Why Israel thinks it won in Syria

Tel Aviv grabs land on Golan Heights after Bashar al-Assad flees.

Originally published by The Electronic Intifada.

By Asa Winstanley and Ali Abunimah, 9 December 2024

The morning after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled the capital Damascus, Israeli leaders toured occupied Syrian territory to oversee a new invasion. (Kobi Gideon/GPO)

Israeli tanks were reportedly on the outskirts of Damascus early on Tuesday, as Israel launched airstrikes across the country that are being called “the heaviest in the history of Syria.”

The escalating Israeli attack on the country comes after President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia in the early hours of Sunday as US- and Turkish-backed insurgents took the capital Damascus.

Benjamin Netanyahu immediately claimed credit for the fall of Assad, whose family had ruled Syria for five decades.

The Israeli prime minister’s comments came as he visited the Israeli-occupied sector of Syria’s Golan Heights on Sunday morning.

“This is a historic day,” Netanyahu said, “a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hizballah, the main supporters of the Assad regime.”

Israeli occupation forces exploited the fall of the government by bombing Syria, occupying additional Syrian territories and taking out vital public infrastructure, defense equipment and airbases.

Fresh Israeli air strikes hit Damascus and southern Syria, destroying “advanced weapon systems and weapons production facilities” and leaving Syria more vulnerable than ever before.

Airstrikes on the capital appear to have targeted the immigration and passport office. A huge fire was reported as consuming the building.

On Monday, Reuters, citing Syrian security officials, reported that the massive Israeli air raids “bombed at least three major Syrian army air bases that housed dozens of helicopters and jets.”

The Syrian territories newly occupied by Israel include Jabal al-Sheikh, also known as Mount Hermon, which lies on the Syrian border with Lebanon. Israel’s government press office emphasized it was “the first time since 1973” they had occupied the area.

The Israeli prime minister also announced he was unilaterally ending the 1974 disengagement agreement between Syria and Israel, claiming that the UN-endorsed arrangement had “collapsed.”

Insurgent blitzkrieg

The downfall of Syria’s government comes after an 11-day blitzkrieg, launched out of the northern enclave of Idlib, where the armed insurgents maintained a stronghold bordering Turkey since a 2016 truce brokered by Russia and Turkey.

In late November, the insurgents stormed south out of Idlib through successive Syrian cities – Aleppo, Hama, Homs and finally Damascus.

Although backed by regional and international allies, the Syrian army surrendered most of its positions without any fighting, an indication that there had been a deal assuring Assad’s exit.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden asserted on Sunday that the failure of Russia, Iran and Hizballah to defend the Syrian government was “the direct result of the blows that Ukraine [and] Israel have delivered” with the “unflagging support of the United States.”

Some analyses suggest that Iran and Russia, the Syrian government’s chief backers, concluded that the government under Assad was too hollowed out and could not be saved.

Following years of a war that caused horrific death, displacement and destruction, Assad’s leaving without a fight spared additional bloodshed on a massive scale – at least for now.

His departure has been followed by scenes of jubilation as Syrians have reunited with loved ones from formerly cut off parts of the country or newly released from prisons.

But in a deeply divided society, many will remain in fear of what the new rulers, with their notorious record of atrocities, might bring.

In episodes reminiscent of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, there has been looting and revenge killings of fleeing Syrian soldiers.

Libya, whose leader was toppled and killed in the US-backed 2011 insurgency, is a cautionary tale: Initial hope and jubilation were quickly dashed. Thirteen years later, the country remains in a dire state and many people fear civil war.

The US would far prefer a chaotic Syria broadly under its control to a unified country that opposes Israel.

Keeping Syria in rubble

Since 2014, the US has maintained a direct military occupation of large parts of Syria, primarily in the oil-rich northeastern region, where it is aided by local proxy militias.

When Donald Trump was president for the first time, he withdrew some of the US troops but a reported 900 remain.

Dana Stroul, then a fellow at the AIPAC-affiliated Washington Institute for Near East Policy, co-chaired the bipartisan “Syria Study Group” setting out goals for US policy. She explained its recommendations in 2019 and how the US would aim to weaken the Syrian state and immiserate its people.

The first goal, Stroul said, was to maintain the US military occupation of the most “resource rich” one-third of Syrian territory, encompassing its oil fields and its “agricultural powerhouse.”

In addition to “diplomatic and political isolation of the Assad regime,” Stroul emphasized the importance of US economic sanctions and preventing the war-torn country from rebuilding.

Most of Syria, Stroul said , “is rubble.”

The commission she co-chaired recommended, as she put it, that the United States use its enormous international leverage to “hold the line on preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria.”

From 2021-2023, she had a direct hand in implementing these policies as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East – the Pentagon’s top civilian official for the region.

Stroul is now back at the Washington Institute, the Israel lobby’s most influential think tank, as director of research.

The US has for years been working hard to dominate Syria’s material wealth.

Rebranded al-Qaida

The lightning offensive from Idlib was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which emerged out of al-Qaida.

The group’s leader is Abu Muhammad al-Julani – formerly the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria and once an emissary from the Islamic State of Iraq (which later became ISIS).

Under al-Julani, Jabhat al-Nusra carried out numerous atrocities against Syrian civilians, according to human rights groups.

Human Rights Watch investigated rebel atrocities in the coastal region around the city of Latakia and in a 2013 report stated that al-Nusra and its allied groups carried out “premeditated and organized” war crimes, including “the systematic killing of entire families.”

Nor did such abuses stop with the rebranding to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Human Rights Watch says it has documented severe abuses by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the Idlib enclave it has controlled in recent years.

“Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s crackdown on perceived opposition to their rule mirrors some of the same oppressive tactics used by the Syrian government,” Lama Fakih, the human rights group’s deputy Middle East director said in 2019. “There is no legitimate excuse for rounding up opponents and arbitrarily detaining and torturing them.”

In March, VOA reported that protests erupted over several days in about 20 locations in the Idlib enclave.

“Protesters chant slogans against HTS leader Abu Muhammad al-Julani, demanding the release of prisoners held by the extremist group and an end to its security grip on the enclave,” the US government-funded media network said.

Another uprising broke out in May against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s “increasingly dictatorial” rule, including allegedly torturing prisoners to death.

In a statement on Sunday following the fall of the Damascus government, Human Rights Watch accused Assad of “countless atrocities, crimes against humanity, and other abuses during his 24-year presidency.” It also said that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other “non-state armed groups” that “launched the offensive” from Idlib on 27 November, are responsible “for human rights abuses and war crimes.”

Al-Julani has never been held to account.

On the contrary, US and British officials are reportedly discussing the possibility of removing him and his group from their designated terror lists.

It even seems likely that al-Julani has been groomed to lead Syria, as Western media are working hard to whitewash his image with sympathetic interviews and coverage.

These rebranding efforts rely on assertions that al-Julani and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have left their past behind.

But that wasn’t always the view. The US government itself asserted in 2017 that “HTS is a merger and any group that merges into it becomes part of al-Qaida’s Syrian network.”

It was on that basis that the United States placed a $10 million bounty on al-Julani – whose real name is Ahmed al-Shara – a reward that officially remains available to anyone who can help the FBI locate him.

Biden admits funding of al-Qaida-linked groups

Over the last 13 years, the various armed groups working together to overthrow the Syrian government have been backed by the US, Gulf states, Turkey and Israel itself.

In a rare moment of honesty – one he later had to apologize for – then US Vice President Joe Biden admitted in 2014 that the surge of funding had aided groups the US considers extremists.

Biden said that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and others “were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … [that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars, tens, thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad.”

“Except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaida and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world,” Biden added.

What Biden did not mention is Operation Timber Sycamore, the massive amount of US funding and training that the CIA, under President Barack Obama, also poured into the multibillion dollar Syria proxy war.

In 2017, The New York Times called this “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the CIA.”

The logic was well summed up by Jake Sullivan, currently Biden’s national security adviser, in a 2012 email to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“AQ [Al-Qaida] is on our side in Syria,” Sullivan wrote.

Axis of Resistance setback

The last time al-Qaida and other insurgent groups were present in the Golan Heights, Israel established warm relations with them, treating their fighters in a specially constructed field hospital and even arming them.

Netanyahu on Sunday signaled the revival of that policy. He said that Israel would pursue “the same approach we maintained when we set up a field hospital here that treated thousands of Syrians injured during the civil war. Hundreds of Syrian children were born here in Israel.”

Since Syria was for decades the backbone of the Axis of Resistance to US hegemony and Israeli settler-colonialism, many in the region view Assad’s downfall as a major strategic win for Israel and the US.

Syria was a vital link in the military supply chain – a land bridge between Iran and its regional ally Hizballah. That Lebanese resistance faction ousted Israeli occupation forces from South Lebanon in 2000 and repelled the attempted Israeli ground invasion which began at the start of October this year.

The Israeli ground offensive concluded at the end of November with an uneven truce which Israel has already violated more than 100 times, according to the UN.

Israel was reportedly desperate for a ceasefire with Hizballah, since its invasion was unable to proceed more than a few kilometers from the border and its military was unable to hold any territory.

Its troops were simply beaten by superior Lebanese fighters.

Only hours after Damascus fell to the insurgents, Israel launched a new incursion into Syria, Israeli media reported on Sunday.

Israeli tanks and soldiers occupied new Syrian land in the Golan Heights, calling it a “buffer zone.” Israel has occupied most of Syria’s southwestern Golan region since its invasion of 1967 – expelling most of the Syrian population there.

Israel unilaterally annexed the occupied Syrian territory in 1981 and has colonized the land with about 20,000 settlers.

Pro-Israel insurgents?

Assad’s opponents are celebrating what they hope will be a new dawn for Syria. But many people in the region view the insurgents’ offensive as deliberately timed to aid Israel.

Netanyahu’s claim of responsibility for the fall of Damascus to the insurgents on Sunday morning will only reinforce that view.

Former al-Qaida leader al-Julani, for his part, sounds almost like a pro-Israel lobbyist. In one recent video he made reference to what he termed “Iran’s wars against the region” – echoing language frequently used by Netanyahu since October 2023.

Al-Qaida and other similar groups tend to view the region through an extremist Sunni Muslim sectarian lens, considering Shia Muslim-majority Iran and the Shia Muslim group Hizballah as mortal enemies. Whether tacitly or openly, that allows such groups to make common cause with Israel and the United States – as US official Jake Sullivan acknowledged in his notorious 2012 email.

“We were very happy when you attacked Hizballah,” one “opposition activist” recently told an Israeli journalist who aired his comments on TV. “We are happy to help you,” the activist added. “We love the state of Israel and we have never been its enemy, because it doesn’t harm anyone if no one harms it.”

In another interview with The Times of Israel, one “rebel commander” told the news site that his US-backed Free Syrian Army were ready to normalize relations with Israel – despite the ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and the decades-long illegal Israeli occupation of Syrian territory.

“We will go for full peace with Israel,” the commander said. “Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, we have never made any critical comments against Israel, unlike Hizballah, who stated they aim to liberate Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.”

The insurgent commander speaking to the Israeli news site also hinted that he may already have been in contact with Israeli officials.

Even if these unidentified figures are not speaking officially, such whitewashing of the genocidal Israeli regime will not fill Palestinians with hope, especially those in Gaza.

Speaking to an Israeli TV channel, Israeli military intelligence officer Mordechai Kedar said that he is “in constant contact with the leaders of the Syrian opposition factions … They are ready for a peace agreement with Israel, only if they get to control Syria and Lebanon.”

Such statements will alarm people in Lebanon as a warning that their country could be the next target, part of an effort to draw Hizballah into a civil war.

“Leaders of Syrian opposition factions have conveyed to Tel Aviv that they are planning to open an Israeli embassy in Damascus and Beirut,” Kedar claimed.

Reporting on the comments of another “rebel commander” to Israeli government broadcaster Channel 12, The Times of Israel noted last week that the “offensive was launched just as a ceasefire went into effect” between Israel and Hizballah.

According to this commander, the timing was no coincidence.

“We looked at the [ceasefire] agreement with Hizballah and understood that this is the time … We will not let Hizballah fight in our areas and we will not let the Iranians take root there,” he said.

The commander said his goal was to replace the Syrian government with one that has good relations with Israel, the news site reported.

Some of this might be spin, wishful thinking or outright fabrication. But given more than a decade of US backing for these groups, their sponsors clearly consider them much preferable to groups whose declared goal is resistance to Israel.

Sectarian plots

The newly dominant insurgents have longstanding grudges against the resistance.

Hizballah intervened in Syria in 2013 after the US proxy war against the country that began two years earlier came close to toppling the government in Damascus.

The group and its Axis of Resistance ally Iran – along with Russia, which has military bases in the country – prevented the government from being overthrown.

With the militias that have taken over Syria now in a position to dominate the country, the future of the resistance axis is uncertain.

Some Israeli planners are plotting to carve up Syria into warring ethnic and sectarian cantons – a classic colonial divide and rule strategy.

In an interview published by The Times of Israel on Monday, Israeli military intelligence colonel Wahabi Anan Wahabi laid out his plan for what the news site described as “a loose confederation of four ethnic substates.”

Wahabi said that “the country is already divided into four cantons. The next step is to make this division official.”

“The modern nation-state has failed in the Middle East,” he claimed.

“American-Israeli emergency plan”

The US closely coordinated the Idlib offensive with Israel.

An informed source told Said Arikat, the respected Washington correspondent of the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds, that the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham offensive was planned in coordination with the US, Israel and Turkey.

It “came as a result of an American-Israeli ‘emergency plan’ coordinated by the administration of President Joe Biden with Turkey” and that it “was implemented according to an American vision for the day after the ceasefire agreement between Lebanon and Israel.”

Arikat wrote that his source had previously trained insurgents including the al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and its successor Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in bases in Jordan and Turkey until 2021.

The Israeli invasion on Sunday appears to have been in preparation for some time.

Only one week before the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham offensive was launched, Israeli media reported that the chief of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, had been in Turkey for a meeting with the head of a Turkish intelligence agency.

Also one week before the offensive, Israel began new illegal construction in the demilitarized zone between the Syrian-controlled and the Israeli-occupied sectors of the Golan Heights in violation of the 1974 disengagement agreement.

According to UNDOF, the United Nations peacekeeping force which monitors the ceasefire, these were “severe violations.”

Syrians, regardless of their political outlook, will want to see their country back on its feet, united and independent as soon as possible. No supporter of Palestinian liberation has anything to fear from a truly sovereign Syria.

That is precisely why there are many powerful outside forces, principally Israel and the United States, who want Syria to remain weak and become subservient to their agenda. If division, dependency and chaos are the only ways to achieve that, then that is what they will foster and foment.

Israel, for its part, is wasting no time capitalizing on the tumultuous and historic events to seize more land and consolidate its genocidal grip on the region.