Crew Members Detail Raid On Syria

It started three weeks ago with a suicide bombing in Haifa. A Palestinian, loaded with explosives, walked into Maxim's Restaurant and detonated.

"I was on my way with my family to eat at a restaurant off of the base," squadron leader Lt.-Col. Z (no names -- Israeli policy) was quoted as saying to the Israeli Air Force Magazine. "The guard at the door of the restaurant told me of the terrible attack in Haifa. A few moments later I phoned the squadron and told them to start making preliminary preparations in case we were required to attack."

Less than 12 hours after the Haifa bombing, the Israeli F-16s of the "Northern Knights" were in the air, flying a dangerous raid over heavily-defended Syria. Only, as it turns out, Syria wasn't all that well defended. The aircraft took no ground fire as they entered Syrian airspace, dropped their ordnance and left.

"This was a strike in a hostile area with all its ramifications," Lt.-Col. Z said. "We knew what we were getting into, an attack near the Syrian capital and we planned for all possible scenarios, including anti-aircraft fire and interceptors. We knew the targets well and took off with the knowledge that we had the best jets with the most suitable weapons for the mission."

The strike team chose precision weapons. "Not everyone knows this, but just 100 meters from the wadi where the training base was located were houses from a civilian village. We needed to have absolute accuracy," he said.

It was the first raid into Syria by Israeli warplanes since the Yom Kippur War, exactly 30 years earlier. "There was amazing and complete silence. Not a sound," Lt.-Col. Z said, recalling the moment when they crossed the border. "All of your senses become sharpened when you enter a hostile zone, your fingers run over the various switches and prepare the weapons for that critical moment. Outside the cockpit we could clearly see the lights of Damascus. I passed on the last radio instructions to the planes in the formation and that was it."

Just minutes after crossing over the border at high speed, the flight released weapons on the target -- what Israel says was a heavily-fortified terror training camp.

"Bull's-eye!," he said. "The explosions were very large and full of fire. The secondary explosions that followed a few seconds later proved that the place was an ammo dump and full of weapons."

Of course, the "Northern Knight" ground crews didn't know that their pilots had carried out their missions unopposed. "Only when the last jet touched down did I feel a huge weight lift off my shoulders," said Maj. Avi Elmoiel, the squadron's technical officer. "I have been part of a lot of strikes in my life, but for me this was THE attack. To see all of these jets return safely to base, their bomb racks empty and knowing that they had hit their targets, well there is no better feeling than that."

ANN Correspondent Dave Bender contributed to this report from Jerusalem

FMI: www.idf.il/english/organization/iaf/iaf.stm