Iran, Hezbollah strongholds make Syria a ‘hunting ground’ for Israel

Syria’s current status as a geographical description rather than a country looks set to remain for the foreseeable future.

By Jonathan Spyer, Middle East Forum

With Israeli forces in daily action in Gaza and south Lebanon, and intermittent drone and missile attacks continuing from Iraq and Yemen, one front in the regional conflict currently underway has tended to be ignored: Syria.

Yet the available evidence shows that Israeli strikes against Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian targets in Syria have increased significantly over the last two months.

The individuals targeted in Syria have included veteran and prominent leaders and operatives of the Iran-led regional axis.

At the same time, reports in regional media have appeared in recent weeks portraying Syrian President Bashar Assad as a weak link in the Iranian-led war effort.

These reports suggest that the Syrian leader is trying to distance himself from his Iranian ally and move closer to moderate Arab states. Some Israeli Syria-watchers concur with this assessment.

So what is going on in Israel’s most significant northern neighbor, and where may things be headed?

It is important to remember that the civil war that began in Syria in 2012 has not concluded. Rather, the fighting lines have become frozen, leading to a de facto partition of the country.

After a sorting-out period, Syria has since 2019 been divided into three de facto entities: the regime-controlled area, encompassing around 60% of the country’s territory including Damascus and the entire coastal area; the area controlled by the Kurdish-dominated Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria (AANES), which comprises around 30% of Syria; and a Turkish-guaranteed Sunni Islamist enclave in the northwest, holding 10% of the country’s territory.

The continuation of this arrangement depends on the willingness of international players to underwrite these areas of control: regime Syria is today a protectorate of Iran and Russia, the US guarantees the survival of the Kurdish-dominated area, and Turkey is the sponsor and controller of the Sunni Islamist area.

Assad does not enjoy undisputed territorial control even over the area nominally under his rule. His army is weak and impoverished.

As a result, the patrons are today the senior partners. In practice, this means that the Iranians and their militia proxies are today in control of the southeastern border crossing between Iraq and Syria at Albukamal, and the roads leading westward. Assad’s army enters this area only with Iranian permission.

Southern Syria is thus a link in the chain of contiguous Iranian control stretching from Iran across Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean.

Israel professes no particular interest in Assad either way, except insofar as his forces seek to facilitate, assist, or defend the Iranian weapons trail from Iraq to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.

Israel’s interest

Israel has, however, an intense interest in Iran’s activities on Syrian soil, and in disrupting the Iranian effort.

In recent weeks, this interest has been reflected in some very major “Resistance Axis” scalps apparently claimed by Israeli air power on Syrian soil.

The names on this list may not quite have the prominence of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah or Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh. But they are significant players, whose sudden absence will contribute significantly to the disarray currently apparent in this regional camp.

The list includes Ali Musa Daqduq, a veteran Lebanese Hezbollah operator whose name is well-known to Americans who served in Iraq.

In the years of Shi’ite insurgency against US and allied forces in that country, Daqduq was a key facilitator and point man for the Iranians.

He is believed by the US to have taken part in deadly attacks on US troops. According to Syrian media reports, Daqduq was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Sayida Zeinab neighborhood of Damascus on November 12.

An Israeli airstrike in the Qusayr area this week took out a second very senior Lebanese Hezbollah operator.

Qusayr, in the Syria-Lebanon border area, is a strategically important area for Iran’s arms trail into Lebanon.

It was the site of a fierce battle in the Syrian civil war in which Hezbollah prevailed over the Syrian rebels.

This week, an Israeli air strike on a location in that area killed Salim Ayyash, the Hezbollah man convicted in absentia for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al Hariri in 2005.

Several additional notable movement figures have also been eliminated in Syria in recent weeks: Mahmoud Shahin, who headed Hezbollah’s intelligence network in Syria and was involved in its air defense efforts, was assassinated on November 4.

Abu Saleh, who headed Hezbollah’s Unit 4400, responsible for overseeing the financing of Hezbollah from Iranian oil sales, was killed in a precision strike on October 22 in Damascus.

Adham Jahut, a Hezbollah official based in the Quneitra area and responsible for the organization’s intelligence activities in this important location, was killed by an Israeli air strike on October 10.

Hassan Jaafar Qassir, brother-in-law of deceased Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, was killed in Damascus on October 3.

The disarray of Hezbollah

This list reflects both the extent of Israeli intelligence penetration of Syria and Hezbollah, and the extent to which Israel has, since the outbreak of war a year ago, brushed aside former tacit rules of engagement, treating Syria as an inseparable component of an alliance with which Jerusalem is now at war.

The recent assassinations also show the relative disarray of Hezbollah and its allies in the face of Israel’s relentless attentions.

This jibes with reports from other sources, according to which Hezbollah officials and their families have arrived in Iraq in considerable numbers in recent weeks.

There, they are being housed, with the assistance of their comrades in the Iraqi Shi’ite militias, in the Shi’ite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Only there, it appears, do they feel safe from Israel.

Some observers have suggested that the current relative disarray of the “Resistance Axis” is leading to efforts by the Syrian leader to extricate himself from it.

An article in the Al-Araby Al-Jadeed newspaper this week assembled the evidence. It noted a recent reduction in Captagon smuggling into Jordan, in line with Jordanian and Emirati requests.

Also, Saudi Arabia’s decision to reopen its Damascus embassy reflects an undoubted desire among pro-Western Gulf states to draw a line under the civil war and use economic inducements to tempt Assad away from his allies.

Behind-the-scenes efforts, led by the Italians, are underway to restore relations between the regime and Europe.

But any hopes that Assad might make a decisive break with Iran should probably be resisted.

The Syrian dictator remains in debt to Tehran for his surviving the civil war. He must surely be acutely aware that had he met the Arab Spring while aligned with the West, he would almost certainly have shared the fate of fellow authoritarian leaders Zine el Abidine Bin-Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

Also, the current Syrian regime has survived for half a century because it exploited conflict with Israel and the West (while leaving the door slightly open for some future rapprochement).

Gulf and Western overtures enable Syria to continue to act according to this pattern.

A wholesale abandonment of the Iranians would represent a severe break with a model that has served the Assad family rather well. So any such break remains unlikely.

Syria’s current status as a geographical description rather than a country looks set to remain for the foreseeable future.

This means that it is likely also to continue to be a hunting ground for Israeli air power working its way down the long list of Hezbollah and Iranian targets in the country.

Assad regimeHezbollahIDFIranSyria