Israel Wages a Growing War in Syria

By Robin Wright

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Israeli forces near a border fence between the Israeli-occupied side of the Golan Heights and Syria. The Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw forces from northern Syria could trigger broader Israeli military intervention in the region. Jihad Mughniyah is buried under the same black marble slab as his father, Imad Mughniyah, the legendary Hezbollah military commander, at a special cemetery created by the Lebanese militia for its “martyrs” in Syria. Life-size posters of both men, dressed in fatigues, stand above it. During a recent trip to Beirut, I counted the number of the graves in the cemetery, a barometer of the price Hezbollah is paying to prop up Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad. Mughniyah’s grave also reflects the impact of Israel’s quiet but escalating campaign to challenge Hezbollah and Iran in Syria. The younger Mughniyah was a rising Hezbollah star mentored by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards after his father’s death. In 2015, he was killed, in an Israeli air strike on Syria, along with five other Hezbollah fighters and a general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as their convoy neared the village of Quneitra, in the Golan Heights.

In the course of the civil war, Israel has launched at least a hundred military operations on Syria. Most go unclaimed, even though all parties know where they come from. The campaign has intensified in recent months as the civil war approaches its end game. Israel struck again on Monday in a pre-dawn raid on the T-4 military base, near Homs, in central Syria. The strike killed fourteen, including Iranian fighters.

Israeli strategy has shifted “as we realized that the Syrian civil war has been decided—and the victors are Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, as well as Assad,” Itamar Rabinovich, the president of the Israel Institute, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, and Israel’s former chief negotiator with Syria, told me. “Hezbollah and Iran have now embedded in bases in Syria, and they have recently become much bolder.”

Six months ago, there was widespread fear that hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah might disintegrate into a formal war on Lebanese soil, potentially far bloodier than their thirty-four-day war in 2006. Tensions have instead been playing out in Syria. Israel has hit a wide range of sites, including convoys of Hezbollah or Iranian fighters near the Golan, trucks ferrying missiles and rockets destined for Hezbollah en route to Lebanon, bases for Iranian drones, and an Iranian command-and-control center.

“We are facing now a determined decision by Iran to take advantage of the vacuum in Syria, the coming victory of Assad, and the defeat of isis to extend Hezbollah’s stand in Lebanon at the expense of Syrian territory, especially in the Golan Heights,” Amos Gilead, a retired Israeli major general who now heads the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, told me. “This is a strategic threat. It’s an intolerable plan. We are trying to preëmpt them and protect Israel.”

The biggest confrontation so far played out in February, when Israel struck the same base, T-4 (named for the junction of a pipeline), after an Iranian drone based there flew into Israeli airspace. The limited operation quickly escalated when an Israeli F-16 crashed after being hit by heavy anti-aircraft fire. Israel countered with more attacks on a dozen targets in Syria, including four Iranian military positions. It cited targets that were “part of Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria.”

“You could say a quiet war is not so quiet recently,” Shlomo Brom, a retired brigadier general and former director of Strategic Planning for the Israel Defense Forces, told me. “The goal now is to prevent Iran and Hezbollah from crossing Israeli red lines—basically so they have no presence close to the border with Israel and no activities that harm the interests of Israel.”

Hezbollah boasted that the downing of Israel’s F-16—the first loss of an Israeli warplane in decades—was the “start of a new strategic phase” to challenge Israel. “Today’s developments mean the old equations have categorically ended,” Hezbollah’s media arm said, in a statement.

Recent Israeli military calculations are partly the byproduct of an agreement between the United States and Russia to “de-conflict” areas where they both have deployed manpower on the ground and claim airspace on behalf of their rival Syrian allies. Israel felt exposed. “It was basically a partition agreement that legitimized Iran as one of the shareholders in Syria. It gave Syria to Iran and Russia,” Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general in the Israel Defense Forces and former member of the Knesset, told me.

“Hezbollah already has a hundred and twenty thousand rockets and missiles pointed at Israel from Lebanon. We can’t let them do the same thing in Syria,” he said. “There is no government in Jerusalem—whoever is prime minister—who can accept the reality that has been created at the end of the war in Syria.”

The Trump Administration’s decision, last week, to withdraw two thousand U.S. troops deployed in northern Syria could trigger even broader Israeli military intervention, former senior Israeli military officers told me. Defying advice from his military advisers—and repeated appeals from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—Trump has told his generals to withdraw American forces from the area within four to six months. (The forces have been advising rebels in the Syrian Democratic Forces who liberated a chunk of northern Syria from isis, which still holds parts of eastern Syria.) Once again, Israel feels a decision made by the U.S. makes it more vulnerable to attacks by Iranian-backed militias. Besides Hezbollah, Tehran has also mobilized Afghans and Pakistanis—most Shiites—as paramilitary forces in Syria.

“Given the fact that President Trump seems to have no taste for doing more in Syria, and given the threats we have to cope with—and not wanting to see even more Iranians and their allies embedded in Syria—we are escalating our action,” Rabinovich told me. “Unfortunately, we are on a collision course in Syria.”