A Syrian official said on Monday that his nation will target Israel's civilian population centers with long-range ballistic missiles in the war his country expects to take place in the coming six months.

In an interview with Defense News Weekly, an unnamed senior official in the Syrian Defense Ministry said his nation is looking to avoid a classic war scenario, recognizing that Israel clearly has the upper-hand on the battlefield.

“This will be a war of attrition, which the Israelis are not good at,“ the official explained, adding that it “will be more like a war between cities than a war on the battlefield.”

Military experts say that Syria learned from Israel's war with Lebanon's Hizballah last summer that it does not need to win pitched tank and infantry battles against the Jewish state in order to emerge victorious. Damascus now realizes that establishing itself as a major threat to Israel's civilian infrastructure is sufficient to extract major concessions during the peace negotiations that will follow the conflict.