IN APRIL, A team of army soldiers will begin moving €23 million worth of equipment from Syria to a port in Lebanon where it will meet a chartered ship to return it all to Ireland.
The operation will move in excess of 280,000 separate pieces of equipment in dozens of containers and also Armoured Personnel Carriers and heavy duty weaponry.
This week The Journal met two of the team managing the plan in Camp Faouar on The Golan inside Syria.
The Irish Defence Forces is ending its ten-year involvement in peacekeeping as part of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Mission inside Syria next month.
The men leading the preparation for the move are logistics experts Battalion Quartermaster Colm Donnelly, who is stationed in Finner Camp in County Donegal, and Captain Andrew O’Neill who is normally based in The Curragh.
As their colleagues patrolled the increasingly violent surrounds outside the camp, the men have been keeping stocks of food, clothing and equipment at the level required for a functioning camp.
Both are experts in logistics and have decades of experience between them.
Since July they have been planning the execution of the biggest movement of Defence Forces equipment in the last ten years.
O’Neill said the plan has been in constant planning and preparation and will involve multiple convoys to make it all run smoothly.
“It is a mammoth task,” the captain said.
“It was daunting at first when we started thinking about it but when we got into it we created a plan.
“This is not something we started a few weeks ago, this is something that has been a long drawn out process when we got together in our form up back in July. We’ve been thinking about this the whole way through and making plans the whole way through,” he said.
The plan is a complex one – they are leaving one troubled country and passing through another, Lebanon, which is tense right now due to daily bombardments between Hezbollah and Israeli forces.
During The Journal’s visit to the troops there were multiple incidents of shelling and bombings in Damascus and the village of Hadar to the north west of the Irish camp. Dozens of strikes have happened in Lebanon also. It is a dynamic area and the tense atmosphere changes hourly.
Their plan is not just complicated by the movement of multiple convoys it will be further stress tested by the situation on the ground which includes travelling over winding, narrow and poorly paved roads.
The team have asked, for security reasons, not to identify the specific days when the convoys will move or where they will travel, but their ultimate destination will be one of two ports in the region with their preference for Beirut.
O’Neill said: “Lebanon, at the moment, is extremely volatile and it can really kick off at a moment’s notice – so we have contingency plans in place for a different port.”
There they will meet a ship, chartered by the Irish Defence Forces to move the equipment home over 21 days of sailing – out through the contested waters off Lebanon, through the Mediterranean and home to Dublin.
O’Neill said the first point of the plan was to reduce the load coming home – and that has been achieved by deciding on what was not needed back at home in Ireland.
That reduction has been achieved by sending some equipment to their colleagues in South Lebanon attached to the UNIFIL mission there.
Outside their logistics base there is a specialist heavily armoured digger used to clear minefields and roadside bombs – that along with other critical equipment will go to the Irish base Camp Shamrock near the town of At Tiri inside Lebanon.
Another part of the plan was that they needed to decide on what equipment was critical to achieving the mission until the day they close down the Irish operation in Syria.
There is a need to seek authorisation from the Syrian and Lebanese Governments to allow the convoys pass through their countries – the equipment will include weapons and ammunition.
The two men will go home with the rest of 68 Infantry Group but a team from Ireland, known as J4 Logistics Group from Dublin, will arrive to manage the security and loading of the equipment which will include 12 MOWAG armoured personnel carriers and other vehicles.
Donnelly said that each individual shipment must have manifests for not just individual containers but also individual boxes within those containers and in minute and accurate detail.
It is understood that much of the equipment will then form part of the mission of the European Battlegroup which Ireland will begin participating in in 2025.
The Battlegroup is a concept developed by the European Union in which member states provide military units to respond to crises – it will be managed by Germany with Ireland providing elements.
Donnelly said: “I am in logistics since 2013 and have been on five trips overseas in this capacity and this is the best thing I’ve ever experience wise for the simple reasons that we were able to come up with the plan, implement it and see it work.”
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