Secret Hizballah Chemical Arms, Dirty Bombs Complex in Syria

The southwestern town of Zabadani near the Lebanese border was once packed with tourists, attracted by its mild summer and scenic beauty – until July 2015, when the civil war overtook the small town, killing or driving its 30,000 inhabitants into flight.
Zabadani next fell under the occupation of 1,000 rebel jihadists of Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the radical Islamic militia Ahrar al-Sham. Neither the Syrian army nor Hizballah’s most elite unit, the Radwan force, was able to break their stranglehold on the small town.
But then, in the last week of December, after a succession of UN–brokered cease-fires, the rebels and their families departed in convoys, leaving behind them a ghost town.
But not for long: High walls topped with razor wire soon proclaimed Zabadani to be off limits. Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hizballah, moved in last month and turned this pretty town, which happened to be strategically located on the 83-km Damascus-Beirut highway, into one of the most heavily fortified military compounds in the Middle East.
New buildings were sunk underground on a 3.5 sq. km site to secretly house Hizballah’s most sinister project to date, revealed here for the first time by DEBKA Weekly’s military and intelligence sources: A center of research and development for weapons of mass destruction, primarily chemical weapons and radioactive “dirty bombs.”
Syrian and Iranian engineers and technicians are developing the chemical weapons for Hizballah’s arsenal, our sources report, and experts from the Far East are helping to build radioactive weapons. Some of them are accommodated at the secret complex.
A telltale sign that the Shiite terrorist organization’s “dirty bomb” program has advanced to the production stage 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.
“This would be exactly like a nuclear bomb and we can say that Lebanon today has a nuclear bomb, seeing as any rocket that might hit these tanks is capable of creating a nuclear bomb effect,” Nasrallah said.
When someone like the Hizballah terrorist chief drops four references to a nuclear bomb in as many sentences, ending with the boast that “Lebanon today has nuclear bomb,” it must be presumed that he is crowing over some sort of nuclear device in hand.
It may not be an actual atom bomb – which would call for multimillion dollar investment, expertise and time, “only” a “dirty bomb” (essentially a conventional bomb mixed with radioactive material). That too could cause massive damage to Haifa’s chemical industry, resulting in a high death toll, runaway panic and major disruption – the perfect weapon for terrorists.
This raises tough questions for Moscow and the hefty Russian military presence in Syria. It is hard to believe that Russian intelligence has not noticed that weapons of mass destruction are being produced at Hizballah’s new fortress in the very heart of Syria. Has Vladimir Putin agreed to a terrorist organization developing game-changing weaponry under the protection of Russian air strikes?