Former IDF Chief of Staff MK Gadi Eisenkot, revealed on Sunday that Israel assisted in attacks on Islamic State targets throughout the Middle East and discussed an event from 2015 "where we were asked to attack, carried out a very extensive strike, and inflicted significant damage on many Islamic State terrorists."
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Eisenkot said in an address at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) that "the campaign against the Islamic State was intensive and took place in more than one country, with results in some areas that exceed all expectations in the type of operations and attacks that were carried out."
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Gadi Eisenkot said that Israel assisted in attacks on Islamic State targets throughout the Middle East
(Photo: Rafi Kotz)
"Some of the operations went under the radar. The IDF managed this campaign with the intelligence corps, Air Force, special units, and foreign relations," he added.
Eisenkot explained that "not many countries in the world can identify targets the size of a podium and deliver a missile to a target within a radius of 1,000 km surrounding Israel. Our enemies saw it, the Russians saw it, and the Americans saw it."
"Those who know best how much the IDF operated throughout the Middle East are Islamic State militants because they paid the price with hundreds of casualties, injured personnel and damages, and they knew who was carrying out these operations,” he added.
“In those years, during the Syrian Civil War, Israel engaged in intelligence cooperation with other agents that targeted Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria through Israeli intelligence,” Eisenkot said.
Five years ago, it was revealed in The New York Times that Israel had attacked Islamic State targets multiple times. According to the report from February 2018, in the preceding years Israeli Air Force aircraft attacked targets in Egyptian territory over 100 times to assist Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in his fight against the Islamic State in Sinai.
According to the report, Israeli assistance to Egypt began after the downing of a Russian plane in the Sinai Peninsula in October 2015 by the terrorist organization. In the disaster, 224 passengers and crew members, mostly Russian citizens, were killed.