Israel Warns Iran: Don’t Send Weapons to Syria

The Israelis have warned Iran not to send weapons to Assad’s army, lest they fall into the hands of Hezbollah. Assad, of course, is desperate. Aleppo has been taken by the rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HST). Hama has been taken. Now the rebels are marching on Homs, Syria’s third city, and tens of thousands of Alawites — the backbone of Assad’s support — have already fled, making for the Alawite heartland on the coast.

The rebels are a motley bunch with varying degrees of adherence to the global jihad. Their overall leader, Mohammed Al-Jolani, claims to have cut all ties with Al-Qaeda and its ideology; his sole interest, he says, is in taking Syria and deposing Assad, he says, not in establishing a caliphate. Another of the rebel leaders gave a remarkable interview in Aleppo to an Israeli news source here: “Syrian Rebel Commander: Israel, Opposition ‘Fighting a Common Enemy,’” Algemeiner, December 5, 2024:

One of the commanders of Syrian rebel forces in Aleppo, known as Abu Abdo, gave a special interview with i24 News’ Matthias Inbar on Wednesday, revealing that, despite differences with Israel, “we are fighting against a common enemy.”

He said that Iran and its proxies, including Hezbollah and the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, are the criminal entities “dreaming of returning to the glory days of the historical Persian Empire, but it won’t happen if we all face them.”

Why did Abu Abdo mention that Iran, Hezbollah, and Bashar Assad are all dreaming of a return to the “Persian Empire”? What he is alluding to is that these are all Shiites, and thus anathema to the Sunni rebels now sweeping from Aleppo to Hama to Homs and then, once Homs is taken, on to Damascus.

A member of the former Free Syrian Army, now dubbed the Syrian National Army, he said the group’s members are “neither extremists nor terrorists.”

“I insist and tell all people in the region that we are activists for peace,” he said. “We are not murderous, warlike, and destructive activists. We defend ourselves from injustice and want to build our future Syrian state.”

“We look at Israel and the US, with the arrival of President Donald Trump, and we have a lot of respect and sympathy for them, for their actions against Iran — the country that leads terrorism in the region and all over the world.”

He said that his faction “looks forward to cooperate and eliminate this enemy and restoring stability.”

Perhaps Abu Abdo’s remarks about Israel and the United States should be taken with a grain of salt. Or perhaps he means it but the other rebel groups disagree. Or perhaps it really is the view of the rebels — that their arch-enemies are Assad and his main backer, Iran, and they will be glad to see not only the fall of Assad, but also the Iranian threat to its Sunni neighbors removed, possibly by the IDF.

The jihadists are doing well: in three days they seized Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city and its commercial center. Now they have taken Hama, Syria’s fourth largest city, and seized the large amounts of weapons the Syrian army had warehoused there. The jihadists have opened the prisons in both Aleppo and Hama, releasing thousands of anti-Assad prisoners. Some of them, grateful for their release and hating Assad as much as the jihadists, may help to swell their ranks.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s leader Naim Qassem has pledged to support Assad “as well as we are able.” Given that the IDF has killed all the top Hezbollah leaders and dozens of its commanders, has killed 4,000 of its fighters, has seized 155,000 of its weapons, has reduced its stock of rockets to 20% of their antebellum numbers, there is not much Hezbollah can provide Assad except possibly another few thousand combatants, to reinforce Assad’s troops, poorly paid and demoralized, who now ring Damascus, as the rebels move south to their next likely conquest, Homs — the largest city between Hama and the capital.

Russia is unable to help Assad as it did in 2015 and 2016. The NATO countries are sending more weapons to Ukraine, and allowing the Ukrainians to fire their missiles ever deeper into Russia. The Russians need all their weapons to fight what Putin still calls a “special military operation,” and are so low in troops that they have persuaded North Korea to send 12,000 of its soldiers to beef up the Russian forces.

As for Iran, it has also been weakened by Israel’s attack on October 26 that destroyed its anti-missile defenses, including the S-300 batteries that protect Tehran, and by Israel’s destruction of both Iran’s ballistic missile plants and a secret nuclear research facility at Parchin. It doesn’t have a lot of weapons or men to spare, as it tries to figure out whether, and how, to respond to that Israeli attack. It also wonders if the Israelis may not wait to respond to such an Iranian attack, but will attack its nuclear program once Donald Trump is in office. But if Assad is not sent aid — men and weapons — by Iran, can he hold on? And what would his removal mean for Iran, with all of its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and Assad-ruled Syria — that were once supposed to constitute a threat that would prevent Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear program, no longer able to do so?

What does Israel now want? By warning Iran not to send weapons to Assad, it is not showing any sympathy with the rebels, and there is no evidence to back the claims that Israel has been quietly showing that it wants a rebel victory in all of Syria. The rebel leader Mohammed Al-Julani may well have cut all ties to al-Qaeda and other Islamic groups, but Israel cannot entrust its security in Syria to rebel assurances that all that jihad stuff has been put behind them.

Clearly the best outcome for Israel is a continuing war between Assad’s army and the rebels, with now this side prevailing, and now that. Let Iran and Hezbollah send what help they can, as they try to prop up Assad. And let Turkey provide more aid to the rebels, whom Erdogan, as a staunch supporter of jihad, Sharia, and a restored caliphate, favors. Let each side use up men, money, and materiel in fighting to take control of the country, but ideally, this revived civil war will go on for many years, bleeding dry both sides. Israel need not intervene at all, except to make sure that Hezbollah in Lebanon does not receive, via the Syrian battlefield, new infusions of advanced weapons from Iran. May no side win, but both sides able to grind down one another year after year, the way Iran and Iraq did during their eight-year war. That is a consummation that in Jerusalem is devoutly to be wished.