Daily Times

Just when one thought that things couldn’t get any worse, they did when Israel sent its warplanes to attack and destroy, what it claims, Iranian and Hezbollah weapons’ stockpiles and bases in Syria. It is not the first time that Israel has done this. It has conducted random aerial attacks a number of times before, but the Assad regime has generally underplayed it to avoid opening another front in an already overstretched war theatre. This time, it was different.

Israel said that it launched the ‘large-scale attack’ after one of its F-16 fighter jets crashed under Syrian anti-aircraft fire. It claimed that an Iranian drone had earlier crossed into Israeli airspace on a ‘mission’ — the nature of the mission was not spelt out — and that Israel was within in its rights to send its F-16 jet fighters.

This, in turn, led Syria to shoot down the Israeli fighter plane. Israel followed it up with a sizeable retaliatory strike, said to have hit 12 military sites in the country, including four that Israel said were Iranian.

Iran has denied that any of its drones was in Israeli airspace. And Syria has described the Israeli air strikes as a ‘new Israeli aggression.’ The Lebanese Shia movement, Hezbollah, characterised as Iranian proxy operating in the Syrian civil war to support the Assad regime, described the downing of the Israeli warplane as ‘a new strategic phase’ in the conflict.

In the midst of it all, the US supported Israeli military response as an act of self-defence, putting all the blame on Iran for regional instability.

So far, these are opening moves and whether the antagonists seriously mean to escalate their involvement would remain to be seen. Israel is in a dominant position threatening to upend the conflict, worried that a strengthened Assad regime would turn Syria into a large Iranian political and military base and that the Hezbollah would become its spearhead both in Syria and Lebanon to threaten Israeli security interests.

Obviously, Tel Aviv is overdramatising the threat from Syria that will take a long time to recover, if it ever does. The Assad regime might have been saved for now, but the country is still divided into warring pockets with signs of old/new warfare emerging all the time.

A case in point is the Turkish military advance into northern Syria, and Israeli penchant for making its presence felt now and then to remind everyone that it has the military power to make things worse.

An important aspect of the Syrian crisis is that it is primarily projected as a regional power struggle between the Shia Iran and the Sunni Arab world

An important aspect of the Syrian crisis is that it is primarily projected as a regional power struggle between the Shia Iran and the Sunni Arab world, with Saudi Arabia, Gulf states and Egypt pitted against Iran. At another level, like Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners, Israel too sees Iran as its principal enemy, with its nuclear ambitions and support for Palestine. In other words, there is implied convergence between its strategic interests and that of influential Arab states.

Israel’s military intervention in Syria designed, as it says, to curb Iranian influence is unlikely to rally Arab opinion against it — at the state level at least. With Arab states largely indifferent — maybe even encouraging of Israeli intervention — Tel Aviv has not much to worry on this score.

At the same time, with the US behind Israel, it might not need to worry much about what the Assad regime and Iran might do.

It is worth noting that Israel is the most powerful military state in the Middle East.However, it has to worry about Russia, which has a military presence in Syria and is committed to shore up the Assad regime. Israel’s latest large-scale aerial intervention in Syria did create a worried reaction from Moscow about the scope of what Tel Aviv might do next, given Russian troops’ presence in Assad’s Syria. Will it go after them, which will have the potential of not only pitting Russia against Israel but also its likely expansion to involve the US as well on behalf of Israel? Israel doesn’t seem keen.

To this end, Netanyahu reportedly talked to Putin reiterating, ‘our right and obligation to defend ourselves’ against any aggression and to prevent Iran from establishing a presence ‘in Syria or anywhere else’. In other words, its conflict is with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah. And he said that the two leaders agreed that their military cooperation would continue, apparently to avoid any direct military confrontation.

There is a catch here, though,which is that if Israel were to destabilise the Assad regime, will Russia remain a passive spectator? Perhaps not. It will be interesting to watch how Israel will play this game.

Even as Israel’s large-scale intervention has created alarm, the US and Russia were trying to play down a major military incident in which the US bombardment in Syria’s eastern Deir Ezzor region, caused a large number of Syrian casualties, including some Russians. According to Moscow, while there may be Russian citizens in Syria, apparently as ‘mercenaries’, ‘they don’t belong to the Russian armed forces.’ And the US said that it accepted the Russian claim.

Even though a direct conflict between Moscow and Washington might have been avoided this time, the potential of all the cross-currents cutting into Syria is mind-boggling.

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney. He can be reached at sushilpseth@yahoo.co.au

Published in Daily Times, February 22^nd 2018.