Israeli media revealed, citing information that military censorship allowed to be published after 18 years, that Israel was behind the assassination of Syrian General Muhammad Suleiman, the right-hand man of former President Bashar al-Assad and responsible for managing the secret project to build the Syrian nuclear reactor. For 18 years, the details of the operation remained confined to foreign reports, without Israel officially claiming responsibility for it.

Suleiman was one of the most prominent people close to Assad, and he also assumed the task of coordinating with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah. His assassination came in August 2008, about 9 months after the Israeli Air Force destroyed the Syrian nuclear reactor, which was built by North Korean experts in the Deir ez-Zor desert under the cover of an agricultural project.

According to the Israeli account that was allowed to be published, the assassination was preceded by a tracking operation carried out by Mossad members, during which they were able to collect accurate information about Suleiman’s movements and daily routine.

On Friday, August 1, 2008, Suleiman returned from the area of ​​the destroyed reactor in Deir ez-Zor, where he was supervising the work of obliterating evidence and the remains of radioactive materials, in an attempt to deceive International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and adhere to the Syrian narrative that Damascus was not trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

When Israeli intelligence learned that Suleiman would head to his home overlooking the sea in Tartous instead of returning to his office in Damascus, an Israeli naval vessel sailed along the Syrian coast.

Members of the special naval unit “Shayetet 13” went to the beach, while snipers from the same unit and from the “Sayeret Matkal” unit were stationed on the roof of a building near Suleiman’s house. When the Syrian general arrived for dinner with his wife and two friends, snipers shot and killed him, but his wife or two guests were not injured.

After carrying out the operation, the members returned to the ship and sailed towards their base in Haifa, while Assad quickly issued orders to bury Suleiman in secret to prevent news of his death from reaching Syrian public opinion.

Details of the operation recently appeared in a new book by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, entitled “Arizona All of Us – The Complete Story Behind the Attack on the Nuclear Reactor,” after the military censorship allowed its content to be published.

The book includes new details about the behind-the-scenes preparations to strike the Syrian reactor, and the political conflict that took place between Olmert, who was prime minister at the time, and his Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who took over from Amir Peretz after the Second Lebanon War.

In another revelation, Olmert wrote that Imad Mughniyeh, the military commander in Hezbollah and liaison officer with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, had not undergone any plastic surgery, contrary to what had been reported for years. Rather, Israeli intelligence simply did not know what he looked like.

However, Mossad agents were later able to photograph Mughniyeh upon his arrival in Damascus, accompanied by his wife and son, a photo that, according to Olmert, turned into the “golden evidence” that allowed him to be identified in preparation for his assassination.

After a while, the joint operation was carried out between Mossad and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to the book, at the end of January 2008, Mughniyeh arrived at his secret apartment in Damascus to meet his mistress, a Syrian belly dancer.

The Mossad and the CIA had previously booby-trapped a four-wheel-drive car parked near the apartment. But then US President George Bush set a strict condition that only Mughniyeh should be killed, and that no one else, especially civilians, should be injured.

Olmert writes that Mossad chief Meir Dagan at the time had an old account with Mughniyeh. In the early 1980s, when Mughniyeh was one of the guards of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, Dagan, who was then a colonel and commander of the liaison unit in Lebanon, arrested him, but he later ordered his release, believing that he was a marginal figure.

Mughniyeh later joined Hezbollah, before becoming, according to the report, one of the most wanted people in the world, and the United States placed a large financial reward in exchange for reaching him.

When Mughniyeh left his apartment at night, two Mossad female officers identified him with certainty based on a photo the agency had previously obtained. From the Mossad command room, where representatives of the CIA were also sitting, the execution signal was issued, and Mughniyeh and his guard were killed.

Hours before the operation, Muhammad Suleiman and the commander of the Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, who Washington accused of being behind operations that killed hundreds of Americans, visited Mughniyeh’s apartment. But Bush’s instructions prevented them from being targeted during the same meeting in Damascus.

Olmert said that he was carrying out the assassination of Mughniyeh on a plane returning from a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He expressed his belief that if he had been able to communicate directly with Bush, he would have succeeded in convincing him to agree to the assassination of Muhammad Suleiman and Qassem Soleimani from that time.

The assassination of Muhammad Suleiman was carried out months later in Tartus, while the United States assassinated Qassem Soleimani in 2020 while he was in Baghdad.

Olmert also revealed that after the destruction of the Syrian nuclear reactor, Mossad members attempted to kidnap Ibrahim Othman, head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission, who had been under the surveillance of the Israeli apparatus for years.

According to foreign publications, Mossad agents tracked down Othman and stormed his apartment and room in a Vienna hotel, searching for evidence proving that Syria was building a nuclear reactor.

During one of the raids, Othman left his phone inside the room, and Mossad agents led by Tamir Pardo seized it and extracted the information stored inside it. After analyzing the files, photos were found from inside the reactor, in addition to a photo of a North Korean expert.

But Israeli intelligence wanted to know how Syria and North Korea managed for years to build a reactor that the Israeli and American intelligence services did not know existed. Therefore, Dagan ordered the preparation of an operation to kidnap Othman and investigate him, led by Yossi Cohen and Ram Ben Barak.

After it became clear that carrying out kidnapping was not possible, it was decided to resort to a direct recruitment attempt. Cohen went to Othman’s house in Vienna and knocked on his door asking to speak to him, but the Syrian official answered him: “I know who you are,” before refusing to speak to him and closing the door.

The book also presents the volatile relationship between Olmert and Barak. Olmert says that the Defense Minister repeatedly requested to postpone the strike on the Syrian reactor, perhaps hoping that Olmert would resign under the weight of the repercussions of the Second Lebanon War and the report of Judge Eliyahu Winograd’s committee, which would have allowed Barak, in his estimation, to obtain full glory.

Despite the criticism that Olmert directs at Barak, he praises him in other places, pointing out that he ultimately voted in favor of carrying out the strike.

Thus, Israel reveals for the first time that the Tartous operation was not a mysterious incident or an internal liquidation, but rather a planned Israeli assassination that targeted one of Assad’s closest men after his participation in managing the Syrian nuclear project and his connection to Iran and Hezbollah.