Tiyas Air Base (T4)

Located north of the town of Tiyas and west of ancient Palmyra in Homs Governorate, T4 is Syria's largest air base, with a main runway and two secondary runways each roughly 3 kilometers long. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union was granted periodic access to the base for naval aviation deployments. Through most of the Syrian civil war, the base was jointly used by the Syrian Arab Air Force and Russian forces as a logistics and air support node for operations across central and eastern Syria, while also hosting a substantial Iranian military footprint: Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) units reportedly used T4 for drone development and deployment from at least 2017, supported by regular Ilyushin-76 cargo flights from Iran, and the base has also been described as a transit point for arms shipments toward Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel struck the base repeatedly during this period — including in 2018 and October 2021 — citing Iranian entrenchment as the target.

The fall of the Assad government in December 2024 opened a new chapter. Syrian Free Army fighters took control of the base that month, and by early 2025 Turkey was in talks with Syria's interim government over a potential joint defense pact that could include new Turkish bases in central Syria. According to Reuters, Turkish military teams visited and assessed T4, the nearby Palmyra air base, and Hama's main airport in March 2025, evaluating runways, hangars, and infrastructure as possible sites for Turkish air defense systems and drones. A follow-up Turkish inspection planned for March 25, 2025 was cancelled after Israeli airstrikes hit T4 and Palmyra hours earlier. Israel struck T4 again in early April 2025, with the runway, control tower, hangars, and grounded aircraft reportedly destroyed; a regional intelligence official described the strikes as a message that Israel would not accept an expanded Turkish presence, and a source close to Turkey called the base “totally unusable” afterward.

Since those strikes, open-source reporting has not confirmed that Turkey established operational control over T4. Israeli-Turkish friction over Syrian air infrastructure has continued into 2026, most visibly in an August 18, 2026 Israeli strike on the separate Abu al-Duhur airbase in Idlib province, which Israel said targeted a prospective Turkish deployment there; Turkey condemned the strike, and Syrian and Turkish officials denied any plan for a permanent Turkish presence at that site. The United States has said it is working on a deconfliction mechanism among Turkey, Israel, and Syria to manage this recurring friction. T4's current status reflects that broader pattern: an active Syrian airbase whose infrastructure was heavily damaged in 2025, assessed by Turkey as a potential deployment site, but without confirmed Turkish control as of this writing.