Events in Syria are developing so rapidly that Israeli strategists don’t want to make predictions. There are too many uncertainties.
Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has moved into Israel’s border areas with Syria and conducted hundreds of airstrikes to destroy weapons abandoned by the Syrian army, including its chemical ordnance.
Strategists agree that the rapidity with which the Syrian army collapsed probably surprised even the HTS rebel group, which initially had sought little more than to enlarge the enclave it held around the northern city of Idlib.
“They didn’t intend to reach Damascus, only to enlarge the enclave of Idlib,” said Kobi Michael, senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies and Misgav Institute. “They reached Aleppo and saw that it was pretty easy to take.
“They continued to Hama, and then to Homs, and then to Damascus. They didn’t intend in the beginning to reach so far.
“They have succeeded in doing this not because of their strength but because of the weakness, the decay, of the Syrian army.”
“He saw an opportunity and he grabbed it,” Elliot Chodoff, an IDF reserve major and military strategist, said of HTS leader Abu Mohammed Al-Golani.
It’s unclear just how strong HTS is, he said.
“Al Golani knows better than anyone whether to credit himself or whether he just rode a lucky wave,” he said.
There are many uncertainties as a volatile mix of religious, ethnic, national, and even imperial rivalries swirl around Syria, which has been shattered by civil war over more than a decade.
A month ago, President Bashar Assad controlled perhaps 70 percent of the country, but much of that not very securely, Michael said.
Kurdish rebels have controlled the northeast, while HTS and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army controlled northern areas along the Turkish border.
Some areas the Syrian army controlled only nominally, he said, such as the south.
The Druze in the south who backed the Assad regime did so primarily because they feared al-Qaeda more.
The Assad regime tended to leave the Druze alone.
The United States has small detachments both in the northeast with the Kurds, and in the south, securing one of three border crossings with Iraq.
Chodoff emphasized that the war isn’t over yet. Russia has pulled back its assets but is still present in Syria’s ports, he said.
It must decide whether to commit to maintaining a warm water port on the Mediterranean, or to pull back now because of the Ukraine war.
Iran, which has seen its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah shattered by Israel and has lost its landlines of communication through Syria and into Lebanon, may move to reopen them.
And while Assad has fled the country to Moscow, his base, the minority Alawite tribe, still controls much of Syria’s coast and hasn’t yet been defeated by HTS.
Assad may choose to return, Chodoff said.
Israel, on Syria’s southern border, chose not to participate in Syria’s civil war and is making the same call now.
It has never had territorial designs on Syria, analysts agreed, and its forces will withdraw when there’s a stable government to talk to.
The IDF moved troops into the 155-square-mile demilitarized zone that has buffered the two countries since 1974, to keep possibly hostile rebels from seizing bases right on Israel’s border.
Key objectives included Syrian positions on its half of Mt. Hermon, which straddles the border, said Avraham Levine, media director of the Alma Institute, which studies the security situation on Israel’s northern borders with Lebanon and Syria.
The Syrian part is on higher ground and towers over the Israeli side, he said.
The IDF occupied the Syrian town of Quneitra on Dec. 9, Chodoff said. The town on the border of the Golan Heights has effectively been a ghost town for years, occupied only by rebels or the Syrian army.
The Israeli Air Force has flown more than 300 missions in Syria since Assad’s fall.
Levine said it seeks to destroy as much of the Syrian military’s arms and war-making capacity as possible.
It has destroyed Syria’s entire air force on the ground, sunk warships in port, and bombed bases, barracks, factories, and warehouses, he said.
Israel seeks to avoid an Afghanistan-style debacle, wherein the United States abandoned more than $80 billion worth of arms to the Taliban in 2021, he said.
Also of concern are Syria’s weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons.
“[Assad has] used them before, against his own people,” Levine said. “We don’t know who will pick them up and can’t track where they’re going,” and thus Israel has sought to destroy them, targeting the Iranian-supported CERS Institute, where many were manufactured and kept, he said.
Such weapons, if left unsecured, could be taken into Lebanon for use by Shiite militias there, taken to Iraq, or used by jihadis, he said.
The IDF said it has destroyed 70 percent of Syria’s military capability and that suggestions from the Arab press that the IDF was advancing on Damascus were false.
“I’m 99 percent certain we have no interest in going into Damascus,” Chodoff said. “We could have done it in 1967 [during the Six-Day War] and in 1973 [during the Yom Kippur War]. For what? Who needs it?”
He pointed out that Damascus’s outer suburbs are only 20 kilometers or so from the frontier, so those saying the IDF was that close aren’t necessarily wrong.
And the IDF may not mind the suggestion that it could threaten Damascus, as a deterrent to anyone thinking of attacking Israel, he said.
Some rebels have been shouting at demonstrations that they plan to go on to “Al Aqsa,” referring to the famous mosque in Jerusalem, or to relieve Hamas in Gaza.
Chodoff pointed to the fact that in 1973, after Syria invaded Israel and Israel pushed it back, the IDF advanced toward Damascus. “As the Israeli chief of staff in the Yom Kippur War said, ‘We will teach the Syrians that the road from Damascus to Tel Aviv is also the road from Tel Aviv to Damascus,’” Chodoff said.
The Israeli analysts all said the IDF only has a few hundred troops—company-sized detachments occupying key crossroads or the north side of Mt. Hermon—on Syrian soil, a signal that it’s not intended as a permanent occupation.
The large number of players is complicating matters.
While accounts of the fighting tend to mention three or four rebel groups, dozens have splintered off or rejoined to form loose coalitions.
And then there are the foreign powers.
Chodoff said Russia, Iran, and Turkey are at one level engaged in imperial rivalry going back centuries, to when Iran was Persia.
At another level, they are modern states with their immediate concerns: Russia’s war with Ukraine, and Iran’s efforts to build “the Shia Crescent” through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean shore.
Primary among Israel’s concerns is keeping radical groups off its borders.
Chodoff noted that in the Middle East, when groups split off from large terrorist groups, they often become even more radical. Hamas and Hezbollah both were initially discounted by Israel when they formed as minor players, he said.
Al-Golani belonged to ISIS and then al-Qaeda in past years, only to split off from them. He has projected a more moderate tone, one designed not to scare away minorities or alarm foreign governments as ISIS did. How sincere he is, and whether his moderation will continue, is the big question.
“He’s saying moderate things,” Chodoff said. “So did the Taliban when they were negotiating with the Americans to leave Afghanistan. Time will tell.”
Sperling also noted Al-Golani’s past ties to radical groups.
“The moderation rhetoric could stand, or not,” he said.
Sperling projected that Assad’s forces would finally have to stand down and be dissolved.
And he predicted Russia and Iran will bide their time and consider their options, waiting to see who emerges in control of Syria and what arrangements they might make with a new regime.
The destruction of so much of Syria’s military capability limits the threat any new regime can pose to Israel, he said.
Michael noted that HTS, despite being the lead rebel group, doesn’t have the training or experience in conventional warfare, and has to date been more of a guerrilla group.
It will be a while before the situation gels, Chodoff said.
“We are in a huge wait-and-see period,” he said.
