Syria’s Rusting Navy Turns On Its Own People

The Syrian navy is a pissant, 4th-rate force, incapable of even slowing down any half-decent fleet. A foe would have to be virtually unarmed for Syria’s rusting warships to threaten it. Which means the fleet still does have some purpose for the Assad regime: terrorizing its own people.

On Sunday, just before dawn, Syrian warships joined tanks and paramilitary forces in an assault on the seaside town of Latakia. At least 25 people were killed.

‘The offensive started at 5 a.m. and has not ceased for a second,’ one activist told the Los Angeles Times. ‘The gunfire is so arbitrary. Entire buildings are being shelled with heavy artillery. The bodies stay on the streets because we are unable to leave our home and get them… The smell of death is around us.’

In May, NATO sank eight of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s warships, as part of its campaign there to defang (and, ultimately, dethrone) the regime in Tripoli. The Western response to the ongoing repression in Syria has been relatively muted, in contrast, offering little more than a ‘crescendo of condemnation,’ as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it. But the Syrian government’s use of heavy weaponry may change things, the Times notes, just as attacks by Libyan warplanes and gunboats prompted NATO to intervene. The U.N. Security Council is set to discuss Syria this week.

The Syrian navy has ‘progressively eroded over the years, reflecting the country’s poor economic situation and the limited funding allocated to maritime forces,’ according to Jane’s World Navies. Syria has a single working frigate, a Petya III-class ship produced by the Soviets in the mid-1970s that’s ‘obsolete and nearly non-operational.’ Damascus also has sixteen Osa-class missile boats that ‘lack advanced technology and their armament is quite old.’

These aging missiles may have just been fired inwards. Osas were the kind of ships that Gadhafi used to attack protesters earlier this year. At least half a dozen of them are based in Latakia. So they might have been used to strike Syria’s activists, as well.

The Syrian fleet is not entirely ancient. Iran supplied the regime with a half-dozen Tir-class torpedo boats in 2006. Fast and lightly armed, they’re designed to swarm and harass ships that approach their shores. (Iran has also reportedly agreed to pay $23 million and station troops at Latakia’s airport, to coordinate further arms shipments.)

But Syria’s best naval defense may be that it has a well-armed, politically-connected friend close by. The Russian navy maintains a base in the Syrian port of Tartus. Russia has not only supplied the base with modern, supersonic-capable Yakhont anti-ship missiles. But any attack on Syrian ships harbored at Tartus risks hitting Russian vessels, too. Which is its own form of defense.

Unfortunately, Syria’s people don’t have that same kind of protection.

There is a video at the link.