The Financial Times July 19, 2006
Hizbollah 'capable of sustained missile campaign'
By Stephen Fidler and Demetri Sevastopulo in London and Mark,Turner at the United Nations
Hizbollah has built up an inventory of weapons that could allow it to sustain the tempo of its missile assault on Israel for at leastseveral months, say western analysts and intelligence officials.
The chief element of the Lebanese-based militant group's campaign is the unsophisticated Katushya rocket, with a range of 25km-40km.
Its inaccuracy only adds to its strong capacity to terrorise populations, because of the noise made by incoming rockets coupled with the uncertainty about where they will land.
Christopher Langton, of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, says the rockets have no strategic impact but could have a powerful psychological effect on populations under fire. He likened the sound of the Katushya to "a telegraph pole travelling through the air at a huge speed".
Analyses from private and some western government experts estimate Hizbollah has stockpiled at least 10,000 of the Katushya. According to sources at the United Nations, Hizbollah claimed a year ago that it had 12,000. John Pike, a defence expert at GlobalSecurity.org, said the organisation had used only about 3 per cent of its arsenal since it began its recent campaign.
The analyses also concur with Israeli assessments that the group has longer-range missiles including the Iranian-made Fajr, with a 45km range, and even possibly the larger 200km-range Zelzal, with the theoretical capacity to reach Tel Aviv.
Hizbollah also displayed signs of increasing sophistication with the firing of a C-802 Silkworm cruise missile, with an anti-jamming capacity, at an Israeli ship last week. The radar-guided missile, which can be fired from land or sea, could have been in China's arsenal in the 1980s and have reached Hizbollah after modification by a third party, possibly Iran, analysts said.
They agreed that the Hizbollah campaign could not have been spontaneous and had been planned, at least as a contingency, for some time.
Hizbollah is said to have received much of its weaponry from Iran and from Syria. Officials at the UN, who asked not to be identified, said missiles had transited through Syria.
Last October, a report by Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, cited evidence of "an increasing influx of weaponry and personnel from Syria" to militia in Lebanon. In February, the UN issued warnings about a large transfer of arms from Syria to Lebanon on January 31, and collusion by the Lebanese army. In March, the Lebanese government maintained that the flow had stopped, a UN official said, but it was unclear whether that was the case.
UN officials have said that at a September 9 meeting last year, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad told militia leaders that there were no red lines limiting their destabilising activity in Lebanon.
The attacks also raise questions about Iran's influence on the attacks, amid speculation that Tehran saw an advantage in deflecting international pressure over its nuclear programme.
Mr Pike said one question was whether Iran was trying to use Lebanon as a power projection platform in the way that Nikita Khrushchev, the former Soviet leader, used Cuba in 1962.
© Copyright 2006, The Financial Times Limited
