Prophecy on the Total Destruction of Damascus - Isaiah 17

Isaiah 17

1 The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.

This is a very clear prophecy of Damascus that has yet to happen. It refers to Damascus being a ruinous heap. God declares that Damascus will be completely destroyed. Although it has been captured many times by many peoples, it has never ceased from its existence.

Damascus is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. It has a present population of 1,711,000 (2009 est). It was first mentioned in the Bible in Genesis 14:15 in the War of the Kings where Abraham led a successful rescue of Lot who was captured when dwelling in Sodom.

Damascus was also mentioned earliest in the Egyptian records and was part of the Hyksos Kingdom as early as 1720BC. Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, the Umayyad caliphate, Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Ottomans, French and many others all once held sway here. For more information of Biblical background of Damascus, read here. For more secular history of Damascus, please read here.

The prophecy may be fulfilled soon. A number of incidents may just tilt the balance over Damascus.

1. Accidents -  Jane's Weekly Defense (19 Sept 2007) see below.
2. In the event of an Iranian nuclear missile strike against Israel - when Iran succeeds in obtaining or manufacturing their first nuclear warhead, they will most likely take a strike at Israel taking the route over Syria. Some speculate that Israel could scurry the strike and take the  missile down on mid-route. Perhaps it can drop over Damascus.
3. Civil war - watch the present civil war in Syria. The stakes are high and tensions are mounting where a possible nuclear accident can happen during this scuffle between Assad and the Opposition troops.

All we can say is that the stage is being set for the fulfillment of this prophecy clearer than any previous periods of time.

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An accidental explosion in a secret weapons facility in Syria killed dozens of Syrian and Iranian military engineers as they were trying to mount a chemical warhead on a Scud missile in July, a report has claimed.Fifteen military personnel and “dozens” of Iranian advisers died when the fuel for the missile caught fire and the weapon exploded.

A cloud of chemical and nerve gases, that included the deadly VX and Sarin agents as well as mustard gas, was sent across the facility in the northern city of Aleppo, according to a new report in Jane's Defence Weekly.

The July 26 explosion had been reported earlier by the official Syrian news agency Sana, which said that only 15 Syrian military personnel were killed and 50 others injured in an accident involving “very explosive products.” It made no mention of Iranian officers also being killed in the blast, which it said was not an act of sabotage.

The engineers were trying to weaponise a Syrian-made Scud missile with a range of around 300 miles when the explosion occurred.

The Iranian engineers were working at the facility as part of a 2005 strategic co-operation agreement between the two countries, whose close ties are seen by Israel and the United States as a major threat to regional security.

Jane’s Defence Weekly said the project included Iranian assistance to develop five pilot facilities in Syria to produce chemical weapons, allowing Syria to advance its programme of such non-conventional weapons that it began in the 1970s.

The report coincided with widespread speculation that an audacious Israeli air strike against another Syrian facility two weeks ago may have destroyed a nuclear shipment from North Korea.