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ISRAEL EXPANDS INVASION OF SYRIA, LAUNCHING MASSIVE AIRSTRIKES AFTER
ASSAD’S FALL  
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Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous
December 10, 2024
Drop Site
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_ Israel’s message is clear: regardless of who governs Syria,
Israel will ensure it does not possess the basic military capacity to
defend itself. _

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As armed opposition militias marched into Damascus and overthrew the
government of Bashar al-Assad, Israel wasted no time in unleashing a
massive campaign of airstrikes across Syria. While statues of Assad
and his father, Hafez, were being pulled down from city squares across
the country and thousands of political prisoners were being freed,
Israeli tanks crossed through the occupied Golan Heights and invaded
deeper into Syrian territory, occupying a “buffer zone” created in
1974. By Tuesday, Israeli forces had penetrated farther into the
country, occupying a swath of territory twice the size of the Gaza
Strip.

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the bombing and
invasion as self-defense, many of the military sites destroyed by
Israel were defensive weapons systems and conventional military
facilities. Netanyahu declared that the Golan Heights, occupied by
Israel for nearly 60 years, will remain part of Israel “for
eternity,” citing its strategic importance for Israeli security. On
Monday, Netanyahu heralded what he called “a new and dramatic
chapter” in the history of the Middle East. “The collapse of the
Syrian regime is a direct result,” he said, “of the severe blows
with which we have struck Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.”

As Netanyahu spoke, the Israeli military was expanding its sweeping
campaign to degrade or eliminate Syrian military deterrence
capabilities standard among nation states. Israel’s message is
clear: regardless of who governs Syria, Israel will ensure it does not
possess the basic military capacity to defend itself.

“It's showing Syrian people straight away, ‘Our problem is with
you. It's with your sovereignty, it's with your existence, it's with
your security. What we're doing now is making sure that you are
totally defenseless. We're exploiting this moment of chaos to
completely disarm you and make sure that you're completely defenseless
in the future so that we can do whatever we like,’” said Robin
Yassin-Kassab, a British-Syrian analyst
[[link removed]] and co-author of the book _Burning
Country: Syrians in Revolution and War_. “There's never been such
crazy Israeli bombing in Syria. They're arranging to disarm Syria
completely, to make it completely defenseless and to humiliate it.
That's the way that Syrians are understanding it as well. They are
humiliating Syria.”

The U.N. special envoy for Syria Geir Pederse called Israel’s
military operations in Syria “very troubling” in a briefing in
Geneva. “We are continuing to see Israeli movements and bombardments
into Syrian territory,” he said. “This needs to stop."

The Biden administration has not called on Israel to halt its military
operations nor condemned its occupation of more Syrian territory.
“The Syrian army abandoned its positions in the area around the
negotiated Israeli-Syrian buffer zone, which potentially creates a
vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations,”
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a briefing on
Monday. “Israel has said that these actions are temporary to defend
its borders. These are not permanent actions.” British foreign
secretary David Lammy likewise defended Israel’s attacks in Syria,
saying “there are legitimate security concerns for Israel,
particularly in the context of a country that has housed ISIS, Daesh,
and Al-Qaeda.”

Since Assad’s removal, Israel has launched over 300 airstrikes
across the country, according
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Human Rights, hitting Syrian military installations, airports, weapons
depots, radar and air defense systems, and aircraft squadrons in
Damascus, Homs, Hama, Latakia, and elsewhere, in what an Israeli
security source called “one of the largest attack operations in the
history of its air force,” in comments to Israeli Army radio. The
Israeli navy also carried out a large-scale operation on Monday night
to destroy the Syrian navy fleet.

“It's with American and British and German weapons that they're
bombing the hell out of Syria,” Yassin-Kassab told Drop Site. “Is
that really the message that the Western world wants to give the
Syrians? This is a moment where every right thinking person in the
world should be giving them solidarity, asking them what they need,
how can they help?” he said. “What's happening is that the most
powerful states in the world are supporting the terror bombing of
Syria.”

Israeli tanks and troops have expanded the Israeli occupation, taking
over former Syrian army positions on the highest point
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al-Sheikh, which Israel calls Mount Hermon, and spread across a buffer
zone in place since a 1974 armistice agreement that officially ended
the war between Syria and Israel. In the town of Quneitra in the Golan
Heights, reports emerged of Israeli troops invading the town and
turning its justice department building into a military base. Video
and photographs posted
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soldiers show them posing inside local Syrian government offices and
spraying abandoned homes with bullets, as well as Israeli tanks
positioned in the streets. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on
Monday said the military would seize the entire buffer zone to protect
Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights, which Israel has illegally
occupied since 1967. The area is home to Israel's only ski resort and
some Israelis have already begun celebrating
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potential expansion deeper into Syria. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
and Turkey have all condemned Israel’s advance, while UN
spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric on Monday said
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constitutes a violation of the 1974 Disengagement Agreement.

An image of an Israeli soldier in Qunietra, southern Syria, as posted
by Younis Tirawi on X.

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank my friend,
President-elect Donald Trump for acceding to my request to recognize
Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, in 2019,” Netanyahu
said. “The importance of this historic recognition has been
underscored today. The Golan Heights will be an inseparable part of
the State of Israel forever.”

Yassin-Kassab said that the U.S. and other nations’ diehard support
for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has empowered Netanyahu to attack
and invade Syria. “It would be much more sensible for Israel to try
to come to terms with the fact that they need to make amends to the
people whose country they've stolen and that they need to get on good
respectful relations with the neighbors,” he said. “But there's no
sign of that at all. The message that they're sending to the Syrians
is: ‘We have no respect for you, we have no respect for you
whatsoever.’”

ASSAD AND ISRAEL

Throughout the past year, Israel has repeatedly bombed Syria in
strikes that were overwhelmingly aimed at Iranian and Hezbollah
personnel, sites, and weapons shipments. Assad, however, never once
ordered retaliatory strikes against Israel; the Syrian government
generally accepted the periodic bombing by Tel Aviv as the cost of
keeping Iran as one of its most powerful allies. And Syrian territory
remained a key pipeline for Iranian support to Hezbollah. Israel
“used to bomb Iranian and Iranian militia and Hezbollah targets, any
weaponry which could potentially be transferred to Lebanon and then
potentially used against [Israel]. That's what they used to bomb. But
they largely left the Syrian [government] stuff alone,” said
Yassin-Kassab. “They left it alone because they knew very well that
that's not for use against us, that's for use against the Syrian
people. And that's fine. Now they're bombing everything they can all
over the country.”

Under Assad, Syria was officially a part of the Axis of Resistance,
the loose coalition of both nation-states and non-state actors in the
Middle East who pledged to jointly oppose Israel. But unlike the other
members—Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis in Yemen and the Islamic
Resistance in Iraq—Syria did not launch attacks against Israel in
solidarity with the armed resistance in Gaza despite bordering the
Israeli-occupied Golan. “It's been by far the most peaceful border
that Israel has had. It's been much more peaceful than borders with
states with whom they've had peace agreements,” said Yassin-Kassab.
“There's been more trouble on the border with Egypt and on the
border with Jordan than there has been on the border with the occupied
Golan Heights even though the Syrian regime pretended to still be in a
state of war with Israel.”

Prior to the uprising in 2011, when Syrians took to the streets to
demand major reforms, and the subsequent brutal response from Assad,
the longtime Syrian leader was engaged in secret negotiations brokered
by the U.S. to make a deal with Israel.

“Assad had acknowledged that peace with Israel would require him to
break military ties with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and he said he
was ready to do so once he had Israel's commitment to return to Syria
all territory seized by Israel during the June 1967 War,” said
Ambassador Frederic Hof, who served as the special coordinator for
regional affairs in the US Department of State’s Office of the
Special Envoy for Middle East Peace where he conducted the backchannel
peace mediation between Israel and Syria. “A one-on-one meeting
between Assad and me on February 28, 2011 and a subsequent meeting
with Benjamin Netanyahu and his team a few evenings later convinced
me, at the time, that there was a clear pathway to an Israel-Syria
peace treaty.”

Hof told Drop Site that Assad had assured him that “Lebanon would
follow Syria into peace with Israel, with Hezbollah becoming what he
described as a normal Lebanese political party. But I still had
profound doubts that Iran and Hezbollah could be handled so easily.
The things Assad said he wanted in exchange for this massive strategic
reorientation were the complete, phased return of Syrian territory and
the gradual lifting of American sanctions. He knew the Israeli
withdrawal would take three to five years. And I told him American
sanctions would be lifted in conjunction with Syria implementing its
treaty-related commitments.” Hoff, who is now a Senior Fellow at
Bard College's Center for Civic Engagement, said Assad’s violent
response to the protests in 2011 killed the deal.

As Syria descended into civil war, Assad’s relationship with Iran,
Hezbollah, and Russia deepened to a point where his very survival
depended on them. Russian forces carried out some of the most deadly
attacks of the more than decade-long war; they led to the recapture of
territory seized by opposition militias and exacted a horrifying toll
on Syrian civilians. Both Hezbollah and Iran deployed forces inside
Syria to aid the Assad government and Hezbollah’s militias played a
decisive role in fighting armed opponents of the Syrian government,
allowing Damascus to reclaim and hold lost territory. Over the past 14
months, as Israel expanded its wars in Gaza and Lebanon, conducted
attacks on Iran, and repeatedly struck Hezbollah and Iranian militias
in Syria, Assad’s grip on power became more fragile. Russia’s
focus on the war in Ukraine meant the unleashing of Moscow’s massive
airpower to defend the Syrian government was in question.

More than a decade of civil war fueled by multiple nations, combined
with crippling U.S.-led international sanctions, resulted in the loss
of government control of large swaths of Syrian territory to various
groups backed by foreign powers, including the U.S., Turkey, and
several Gulf states. While Syria has historically portrayed itself as
a defender of the fight for Palestinian liberation and resistance
against Israel, Assad’s alliances were strategically rooted in
preserving his rule and to prevent the state of Syria from breaking
apart.

“Syria has not confronted Israel for 42 years, Syria is not an
active agent of resistance. Syria is a passive agent that enables
other parties’ resistance, specifically, Hezbollah. So it's a
resistance enabler, it serves as the lifeline, or a bridge, between
Iran and Hezbollah,” said Bassam Haddad, founding director of the
Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the
Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
“Before November 27 the role of Syria and the Axis of Resistance
could only be confirmed counterfactually. Now we have the
counterfactual, and it's a matter of time before we recognize the
weight of this role.”

In the aftermath of the recent Israeli attacks that wiped out much of
the upper echelon of Hezbollah’s leadership, including its secretary
general Hasan Nasrallah, and the eventual signing of a cessation of
hostilities between Israel and Lebanon in late November, Israel issued
a series of warnings to Assad: If Syria continued to support Hezbollah
in Lebanon by allowing weapons and personnel to pass through Syria,
“Not only the convoys will be attacked, but there will be prices to
pay in Syria as well.” Netanyahu bluntly warned, “Assad must
understand that he is playing with fire.”

“On the one hand, you cannot underestimate Syria's enabling factor
for the Axis of Resistance. On the other hand, that enabling function
has been diminished over the past year,” Haddad said. “It's not
about whether this regime was playing a role that was extremely
effective or not. It’s that its absence is going to allow for
alternatives that will further undermine the Axis of Resistance.”

HTS AND THE WEST

Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the powerful militant group Hayat Tahrir
al-Sham (HTS), which led the overthrow of Assad, has said his parents
were forcibly displaced from their home in the Golan Heights in 1967.
The nom-de-guerre he would later take, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, is a
reference to the region. “We are from a family originally from the
now-occupied Golan Heights. My grandfather, my father’s father, was
displaced from the Golan in 1967, after the Israeli Zionist army
entered the area,” Jolani said in a 2021 interview
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PBS. He also said the second Palestinian intifada in the early 2000s
was a pivotal event that shaped his politics. “I was 17 or 18 years
old at the time and I started thinking about how to fulfill my duties
defending a people who are oppressed by occupiers and invaders,” he
said. However, HTS has not commented on the latest Israeli attacks nor
have they explicitly threatened Israel in the past.

“For so many years, HTS and groups along the lines of HTS, have
actually been quite reserved in terms of voicing anything regarding
resistance to Israel,” Haddad said. “I have never seen anything of
significance that is an official line of HTS regarding centering
Palestine or threatening, challenging, or confronting Israel.”

Al-Jolani remains a U.S. government designated terrorist with a $10
million bounty on his head and HTS is formally considered a terror
organization by the U.S., U.K., and the UN. Though the Turkish
government also classified HTS as a terror organization in 2018,
Ankara has served as the group’s primary nation-state supporter.
Politico reported that there is a “furious debate” in the Biden
administration “over what to make of HTS” in Syria. “There is a
huge scramble to see if, and how, and when we can delist HTS,” a
U.S. official said. While some British officials have indicated that
HTS would likely be delisted, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it was
still “far too early” to remove the terror designation. "We have
all seen in other parts of history where we think there is a turning
point - it turns out not necessarily to be the better future that we
hope for," Starmer said. "We've got to make sure this is different."

HTS and Jolani have a long track record of brutality, torture, and
extrajudicial executions. Jolani was a member of both Al-Qaeda and
later ISIS and, even in the years since officially renouncing his ties
to those groups, retained a reputation for violent authoritarianism
during his time in charge of Idlib, where he consolidated HTS’s
control of the anti-Assad “Salvation Government.”

In February, large protests broke out against HTS rule as people
demanded an end to torture and other abuses, the release of political
and religious prisoners and called for political and economic reforms
and a return of land seized from local residents by HTS. Protesters
also called for Al Jolani’s removal as head of the administration in
Idlib. The UN documented
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of detainees in HTS prisons and security facilities with pipes, cables
and sticks, fingers broken and nails removed, prisoners held in
solitary confinement for months. “HTS detained men, women, and
children as young as seven. They included civilians detained for
criticizing HTS and participating in the demonstrations,” a UN
report issued in September found. “Pregnant women, women with small
children, and girls were also reportedly detained.” Both Christian
and Druze minorities faced persecution and Druze residents were
subject to forced conversion to Sunni Islam.

In a series of interviews
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Western media outlets over the past week, Jolani has sought to portray
himself as a new man who has learned from the past and believes in a
legal framework to ensure protection of minority rights. He made
similar claims in 2021 for a PBS “Frontline” documentary
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areas under his control continued. “Although HTS has cut formal ties
with al-Qaeda, engaged in self-promotional interviews with
international media, and attempted to rebrand itself as a legitimate
civic authority, it remains a potent source of a Salafi-jihadism that
restricts the religious freedom of non-conforming Sunni Muslims and
threatens the property, safety, and existence of religious minority
groups such as Alawites, Christians, and Druze,” a U.S.
government report
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religious freedom in Syria concluded in 2022. HTS “continued to
perpetrate some of the same human rights abuses—including torture,
forced disappearance, rape and other sexual violence, and killing in
detention.”

Jolani, who has insisted he now disavows such abuses and believes in
protecting minority rights, has suggested that HTS does not seek to
rule Syria and would dissolve itself as part of a process of
rebuilding a central government. On Tuesday, Mohammed al-Bashir—who
administered the HTS-led Salvation Government in northwest
Syria—assumed the role of interim prime minister to coordinate the
creation of a transitional government. The announcement was made after
meetings that included Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, the last prime
minister under Assad’s government. Whether HTS will dominate a new
government remains an open question, particularly given the fractious
nature of the armed groups that fought Assad’s rule in Syria, some
of which have also fought one another. Should HTS consolidate its
control of Syrian state institutions, it could represent a dismantling
of the largely secular nature of the Syrian government that existed
for decades under the rule of Assad and his father.

“HTS as a group generally and Jolani in particular has come to
accept the idea that you can't really operate independently of the
existing order of nation-states and somehow think you're just going to
blaze through and dismantle all nation-states and set up a worldwide
caliphate,” said Dr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a scholar on Islamist
groups who has monitored the evolution of HTS. “A close analogy I
would give is Afghanistan's Taliban, because the Taliban has this
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. But they don't say, ‘Now we've got
to go and push beyond the borders and take Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and
push into China.’ No, they accept the idea of having ties with
nation-states.” Al-Tamimi told Drop Site that Jolani “has
definitely moved on and developed a more, I think, realistic
understanding of, ‘How am I going to be taken seriously as an actor
and how am I going to have a viable prospect [of] wielding political
power?’ Because if you go down the Al-Qaeda and Islamic State route,
ultimately you're just going to have the entire world against you.”

Ambassador Hof, the former U.S. envoy, told Drop Site he remains
concerned about Jolani and HTS’s history with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but
believes the U.S. should engage with them. “Mr. Ahmad al-Sharaa and
his colleagues are saying all the right things about inclusivity,
protecting minorities, reconciliation, and reconstruction. The HTS
human rights record in Idlib Province was not, however, a good one,”
Hof said. “The U.S. should, I think, give him the benefit of the
doubt and work closely with Turkey to influence him in the direction
of inclusive, non-sectarian governance.”

Hof said that once the security situation stabilizes, the U.S. should
dispatch a special envoy to Syria and reopen the U.S. embassy in
Damascus. “There is a lot of uncertainty about how Syria will be
governed in the post-Assad era,” he said. “But one thing is
absolutely certain: Assad's departure permits Syrians to think about a
better future, one featuring lives lived with dignity and freedom.
Such thoughts were simply incredible and impossible with the Assad
family and its entourage still on the scene.”

At the White House, President Joe Biden hailed
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policy in the region as having helped bring about Assad’s downfall.
“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle
East,” he said. “For the first time ever, neither Russia nor Iran
nor Hezbollah could defend this abhorrent regime in Syria. And this is
a direct result of the blows that Ukraine, Israel have delivered upon
their own self-defense with unflagging support of the United
States.”

What went unmentioned in Biden’s celebration of the fall of Assad
was the role the U.S. played in the Syrian civil war. In addition to
openly supporting and arming Kurdish-led forces, the CIA ran a covert
program to arm and train so-called “moderate rebels” from the Free
Syrian Army in the early years of the war at an estimated cost
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roughly $1 billion a year. Over the past decade, the U.S. has carried
out airstrikes in Syria, primarily against ISIS forces, and is
believed to have continued its clandestine training and arming of
opposition forces.

In a statement on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the
U.S. would recognize and support a Syrian government that would
“respect the rights of minorities, facilitate the flow of
humanitarian assistance to all in need, prevent Syria from being used
as a base for terrorism or posing a threat to its neighbors, and
ensure that any chemical or biological weapons stockpiles are secured
and safely destroyed.”

On Sunday, the U.S. struck more than 75 targets associated with the
Islamic State, according to U.S. Central Command. Meanwhile, some 900
U.S. troops remain deployed in Syria, including some working with
Kurdish forces in the northeast of the country.

When asked if the U.S. was going to have any direct engagement with
HTS, a senior administration official was vague. “On HTS, is there
contact? I think it’s safe to say there’s contact with all Syrian
groups as we work to do whatever we can to support the Syrians through
a transition,” the official said at a background briefing
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“HTS, obviously, will be an important component of that, and I think
we will intend to engage with them appropriately and with U.S.
interests in mind.”

The U.S., Israel, Turkey and other outside nations will be wrestling
to secure their influence over what comes next in Syria. Immediately
after Assad’s ouster, scenes of elation erupted across the country,
as prisoners were freed from dungeons and reunited with their
families, while the roads from Turkey to Syria were clogged with
thousands of Syrians looking to return home, despite all the
uncertainties that lie ahead following more than half a century of
Assad family rule.

“I try, as much as possible, to center the jubilation of the passing
of somebody who's made the lives of millions of people miserable,”
Haddad said. “But the fact is that as soon as this subsides, these
upcoming sober moments will allow us to see what happened for what it
is at the regional level, and that is the considerable diminution of
any forces that resist the domination and hegemony of the United
States and its allies in the region.”

_Jeremy Scahill is a journalist at Drop Site News, co-founder of The
Intercept, author of the books Blackwater and Dirty Wars. Reported
from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc._

_Sharif Abdel Kouddous is a journalist and editor at Drop Site News._

_Drop Site is not simply another non-partisan news organization. It is
completely independent journalism dedicated to principles of accuracy
and accountability. We are never afraid to take a stand for truth,
regardless of the partisan consequences or the risk of political or
personal unpopularity.  Drop Site is reader-supported. Consider
becoming a free or paid subscriber._

* Syria
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* Israel
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* Bashar al-Assad
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