What’s Really Behind Israel’s “Shock & Awe” Campaign In Syria?

A confluence of interests explains its actions, but these same actions also have some unintended consequences.

Israel carried out one of the largest attack operations in its history after launching nearly 500 strikes in post-Assad Syria, which has just been taken over by a group of “rebels” led by the terrorist-designated and Turkish-backed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly known as Al Qaeda in Syria. The goal is to create a “sterile defense zone”, to which end the IDF broached the Golan Heights buffer zone and advanced along the Syrian-Lebanese border, ending up just kilometers away from Damascus.

The operation is ongoing and it’s possible that Israel will push further, whether deeper into Syria and/or perhaps flanking Lebanon to reinvade Hezbollah from behind the defense lines that it built. It also can’t be ruled out that Israel will expand its annexed portion of the Golan Heights to include Syria’s portion and even areas beyond. Complementarily, Israel could arm nearby Druze to carve out a client state in southern Syria, even if such never declares independence. All of this advances the “Greater Israel” plan.

Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzia condemned “the continuing aggression of Israel against Syria”, though the argument can be made that Israel’s “demilitarization” of post-Assad Syria prevents strategic Soviet- and Russian-era weaponry from being sent to Turkiye and onward to Ukraine. The “rebels” and terrorists can’t operate them without extensive training anyway so they might have passed them along to their Western patrons as payment for their support if they weren’t destroyed.

Their loss of this equipment, and the possibility that former members of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) who were trained to operate such could be allowed to join the new armed forces as part of the ongoing “nation-rebuilding” efforts, interestingly creates a military-technical opportunity for Russia. TASS reported on what Ibragim Ibragimov, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations, told Vedomosti earlier this week.

In his view, “I don’t exclude that a new format of military-technical cooperation will appear soon and that Russian military instructors will play a role in establishing a new Syrian army.” It might be this possible opportunity that accounts for publicly financed Russian media’s restrained response to the Syrian regime change that was analyzed here. The explanation is that Russia might want to replace these wares, which the new ruling arrangement needs, so it’s mutually beneficial to remain cordial for now.

Therefore, it could turn out that Israel’s “demilitarization” of post-Assad Syria inadvertently serves to perpetuate Russia’s military presence, though other unrelated developments could still occur to ensure its phased but dignified withdrawal like some observers expect might be inevitable. It’s also interesting to wonder why Israel waited until now to destroy all of Syria’s strategic weaponry and didn’t do so earlier. The answer appears to be that Israel didn’t feel as threatened by Assad as it does by HTS.

Despite the official decades-long state of war between their countries, Assad was considered more predictable, and later after Russia’s intervention, more manageable. After all, it was only on one exceptional occasion in early 2018 that the SAA shot down an Israeli jet, on every other occasion Israel’s strikes against the IRGC and Hezbollah there went unpunished. This is due to Assad being more rational than HTS extremists in that he wasn’t willing to risk Syria’s destruction just for Iran and Hezbollah’s sake.

His successors are ideological driven and embrace a twisted “martyrdom” concept, however, so it couldn’t confidently be ruled out that they wouldn’t one day try to learn how to operate the strategic Soviet- and Russian-era weaponry that they inherited to launch a devastating attack against Israel. Whatever replacement equipment the new ruling arrangement might receive, whether from Russia or whoever else, will presumably have to first be preapproved by Israel for this reason or it’ll be destroyed.

In the same vein, it can therefore also be concluded that the US didn’t consider it a threat to its interests for the Taliban to seize approximately $24 billion worth of American equipment during its reconquest of Afghanistan or they’d have destroyed it all beforehand. One reason for that could be that they thought that the Taliban might be emboldened to expand into Central Asia. In any case, the contrast between Israel’s reaction to HTS’ conquest of Syria and the US’ reaction to the Taliban’s of Afghanistan is damning.

Putting all the preceding observations together, Israel’s “shock and awe” campaign in Syria is driven by: 1) a much greater threat perception of HTS than of Assad; 2) the desire to advance military-strategic goals in Lebanon and Syria; and 3) possible territorial revisionism per the “Greater Israel” plan. The unintended consequences are that: 1) Biden’s Afghan fiasco looks even worse than before; 2) Syrian heavy equipment won’t make it to Ukraine; and 3) Russia might retain its military presence in Syria.