18 years after the operation.. Israel’s first acknowledgment of the killing of “Assad’s advisor”.
The recognition comes in Olmert’s new book, “Arizona All Of Us…The Complete Story Behind The Bombing of a Nuclear Reactor,” which details the 2007 Israeli attack on a Syrian reactor and related operations.
What Olmert released is the first direct public acknowledgment by an Israeli official who headed the government at the time of the assassination, but it is not considered an official statement issued by the government or the army.
Israel’s Seventh Eye platform reported that military censors had allowed the details to be published after they had been banned for years.
Snipers came out of the water
The operation took place on August 1, 2008, while Suleiman was having dinner with guests on the balcony of his beach house.
Olmert says Israeli snipers emerged from the sea under cover of darkness, approached to within 150 meters of the balcony and took up positions on either side of it before confirming Suleiman’s identity.
Although there were many people on the beach, he said, no one noticed the movement of force.
When the order was given, the snipers fired three rounds at Suleiman, which hit him in the back, killing him, and the force members immediately moved to the waterline, then reached the boat that was waiting for them and left the area undetected.
The published excerpt does not say that the bullets were fired from the sea, but that the force penetrated it and carried out the killing after coming on land.
Olmert described the perpetrators as “our fighters and skilled snipers,” while Israeli media attributed the operation to the Shayet 13 naval commando unit.
Who is Muhammad Suleiman?
Soleimani was a brigadier general and special adviser to Bashar al-Assad, and a classified US government document described him as an adviser to the Syrian president on arms procurement and strategic weapons.
Intelligence and Israeli reports have also identified him as one of the former president’s close associates and secret military files on links to Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Olmert says Suleiman was the “driving force” behind Syria’s nuclear reactor at the al-Kibar site in Deir ez-Zor, and that he oversaw the logistical aspects of its construction, dealing with North Korea, bringing in materials and equipment and concealing the nature of the facility.
Those details regarding his immediate role in the project remain in Olmert’s account, although previous US and Israeli reports have linked Suleiman to reactor security and Syria’s strategic weapons program.
The Israeli air force destroyed the facility in September 2007, about 11 months before Soleimani was killed, and Israel did not officially claim responsibility for the attack until 2018.
The document that preceded Olmert’s confession
Israel’s responsibility for the killing was not fully known until the book was published.
In 2015, The Intercept website published details of a classified US National Security Agency document as part of the Edward Snowden leak. According to the document, the commandos of the Israeli military and naval forces killed Suleiman near Tartu, and then crossed the sea.
The document attributed the operation to “Shayyat 13” and described it as the first known case of Israel directly targeting a Syrian government official.
But the US document does not reveal the details that Olmert is now providing, such as snipers approaching from 150 meters away, positioning themselves on the balcony and firing three rounds before exiting the boat.
Years of conflicting narratives
Syrian authorities imposed a blackout over Suleiman’s killing, and official media delayed announcing his death for several days, with Israel leading the list of suspects.
In the following years, various reports emerged, some of which spoke of a sniper firing from a yacht at sea, while others indicated that the killing was related to the conflict within the Syrian regime.
Hezbollah’s former secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, blamed Israel for the operation and linked it to Soleimani’s role in the military relationship between Damascus and the party.
Olmert now resolves an essential aspect of this controversy by admitting that Israeli forces carried out the killing. But he provides his personal account of the operation, in the absence of an independent statement from the Israeli army or the release of original documents from the operation.