Katz - Shadow strike: inside Israels secret mission to eliminate Syrian nuclear power

It was a hot summer night in 2014, and Ehud Olmert was sitting at home looking at some news sites online. The former prime minister came across a story about fighting taking place in eastern Syria near the ancient city of Deir ez-Zor, located along the banks of the mighty Euphrates River.

At first glance it didnt mean much. The civil war in Syria had erupted three years earlier and while it had long ago turned into a humanitarian disaster, the world seemed to simply not care.

It started with protests in Damascus in March 2011, as it had around the same time in other capitals throughout the Middle East and North Africa, in what was then still referred to as the Arab Spring. Ordinary Syrians took to the streets demanding democratic and economic reforms. They wanted political prisoners released from jail and an end to government corruption and draconian emergency laws that, for decades, had ruled over their lives.

Muammar Gaddafi had been captured and executed in Libya, Hosni Mubarak was dramatically overthrown in Egypt, but Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, was continuing to hold on and fight the rebel forces, in a deadly, bloody and controversial war that would eventually see the rise of ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Artificial border lines drawn a century earlier with a pencil and ruler were proven worthless by a force that used pickup trucks carrying five men dressed in black fatigues and armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

By 2014, what was happening in Syria was a full-fledged war, one that had exceeded all predictions of how long it would last and whether Assads regime would survive. With help in the beginning from Iran and Hezbollah and later from Russia, Assad was fighting back with all available means.

The regimes use of chemical weapons had passed by with little repercussion the previous summer, and while there was talk about coalition airstrikes and the global threat the Islamic State posed Europe, the West had pretty much fallen into a routine. Countries condemned Syrias leader but never took action. It was still a few months before the US would finally step up its involvement and launch airstrikes against ISIS targets throughout the country.

But that July, the Islamic State announced that it had completed its takeover of Deir ez-Zor, the primary hub of Syrias oil and natural gas industry and a placelike many in the Middle Eastrich in history, blood and violence.

During Roman times, Deir ez-Zor was an important trading post. A few centuries later, it changed hands and became part of the ancient kingdom of Palmyra. But the wave of conquests didnt stop there. In the late nineteenth century, the city came under the control of the Ottoman Empire, eventually becoming the final destination point for Armenians forced on the death march during the genocide that began in 1915. Those who survived the marches were taken to a nearby desert patch where they were shot and buried in mass graves.

ISIS, Olmert read that night, was now in control of most of the Tigris-Euphrates river basin, an area similar in size to the entire United Kingdom. It reigned over the territory it conquered through a combination of terror, zealotry, a savvy use of social media and improvised battlefield tactics. It was a force that Assads conventional military was failing to defeat.

The Israeli government was carefully tracking what was happening in Syria. From its perspective, the war there had nothing to do with Israel, and therefore there was very little it could do to make a genuine difference. Yes, it felt a moral imperative to help the people being massacred and, as a result, established a field hospital along the border to treat the wounded. But it knew that it had to be careful not to be dragged into the war over the border. If it was, Israels involvement would be used by Assad to claim that the civil war was actually a Zionist plot, which would help him garner greater support at Israels expense.

But that evening, Olmert was focused on Deir ez-Zor. The story he was reading was of extreme importance. It was a validation of a decision he had made seven years earlier, one that if not taken would have transformed the world and made it an even scarier place.

Olmerts three-year term as prime minister had been marked by conflict, peace negotiations and political upheaval. In 2006, he took the country to war in Lebanon against Hezbollah and in 2008 against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In 2009, as his term came to a premature ending, he tried to hammer out a peace deal with the Palestinians, making their leader an offer to which Olmert would never receive an answer.

But now, five years later, Olmert was still in the spotlight. A few months earlier, the Tel Aviv District Court had found him guilty of receiving bribes when he was mayor of Jerusalem, about a decade earlier, and sentenced him to six years in prison. Olmert wasnt giving up and was in the midst of finalizing his appeal to the Supreme Court.

After finishing the article, Olmert looked out the window of his home in Motza Illit, a small and sleepy suburb to the west of Jerusalem, Israels capital city. In the distance he saw the tower of Hadassah Hospital, one of the countrys leading medical institutions. To the south he could see the Har Menuchot cemetery, a place where, according to Jewish tradition, some of the first people will be resurrected when the Messiah comes. And just below was Highway 1, the countrys main artery, connecting Jerusalem with Tel Aviv and beyond.