Ready on the Right, Ready on the Left, Ready on the Firing Line!
July 5, 2007
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The cartridges are in the rifle chambers. Many exercises and actions by both the Israelis and Syrians will eventually get the rifles locked and loaded, and then one day the order will be given to fire. My guesstimate as to when the order to “Fire at Will” will be given is some point in time between 2008 and the close of 2012, but only time will tell if my guess is correct. But make no mistake, when the rifle chambers begin to empty, the final three and one-half years of tribulation will begin, ushering in a major war, which will see the end of this age at its final great battle of Armageddon.
Certainly, this is a guess on my part, but I will assure you of this – The end of the Age of the Gentiles is not a far distant event – It is at our doors.
I have been in a “watch” mode for the last 40 years, and the smell of a great final war is stronger than it has ever been in my spiritual senses.
The two articles which follow, the first from Haaretz, and the second from DEBKAfile, describe the recent activities on the Golan
Heights.
Beg in Haaretz Article
IDF carries out massive exercise on Golan
July 5, 2007
By Yuval Azoulay
The Israel Defense Forces this week carried out one of the largest
infantry exercises of recent years in the Golan Heights region, training for conflict with Syria and Hezbollah.
Supplies were air-dropped, tanks provided covering fire and infantry forces trained in nonconventional warfare and countering anti-tank missile attacks.
“We are training for every possible scenario. Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and terror organizations in the West Bank,” an officer says.
The IDF said the exercise was not intended to signal any attack on Syria, a statement Damascus did not accept.
“Olmert says explicitly that he is not prepared to talk to Syria, and senior American officials repeat this statement. That’s why we cannot believe his lies,” a commentator on Syrian radio said yesterday.
The IDF is trying to correct shortcomings discovered during the Second Lebanon
War, a battalion commander said. The Golani brigade lost 20 fighters in the last war.
The exercise’s goal is to prepare both mentally and actively for any future challenge.
“Last year we were less trained, we lacked resoluteness and decisiveness. With regard to mental preparation the problem lay in the sharp transition from routine to warfare,” he said.
A senior officer says that over the past year the exercises for reserve troops have increased dramatically. “The exercises are more structured. Each unit carries out specific exercises according to its goals and aims. Our emergency supplies have been renewed, there is a multi-year plan for weapons and personal equipment.
Every thing
is based on the assumption that a reserve soldier’s preparation should be similar to that of a regular soldier,” he says.
IDF officers are convinced that the army has learned many lessons from the last war and that the threats to which the forces had been exposed have been dealt with, especially the threat of Hezbollah’s advanced anti-tank missiles. They believe Syria’s army has limited capabilities and its air force is far inferior to Israel’s. Therefore, a new war would resemble last year’s fighting in Lebanon – commando combat in difficult terrain with large areas controlled by anti-tank units.
In recent months the Golan Heights has become one of the IDF’ s main exerci
se areas. At times this requires closing off roads. Infantry troops and rows of tanks, armored personnel carriers and jeeps raise clouds of dust in grazing fields and the air is filled with low-flying helicopters and echoes of explosions.
“This is the first time they let us practice with live fire,” says a reserve soldier from the central region, after completing a two-week exercise in the Golan last month. It’s like a medicine student who practiced only on a plastic doll and needs to feel the real thing. We’ve exercised attacks, fired from rocket launchers. But as for the Syrian threat, I did not feel like the commanders knew something that hasn’t been written about in the newspapers,” he said.
Another reserve soldier, who completed an exercise at the Ze’elim base, reported a significant improvement in the quality of weapons and equipment. He said this was the first serious exercise he had taken part in since 2001. “This time we felt we were really training,” he said.
Begin DEBKAfile Report
July 5, 2007
Syria Winds up Planning for Campaign of Terror on Golan
On June 26, Syria opened the Damascus-Golan road to Quneitra to civilian traffic for the first time since the Six-Day War of 1967. No announcement was made.
The dozens of military roadblocks studding the 60 km high road connecting the capital with the Syrian part of Golan for 40 years were removed, except for two – one at the entrance to Qunetra from the Syrian end and one at the town’s exit to Israeli Golan. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources report that this measure went mostly unnoticed, although it made Israeli military intelligence sit up.
Until this week, civilian traffic heading towards Syria’s Golan border with Israel was discouraged by the government in Damascus; a traveler needed eight different pieces of paper and endless waits to get past the military roadblocks. All of a sudden, the powers-that-be in the Syrian capital decided to allow civilians free passage to Golan meaning preparations are complete for the launch of a cross-border campaign of terror in the Israel sector of the territory. Such a campaign could quickly escalate into a full-scale war.
The day the road was opened, Syria celebrated the 33rd anniversary of Quneitra’s liberation, i.e. the signing of the armistice agreement with Israel which delineated the provisional border between the two countries and ended the 1973 Yom Kippur war and ensuing war of attrition. Quneitra, which was captured by Israel in 1967, was ceded to Syria on condition it was kept demilitarized.
The Syrian official publication Tishreen marked the event by writing:
Since the first moment of taking oath as President of the Republic, Bashar Al-Assad made it clear that the Golan always remains in the center until it returns to the homeland, Syria. This is an inevitable day.
The return of Golan to Syria is non-negotiable.
Under such circumstances in which the Israelis continue to reject all Arab bids for reaching a just and comprehensive peace settlement, the option of national resistance remains the only open legitimate course for the liberation of the occupied Arab lands and the restoration of usurped rights.
Golan, the biblical Bashan, is a narrow basalt plateau, part of the Sea of Galilee’s catchment basin, which provides 30% of Israel’s water. Israeli jurisdiction was formally extended to Golan in 1981.
In speeches he made in the last three months, Bashar Assad made a point of referring to the mounting pressure of refugees from Golan living in Syria to take “liberation” in their own hands. Official Syrian figures put the number of “Golan Heights refugees” at 410,000, a figure which is grossly exaggerated to highlight their suffering. The real refugee figure from this tiny sliver of 1,070 sq. km. of land is no more than 60-70,000, around half of whom are crowded into the Wafadin camp on the western outskirts of Damascus.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources disclose that a year ago, in June 2006, Syrian military intelligence recruited several hundred Golan refugees for a new framework called the Front for the Liberation of the Golan Heights. They were trained for terror operations, blowing up roads and bridges, attacks on military camps and convoys and hostage-taking. Three months ago, the Front struck for the first time, detonating an explosive device on the border fence as an Israeli patrol passed by.
Israeli and Western military and intelligence interpret the opening of the Damascus-Quneitra highway to civilians as a gambit
to give the Front free rein to cross into Israeli Golan for terrorist operations against civilian and military targets, without Syria being held responsible. This gives the Assad government an alibi for claiming it has no control over the traffic traversing the road to the border, the same pretext it has used for years in allowing terrorists, arms and money to infiltrate Iraq and Lebanon.
Israel can be expected to be a lot less tolerant of Syrian attacks on the Golan than the Americans are in Iraq – whatever the name of the “resistance” framework.
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