewish State is helping Putin save Assad.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/24/russia-is-flying-israeli-drones-against-anti-assad-rebels-in-syria.html#/articles/2016/03/24/russia-is-flying-israeli-drones-against-anti-assad-rebels-in-syria.html
Russia’s sort-of-but-not-really withdrawal from Syria passed without the
world noticing that it featured aerial technology from a surprising
source—Israel, which provided the high-tech surveillance drones that
apparently help the Russian warplanes find and strike their targets on
the ground.
The Russian air force acquired a number of 20-foot-long Searcher drones
from Israel Aerospace Industries, one of the world’s leading
manufacturers of unmanned aerial vehicles, starting in 2010.
Russia also acquired from IAI, which is wholly owned by the Israeli
government, a license to make its own copies of the propeller-driven
Searcher, a rough equivalent of the U.S. military’s own Predator drone.
The Kremlin dubbed its Searcher clone “Forpost,” which means “fortress”
in Russian. While Russian officials had earlier hinted that their drones
had deployed to Syria alongside an air wing of around 40 fighters and
bombers, it wasn’t until mid-February that photographer Ahmad Al Khayer
actually spotted a Forpost flying over Syria ... and posted to Facebook
a photo of the distinctive-looking drone.
“While it is impossible to definitely confirm the model from just one
picture, the similarities to the Searcher/Forpost are striking: the
placement of the camera and sensor turret, the horizontal connection
with the fins at the rear,” Ulrike Franke, a drone researcher at the
European Council on Foreign Relations, told The Daily Beast in an email.
“In the picture, the wings appear slightly more back-swept than those of
the Searcher/Forpost,” Franke continued, “but given all these elements,
it appears unlikely that this picture could show anything else than a
Searcher/Forpost.”
The photo underscores Israel’s role, however indirect, in enabling
Russia’s military intervention in Syria on behalf of the embattled
regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Without Jerusalem’s help, Moscow
would never have been able to pull off its Syrian operation in the way
that it did. In a surprise announcement on March 14, Russian President
Vladimir Putin declared the Syria intervention a success and said
Russian forces would begin withdrawing from the war-torn country.
Since arriving in western Syria in October, Russian warplanes have flown
thousands of sorties targeting anti-regime rebels and civilians in
rebel-held areas. During one weeklong period in mid-February, Moscow's
jets launched 444 combat sorties and struck 1,593 “terrorist objects,”
the Russian defense ministry claimed in a statement.
Hitting four targets per mission requires extensive intelligence
preparation—the kind that drones can best provide. Able to loiter over
the battlefield for 12 hours at a time or longer, unblinkingly scanning
below with cameras and other sensors, drones—actually, the operators and
analysts controlling the drones via radio—can pick out coordinates for
the fast-flying fighters and bombers to target.
Russia needed Israel to provide the unmanned aerial vehicles because its
rusting weapons industry struggles to design and produce high-end
robotic aircraft all on its own. “Although Russia has the capability to
manufacture small reconnaissance drones, it has long depended on
countries like Israel for larger, more capable unmanned aircraft,” Dan
Gettinger, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard
College in New York, told The Daily Beast via email.
Israeli companies—and especially the state-owned Israeli Aerospace
Industries—are among the world’s top exporters of advanced drones.
Whereas U.S. firms are barred by law from selling unmanned aerial
vehicles to countries with histories of human-rights abuses, Israeli
industry suffers no such constraints. Other customers for the Searcher
drone include Thailand, which is ruled by an unelected military junta,
and Azerbaijan, a country with a “poor rights record,” according to
Human Rights Watch.
Getting its hands on Israeli Searchers helped the Russian military to
catch up to the world’s leading drone powers. For Russian drone
operators, switching to Searchers and Forposts from smaller and older
Russian-made robot models was “like switching from a Zhiguli to a
Mercedes,” commented Denis Fedutinov, editor of a Russian magazine
devoted to unmanned aerial vehicles. A Zhiguli is a notoriously
out-of-date Russian car design.
“These drones can typically fly for many more hours than the indigenous
models produced in Russia and could potentially be modified to carry
some weapons,” Gettinger said of the Searcher and its Russian clone.
To be fair, there’s no evidence that the Forpost drones in Syria ever
carried their own weapons. Instead, they apparently helped to boost the
destructive power of other, manned warplanes. “Throughout their stay in
Syria there was no bombing raid that missed the target,” Russian air
force Commander Viktor Bondarev said.
And while Bondarev is clearly exaggerating, his boast could speak to the
Kremlin’s growing confidence in its aerial surveillance hardware.
That is, its Israeli aerial surveillance hardware
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