The longer Syria remains in a state of anarchy, the more Israel — and the US — will have to monitor the border 24/7

Photo: Flash90

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he IDF has deployed troops in the buffer zone along the Israeli-Syrian border in the Golan Heights, and has attacked military targets belonging to the former Assad regime that could still pose a threat to Israel, while keeping a close eye on Syrian rebel forces to ensure they don’t advance toward the Golan Heights. Army brass is watching Iran from afar to bar them from leveraging the chaos to deploy militias who could rearm and reinvigorate Hezbollah.

Israel is taking no chances following the startling collapse of the brutal Assad regime that has ruled Syria since 1971. The United States has skin in the game, too, with some 900 combat troops stationed in Syria backing the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to combat what remains of ISIS. Still, it has done little, with President Biden having all but checked out of the White House.

President-elect Donald Trump is sticking to his campaign promises to keep the US out of foreign entanglements. “Syria is a mess, but it’s not our friend,” he tweeted. Reverting to all caps, he added: “the united states should have nothing to do with it. this is not our fight. let it play out. do not get involved!”

Sitting on the sidelines, watching fanatical radicals dictate the pace and the outcome, may prove deadly and detrimental to both America’s and Israel’s long-term interests.

“The US needs to get ahead of this,” contends Damascus-born Hazem Alghabra, founder and president of Frontiers Consultants, a Washington–based public relations and crisis management firm, and a ten-year State Department veteran who worked as a public affairs coordinator and advisor to the Bush and Obama administrations.

Alghabra expressed his opinions during a webinar sponsored by EMET — the Endowment for Middle East Truth, based in DC. Adding that “the Biden administration seems confused, at best,” he called for “a very high level of coordination between the US, Israel, and our ace in the hole — the Kurdish forces.”

Alghabra’s concerns were backed up by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a Milstein writing fellow at the Middle East Forum, who said US troops in Syria had prevented ISIS soldiers from filling vacuums left by Assad forces who either fled or defected. Still, Al-Tamimi doesn’t have high hopes for the HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) rebels who routed Assad’s army and who are trying to consolidate their rule in territories they control.

“That’s still something of concern for the international community, as the rebels remain a designated terrorist organization in the United States,” Al-Tamimi added.

Not Mild or Mannered

Only some people are as clear-eyed as Alghabra and Al-Tamimi.

Many Western media pundits glamorize Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the leader of the HTS rebels, as a modern-day swashbuckler. Al-Golani, sometimes spelled al-Julani, was born Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a. Agence France-Presse, rated “left” by AllSides, quoted Thomas Pierret, a specialist in political Islam, as describing al-Golani as a “pragmatic radical,” however he might define that. Even the British Telegraph newspaper, which AllSides rates as “leans right,” labels him a moderate.

Al-Golani sometimes wears a turban in public. When interviewed by the foreign press, he dresses like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. When he rouses his troops in the field, he wears a green army cap and, with his long brown beard, bears an uncanny resemblance to Fidel Castro.

Hazem Alghabra knows a lot about al-Golani’s background, which he shared with Jewish media during the EMET webinar. The HTS leader is called al-Golani because his family lived in the Golan Heights before Israel captured it from Syria in the June 1967 Six-Day War. Al-Golani was born 15 years later, in 1982, in Saudi Arabia, where his father found work as an oil engineer and published several books on how Arab nations could utilize their oil revenues for economic development. His father had a deeply ideological bent and supported the Palestinian Fedayeen, the terrorist branch of the PLO based in Jordan that committed cross-border terrorist attacks against Jews in Israel. In 1989, the family moved to an elegant neighborhood in Damascus, so it’s not as if al-Golani was drawn to the military to escape poverty.

After the US invaded Iraq in 2003 in the ill-fated search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, al-Golani joined al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was arrested and held in an Iraqi prison for five years, then returned to Syria as an envoy of Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the ISIS chief who coronated himself as the first caliph of the Islamic State back in the terror group’s heyday.

That’s quite a résumé and family background.

Let’s remember, too, how the hopelessly naive Western media had high hopes for democratic reforms in Syria when Bashar Assad assumed control in July 2000, describing him as a “mild-mannered, Western-trained ophthalmologist.” Since the 2011 outbreak of civil war in Syria, Assad’s legacy includes the murders of some 600,000 Syrians, internal displacement of seven million others, and five million refugees who fled to Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and elsewhere. That’s a staggering 57% of Syria’s estimated prewar population of 22 million whose lives were ruined.

It’s frightful to think what Assad could have accomplished if he weren’t so mild-mannered.

It’s Not Progressive

This is Syria’s problem, not Israel’s or America’s, but we have to understand the ideology of the HTS rebels to know what to expect and how to deal with them.

Al-Golani’s group belongs to the Salafi branch of Sunni Islam.

“Salafi Islam is socially conservative,” explains Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi of the Middle East Forum. “Women wear the hijab in areas the rebels control in northwestern Syria. They also imposed forced conversion on the Druze minority in Idlib and made them destroy their shrines. They’re not progressive or anything like that.”

Some analysts take solace in the fact that the HTS rebels are Sunni Muslims and generally fierce opponents of the Shiite brand of Islam that Iran espouses and hope that if the HTS rebels take control of Syria, they will eject Iran. Salafi Islam bears some similarities to the Hanafi Sunni Islam practiced in Afghanistan under the Taliban, who profess to favor peaceful relations with other countries as opposed to preaching global jihad.

The common denominator is that all of them are religious zealots who grew up in lands torn by war and tribal intrigue, and they are hostile to Western-style democracies.

Hazem Alghabra explained that under the Assad regime, young people were subjected to emergency laws that prohibited the formation of any youth groups unless government entities or mosques controlled them. He says that anyone who belonged to such groups was fed a high-calorie diet of anti-Semitism. “You’re dealing with two factions that have been raised on the concept that Israel is bad and the Jewish People are bad. And this is why we don’t see any friends among these groups.”

So, in that respect, Donald Trump is correct. Syria is not our friend. But the 1974 separation of forces agreement that Bashar Assad’s father Hafez signed with Israel to formally end the Yom Kippur War and delineate the Israel-Syrian border is now a dead letter, according to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Will Syria’s new leaders honor that deal?

In the meantime, the Netanyahu government has ordered IDF reinforcements to secure the border until new arrangements can be made.

Still, the longer Syria remains in a state of anarchy, the more Israel — and the US — will have to monitor the border 24/7 to ensure Israel’s security. And this is nothing that Trump or Netanyahu can let slide.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1040)