The southwester town of Zabadani, 30 km west of Damascus, is a ghost town, depopulated by five years of Syrian war ravages, except for one sign of life – or rather death. Since December, Hizballah has enclosed this once attractive tourist resort, strategically located on the Damascus-Beirut highway, into a heavily fortified ex territoria enclave whose high walls conceal the terrorist group’s new program for the development of weapons of mass destruction. This is disclosed for the first time by DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources.
Most of the facilities for the research and development of chemical weapons and dirty bombs are sunk below the surface of the secret 2.5 sq. km site.
Syrian and Iranian engineers and technicians are developing the chemical weapons for Hizballah’s arsenal, and foreign experts were hired from outside the Middle East to help build radioactive weapons. They are kept out of sight in on-site accommodation at Zabadani.
A telltale sign that the Shiite terrorist organization was actively pursuing a radioactive bomb program – and which prompted our investigation – was dropped in a speech given by Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Feb. 16.
He boasted that a pair of Hizballah rockets falling on the Israeli city of Haifa would cause a catastrophe equivalent to a “nuclear bomb” attack. He elaborated on this: “An Israeli expert had said that Haifa’s residents fear a deadly attack on the ammonia storage tanks which contain more than 15,000 tons of this gas. That would lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of Israelis and affect another 800,000,” he declared.
They have been fighting and killing each other or a few thousand years and the best thing the United States can do is stay out of it.