The SPECTATOR James Snell Israel is playing a dangerous game in Syria 3 April 2025, 12:07pm

 The SPECTATOR

James Snell

Israel is playing a dangerous game in Syria

3 April 2025, 12:07pm

The aftermath of Israeli airstrikes in Damascus (Getty images)

As Donald Trump’s tariffs dominate the headlines, in the Middle East, Israel is stepping up its campaign against Syria. Israeli air strikes hit targets across the country, including the T4 airbase in Homs, last night. The latest campaign which has been conducted over the last few months – involving dozens of air strikes and the deployment of troops – is a big escalation.

The strikes in Syria overnight were intended to deter Turkey from making use of bases inside the country. The bombings were to ‘convey a message to Turkey,’ an Israeli official told the Jerusalem Post.

Turkey has made much of its closeness to the new leadership of Syria. It had an uneasy relationship with the now-dissolved Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) when the Islamists were in opposition, bottled up in Syria’s north. But now HTS’s former leadership is in power in Damascus, Turkey is determined to be an important player. It is talking up Turkish intelligence and material support for the offensive that toppled Bashar al-Assad, facilitating much of the diplomacy that introduces Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa to the wider world. Turkey is also looking primed to take over the running of many bases which, under the former regime, were given over to Russia, to Iran and its proxies, and to various criminal enterprises linked to the Assad government.

Turkey is moving into Syria; and the efforts of Turkish diplomacy have, elsewhere, been opposed to what its leaders see as a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks of himself as a leader of the world’s Muslims. Israel has always viewed him with suspicion. Many of the strikes on military bases and airports across Syria pre-empt what might have been Turkish occupation of those sites. 

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Yet that is not all. Overnight, ten people were reportedly killed in the southern city of Daraa, the cradle of the Syrian revolution against Assad, by Israeli forces. This is the third outbreak of deadly violence in twenty days between the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and men in Syria’s south. The reason given for an Israeli incursion into Syria’s south is to protect the Druze (a group with a notable population inside Israel proper and territory Israel occupied before December), who live in and around Suwayda in Syria’s south. But this looks like the thin end of the wedge towards partition, official or unofficial.

Israel’s line is that it will not tolerate the presence of HTS in Syria’s south. But much of the south was freed from the grip of Assad by former rebels from other groups, previously ‘reconciled’ with the regime, who reformed old units and moved on Damascus themselves. The IDF says the tribesmen in the south are HTS-aligned, although the evidence for that is unclear.

Israel’s strikes on Syria are hardly new: it has been hitting targets inside the war-ravaged country for over a decade. In the past, it mostly concentrated its efforts against the Shiite jihad launched by Iran and its proxy groups, which slowly filled southern and central Syria with Shia jihadists like Hezbollah, who used their Syrian position to pepper Israel with drones and missiles.

Yet Israel preferred Assad and Russia to what it faces now: a Syria ruled by members of the Sunni majority. Assad claimed to be a member of the Axis of Resistance, Iran’s regional alliance directed against Israel. Syria’s dictator also hosted armed groups that attacked Israel constantly. But the private promise of Assad was to keep the border ‘quiet.’ Assad did not make an overt fuss about the Israeli occupation in the Golan, for instance. This was not popular.

As the Assad regime fell in December last year, Israel struck targets across the country. Some of that was sensical if tactically questionable: destroying chemical weapons labs and alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, for instance. Other strikes made sense only from a narrow perspective: Israel tried to disarm the new Syria, sinking the old regime’s navy at anchor, destroying what it claimed was 80 per cent of Syria’s ‘military capabilities’. 

Israel is engaged in conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon simultaneously. It is also joining the United States in a campaign against the Houthis in Yemen – and threatening all the while to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme and possibly to topple the regime there. Add to that its campaign in southern Syria and it is clear that Israel is playing a high-wire game. Why fight in Syria at the same time? Why turn what could have been a friend, totally opposed to the Iranian-sponsored axis of Resistance which is Israel’s primary enemy, into a foe – possibly  an implacable one? It’s a gamble. But ever since October 2023, Israel’s leaders have been more and more willing to gamble with everything they have.

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Written by

James Snell

James Snell is a senior advisor for special initiatives at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. His upcoming book, Defeat, about the failure of the war in Afghanistan and the future of terrorism, will be published by Gibson Square next year.