The Soviets are expanding naval facilities in the Syrian port of Tartus and the neighboring island of Arwad to counter the U.S. presence in the Mediterranean, Israeli analysts said today. The Soviet Union's installations in Tartus include submarine and surface ship maintenance facilities and constitute the largest Soviet naval base in the Mediterranean, said Dore Gold of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. According to Aharon Levran, editor of The Middle East Military Balance published this week by the center, the facilities extend to Arwad island and include recreation facilities for Soviet crews. Gold said there was no declassified information available on the current or planned size of the Soviet base but said the general trend has been one of expansion at least since 1987. In addition, the Soviets use land installations in Syria for naval and air intelligence-gathering, the two analysts said in separate interviews with The Associated Press. Gold said that the main objective of the Tartus base expansion was to counter the presence of the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean. The Soviets had to find new arrangements in the region after Albania shifted its alliance to China in 1961 and Egypt abrogated its friendship treaty with Moscow in 1976, he said. He said the Tartus facility was important for prolonged deployment of Soviet attack submarines in the Mediterranean. In an article published today in the English-language daily Jerusalem Post, Gold noted that the London-based Jane's Defense Weekly in May referred to Tartus as ``the primary maintenance facility for Soviet submarines operating in the Mediterranean.'' Levran said the Soviets have been using Tartus for at least five years and that the base's expansion apparently was a price Syria had to pay for purchasing Soviet weapons. In spite of the Kremlin's recent reluctance to supply Syria with advanced weapons systems, he said, ``Syria is still the Soviet Union's strategic asset in the Middle East.'' He said the base replaced the Soviet practice of using Mediterranean Squadron's mother-ships for maintenance. But he said the base was less important than the recently developed Soviet Far Eastern base in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. Syria's navy, Levran wrote in the 1987-88 Middle East Military Balance, ``underwent a radical facelift'' due to supplies, training and maintenance cooperation from the Soviet Union. The Soviet base in Tartus could ``create a problem'' for Israel in wartime because Israel may be reluctant to harm a Soviet-flagged facility, he said.
