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Hezbollah and Israel's Common Interest in Syria: Yossi Melman, Jerusalem Post, June 15, 2015— If the 50-month-long civil war in Syria – with its 200,000 fatalities and with unexplained rivalries and alliances – has created a big mess, a more convoluted threat is emerging, a threat to the Druse community, which may drag Israel unwittingly into the killing fields.
Hezbollah – Born in Lebanon, Dying in Syria?: Jonathan Spyer, Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2015 — The latest reports from the Qalamoun mountain range in western Syria suggest that Hezbollah is pushing back the jihadis of Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.
Syrian Death Throes: Dr. Mordechai Kedar, Arutz Sheva, May 28, 2015 — The situation in Syria is deteriorating.
ISIS Won't Find Nuclear Weapons in Iraq or Syria, Thanks to Israel: Louis René Beres, The Hill, June 5, 2015 — Credo quia absurdum. "I believe because it is absurd."
Israeli Scholar Calls for the Establishment of a Kurdish and Druze State in Syria: Rachel Avraham, Jerusalem Online, June 9, 2015
Lyse Doucet: ‘The War in Syria … is Not Just About Syria Any More’: Rudyard Griffiths, Globe & Mail, June 5, 2015
Syria Army’s Weakness Exacerbated by Draft Dodgers: Raja Abdulrahim, Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2015
The Lessons of the Syrian Chemical Weapons Discovery: Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, JCPA, May 18, 2015
With Syria Crumbling, Israel's Security Situation Has Never Been Better: Yossi Melman, Jerusalem Post, June 3, 2015
HEZBOLLAH AND ISRAEL'S COMMON INTEREST IN SYRIA
Yossi Melman
Jerusalem Post, June 15, 2015
If the 50-month-long civil war in Syria – with its 200,000 fatalities and with unexplained rivalries and alliances – has created a big mess, a more convoluted threat is emerging, a threat to the Druse community, which may drag Israel unwittingly into the killing fields. On the surface, Israel is closely monitoring the situation. Security officials clarified there is no intention of intervening in the civil war, but could Jerusalem really stand idly by as 700,000 Syrian Druse face an existential threat?
On Saturday night, Druse in Israel and on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights demonstrated in solidarity with their brethren in Syria. Their political leaders, led by Deputy Regional Cooperation Minister Ayoub Kara and spiritual leader Moafaq Tarif, showed responsibility and restraint. “As a Druse,” Kara said, “I’m making great efforts to ensure the safety of the Syrian Druse and to mobilize every player in the world to help them.” He was referring to the US, Jordan and Turkey. The concern for the fate of the Druse was discussed last week during a visit by the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey.
President Reuven Rivlin called on the United States to protect the Druse community in Syria. Kara last week attended a regional Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian conference about the rehabilitation of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea basin. But he also used the opportunity to meet with Sheikh Yousuf Jorba, the spiritual leader of his community in the Mount Druse region of southern Syria – the largest Druse concentration in the country. Kara also met with Jordanian security officials and discussed with them a scenario in which the Druse would seek refuge in the Hashemite Kingdom. He will visit Turkey next month as a guest of the Turkish mufti and use the opportunity to discuss the possibility that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government would open border crossings if there were mortal danger to the northern Syrian Druse.
But behind the scenes, the secret dealings and messages are even more complicated and intriguing. They create hidden alliances that would be incomprehensible in normal circumstances. They include Israel, Jordan, the US, the Nusra Front (the Syrian branch of al-Qaida), Hezbollah and, over the horizon, Iran, Hezbollah’s partner in the Shi’ite alliance. The events regarding the Druse community in Syria have unfolded rapidly in recent weeks. As an ethnic and religious minority, the community enjoyed the protection and sponsorship of President Bashar Assad’s regime and army, but of late, they were informed that the military could not protect them anymore due to its overstretched deployment.
The biggest threat to its 700,000 members is the advancement of Islamic State in the region known as Mount Druse, 60 km. from the Jordanian border and 50 km. from Israel’s Golan Heights. There are two more Druse areas in Syria that are facing trouble. One is in the north, where 20 members of the community were murdered by the Nusra Front last week. Nusra’s leaders announced in an unprecedented message that they apologized, and described it as a rogue operation, promising to punish the perpetrators.
It is worth noting: The murderers of al-Qaida apologized. No doubt someone made sure to send them a strong message not to mess with the Druse. Was it Israel? According to foreign reports, it has maintained cordial relations with the group, which controls the 100-kilometer strip of the Israeli-Syrian border. A similar strong message was sent months ago to the Nusra Front when it tried to take control of the third-largest Druse concentration, on Mount Hermon, near the Israeli border. Since then, the border has been quiet, and a tacit understanding has been established that as long as the Israeli side of the border is tranquil, the Nusra strip on the Syrian side of the Golan will be so, too.
But the Druse in Syria, Lebanon and Israel don’t trust the apologies of the jihadists, and as such, began to organize. Hundreds of Lebanese Druse responded to their leader Walid Jumblatt and moved from the Chouf Mountains, with free passage arranged by Hezbollah to their brethren’s villages on Mount Hermon. And this is where it gets unbelievable: Hezbollah and Israel have a common interest, albeit with different motives, to defend the Druse community in Syria. This is part of a larger realignment aimed at creating an independent Druse military force. The initiative is ambitious and requires the enlistment of 100,000 troops.
The coordinator is a former general in the Syrian army. The heavy weapons – antitank missiles, armored cars and artillery – will probably be provided via Jordan by foreign suppliers. The US, if necessary, will provide air strikes against Islamic State. It can be assumed that these steps, if executed, will be coordinated with Israel. In the worst-case scenario, Israel is preparing for an emergency in which it will have to absorb tens of thousands of Druse refugees, or as a last resort use its air force to defend them.
HEZBOLLAH – BORN IN LEBANON, DYING IN SYRIA?
Jonathan Spyer
Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2015
The latest reports from the Qalamoun mountain range in western Syria suggest that Hezbollah is pushing back the jihadis of Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The movement claims to have taken 300 square kilometers from the Sunni rebels. The broader picture for the Shi’ite Islamists that dominate Lebanon, however, is less rosy.
The Iran-led alliance of which Hezbollah is a part is better-organized and more effectively commanded than its Sunni rivals. The coalition’s ability to marshal its resources in a centralized and effective way is what has enabled it to preserve the Assad regime in Syria until now. When President Bashar Assad was in trouble in late 2012, an increased Hezbollah mobilization into Syria and the creation by Iran of new, paramilitary formations for the regime recruited from minority communities was enough to turn the tide of war back against the rebels by mid-2013.
Now, however, the numerical advantage of the Sunnis in Syria is once more reversing the direction of the war. With the minority communities that formed the core of Assad’s support no longer willing or able to supply him with the required manpower, the burden looks set to fall yet further onto the shoulders of Assad’s Lebanese friends.
What this is likely to mean for Hezbollah is that it will be called on to deploy further and deeper into Syria than has previously been the case. In the past, its involvement was largely confined to areas of particular importance to the movement itself. Hezbollah fought to keep the rebels away from the Lebanese border, and to secure the highways between the western coastal areas and Damascus. The movement’s conquest of the border town of Qusair in June 2013, for example, formed a pivotal moment in the recovery of the regime’s fortunes at that time.
But now, Hezbollah cannot assume that other pro-regime elements will hold back the rebels in areas beyond the Syria-Lebanese frontier. This means that the limited achievement in Qalamoun will prove Pyrrhic, unless the regime’s interest can be protected further afield. Hezbollah looks set to be drawn further and deeper into the Syrian quagmire. Movement Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged this prospect in his speech last Sunday, marking 15 years since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon. In the talk, Nasrallah broadened the definition of Hezbollah’s engagement in Syria.
Once, the involvement was expressed in limited sectarian terms (the need to protect the tomb of Sayyida Zeinab in Damascus from desecration). This justification then gave way to the claimed need to cross the border precisely so as to seal war-torn Syria off from Lebanon and keep the Sunni takfiris (Muslims who accuse other Muslims of apostasy) at bay.
On Sunday, Nasrallah struck an altogether more ambitious tone. Hezbollah, he said, was fighting alongside its “Syrian brothers, alongside the army and the people and the popular resistance in Damascus and Aleppo and Deir al-Zor and Qusair and Hasakeh and Idlib. We are present today in many places, and we will be present in all the places in Syria that this battle requires.” The list of locations includes areas in Syria’s remote north and east, many hundreds of kilometers from Lebanon (Hasakeh, Deir al-Zor), alongside regions previously seen as locations for the group’s involvement.
Nasrallah painted the threat of Islamic State in apocalyptic terms, describing the danger represented by the group as one “unprecedented in history, which targets humanity itself.” This language fairly clearly appears to be preparing the ground for a larger and deeper deployment of Hezbollah fighters into Syria. Such a deployment will inevitably come at a cost to the movement; only the starkest and most urgent threats of the kind Nasrallah is now invoking could be used to justify it to Hezbollah’s own public.
The problem from Hezbollah’s point of view is that it too does not have inexhaustible sources of manpower. The movement has lost, according to regional media reports, around 1,000 fighters in Syria since the beginning of its deployment there. At any given time, around 5,000 Hezbollah men are inside the country, with a fairly rapid rotation of manpower. Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s entire force is thought to number around 20,000 fighters…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Dr. Mordechai Kedar
Arutz Sheva, May 28, 2015
The situation in Syria is deteriorating. To the east, the city of Tadmur (Palmyra) has fallen into the hands of Islamic State, giving that organization control over nearly half the country, including the areas bordering on Iraq and Jordan. Assad's regime has lost the border crossings to Iraq, while the military airfields in the desert -Tadmur and T4 – have fallen to ISIS. Hundreds who lived in the city and helped the regime have been slaughtered by Jihadist knives and their bodies flung onto the streets. The world is concerned that Tadmur's antiquities, priceless relics of ancient cultures, will suffer the same fate at the hands of ISIS as did the ancient artifacts of Iraq.
Currently, there are several combat zones focused on the western part of the country, the area where most Syrians live and where most of the agriculture and industry are located. Battles rage between the regime and a coalition of rebel forces, most of them Islamists attempting to overthrow Assad, mainly in the Qalamoun mountains and the Idlib region. Fierce fighting is taking place in both areas and over the past few weeks, the regime and its ally, Hezbollah, have been losing ground as well as more and more fighters and equipment.
The deteriorating situation in Syria has forced Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader who led his organization into the Syrian quagmire, to schedule three appearances in which he found himself facing mounting criticism from Lebanese Shiites. The large number of Hezbollah casualties has raised the possibility of a general draft, causing high school pupils to be kept from school by their Shiite parents for fear of forced induction into the Hezbollah militia.
The terrible situation in which the Syrians have found themselves has sown panic among the Alawites, who know full well that the connection between their heads and their bodies has a good chance of being severed if the Jihadists prevail. This, naturally, causes them to look for someone to blame and their natural choice is Bashar Assad. Many Alawites accuse Assad of destroying the country and creating the situation in which they – that is, close to two million people – are now in mortal danger. They know how the majority of Syrians view them after forty five years of the Assad family's regime and its extreme cruelty, cruelty which was especially evident when dealing with Sunni opponents.
The Alawites are deathly afraid of the day that mass graves of about twenty thousand people who "disappeared" in Tadmor prison between 1980 and 1981 will be found. Most were peaceful citizens murdered for being suspected of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. The regime has never told their bereaved parents, widows and orphaned children the fate of their loved ones. The discovery of the graves and the sight of the many skulls they contain will serve to exponentially increase Sunni hatred and thirst for revenge against the Alawites.
Alawites are fleeing enclaves and neighborhoods located in Shiite cities – Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama – for the regions they came from in northwest Syria, but the rebels are getting closer and threatening to annihilate them. Suspicions run rife, with Alawites accusing one another of collaborating with the enemy, or attempting to flee the country in order to save themselves. In the city of Qardaha, the Assad family's home town, a fight broke out several days ago, in which two of the ruler's cousins were killed.
Even the Druze, who are traditionally loyal allies of the Alawites, have begun washing their hands of any connection to them and their regime. Sheikh Hamoud Al Hinawi, one of the Druze spiritual leaders, said, this week, that "recent events have shown that reliance on what was once called 'the Syrian Army' is of no value." The Sheikh despaired of the ability of Assad's forces to protect Druze enclaves in southern Syria, especially after the transfer of significant forces that had been keeping the Sunni rebels at bay to other fronts – the Qalamoun mountain range and the Idlib region. The sheikh called on the regime to return to the Druze the heavy and medium strength weaponry that was moved from the area so as to enable them to defend themselves.
The deterioration of the Syrian army is causing it to lose all restraint and it is beginning to act as if there are no rules of warfare. There have been an increasing number of incidents in which civilians were blown up by explosives including chlorine gas and where scud missiles were launched at towns taken over by the rebels without taking into account the possibility of innocent civilian casualties. All this is happening at the time when several rebel groups are uniting under one umbrella, hoping to take advantage of the resulting momentum to topple the Assad regime once and for all. Bashar Assad has lost faith in his Alawite security forces and the only guards who surround him day and night are Iranians of the Quds force, an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guards sent by Iran in order to aid the weakened ruler.
The entire region is experiencing upheaval as a result of the developments in Syria, chief among them the efforts expended by the Saudis and Turks to overthrow Assad. The significance of this joint effort is that the Saudis will fund purchases of weapons, armaments, communications equipment and other tools of warfare which will reach the rebel forces via Turkey. In addition, Turkey will make it easier for foreign volunteers to enter Syria, join the rebels and enhance their ability to operate.
During the last few weeks, there have been reports citing the possible places where Assad can seek refuge – Russia, Iran and Switzerland have been named. Russia and Iran are listed due to their being friends, while Switzerland, it is surmised, is listed due to the Assad family's secret bank accounts in that country. The billions stolen by the ruling family from the Syrian people over decades will be enough to ensure a life of opulence and maximum security for centuries…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
ISIS WON'T FIND NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN IRAQ OR SYRIA,
Louis René Beres
The Hill, June 5, 2015
Credo quia absurdum. "I believe because it is absurd." As President Obama continues to legitimize a nuclear Iran with his surrender-based negotiations, he also worries incongruously about regional nuclear proliferation. Ironically, it is only because of Israel's own earlier renunciations of such pretend diplomacy, and because of Jerusalem's corollary preemptions against both Iraqi and Syrian nuclear facilities, that the Middle East is not already awash in Arab nuclear weapons.
It's not complicated. Precisely because of Israel's singularly courageous and correspondingly lawful self-defense operations in Iraq and Syria, America and its allies do not currently face Islamist nuclear weapons technologies. Thankfully, especially as portions of these countries continue to crumble before advancing Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) forces, murderous terrorist armies will not discover any nuclear weapons or supportive infrastructures along the way.
The reason is clear: Thanks to Israel's Operation Opera on June 7, 1981, and also its Operation Orchard on Sept. 6, 2007, neither Iraq nor Syria will be able to provide ISIS with certain game-changing kinds of destructive technology. To be sure, nuclear weapons in these areas could conceivably have made the Sunni terror organization's End Times theology a grotesquely palpable reality.
On June 7, 1981, and without any prior forms of international approval, Israel destroyed Osiraq near Baghdad. Left intact, this Saddam Hussein-era reactor would have been able to produce enough fuel for an Iraqi nuclear weapon. Moreover, had Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin first pleadingly sought formal approvals from the "international community" — retrospectively, exactly the sort of self-defeating posture that would have been favored by Obama — that residually vital expression of self-defense would have failed. Under international law, war and genocide need not be mutually exclusive. Although it had been conceived by Begin as an indispensable national security corrective for Israel, one desperately needed to prevent an entirely new form of Holocaust, Operation Opera ultimately saved the lives of thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of Americans — U.S. soldiers fighting in subsequent Iraqi wars.
During the actual attack on Osiraq, Israeli fighter-bombers destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor before it was ready to go "on line." Immediately following the attack, the general global community reaction was overwhelmingly hostile. The U.N. Security Council, in Resolution 487 of June 19, 1981, indicated that it "strongly condemns" the attack, and that "Iraq is entitled to appropriate redress for the destruction it has suffered." Even the United States, not yet aware that it would become a primary beneficiary of this unilaterally defensive action, issued multiple statements of conspicuously stern rebuke. Today, of course, particularly as we worry about unceasing ISIS advances, matters look very different…
Most readers are more or less familiar with what happened at Osiraq in 1981. But what about what took place in Syria, during Operation Orchard, in 2007? In this second and later case of an Israeli preemption designed to prevent enemy nuclear weapons, the operational details are much more hazy. In brief, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, consciously reasserted the 1981 "Begin Doctrine," this time within the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria. Several years later, in April 2011, the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) authoritatively confirmed that the bombed Syrian site had indeed been a nuclear reactor. Olmert's decision, like Begin's earlier on, turned out to be the right one.
International law is not a suicide pact. All things considered, Israel's 1981 and 2007 defensive strikes against enemy rogue states were not only lawful, but distinctly law-enforcing. In the absence of any truly centralized enforcement capability, international law must continue to rely upon the willingness of certain individual states to act forcefully on behalf of the entire global community. This is exactly what happened on June 7, 1981, and, again, on Sept. 6, 2007. Israeli Operations Opera and Orchard are exactly the reason that U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Syria do not now have to worry about ISIS forces equipped with nuclear weapons.
Oh yes, but what about Iran? Here, lamentably — where permissible acts of preemption were renounced while they had still been operationally plausible — it will be back to pretend diplomacy. In essence, this most relentless state exporter of Shiite terrorism will thus become the jihadist nuclear power in the next few years.
Should Tehran agree to provide surrogate Hezbollah militias with some of its associated or derivative nuclear technologies, Iran could find itself marshaling considerable and potentially decisive influence in regional terror wars. These endlessly sectarian conflicts throughout Iraq, Syria and other places could then continue to rage until every remaining flower of human society is irremediably crushed. If that happens, a difficult question must inevitably arise: How should America and Israel choose between barbarously warring sides?
Israeli Scholar Calls for the Establishment of a Kurdish and Druze State in Syria: Rachel Avraham, Jerusalem Online, June 9, 2015 —In the wake of Syria disintegrating, prominent Israeli Middle East scholar Mordechai Kedar told JerusalemOnline in an exclusive interview that it is still possible that parts of Syria won’t be controlled by the Islamists: “The northeast part of Syria is going to be a Kurdish state or entity. The northwest is Alawite. The South would be Druze. The heartland will be Islamic, whether radical or not. Already, we have ISIS, which nobody sees how to get rid of.”
Lyse Doucet: ‘The War in Syria … is Not Just About Syria Any More’: Rudyard Griffiths, Globe & Mail, June 5, 2015—The outside world, and in particular the West, has had a difficult time right from the very start of this conflict trying to understand what was unfolding in Syria.
Syria Army’s Weakness Exacerbated by Draft Dodgers: Raja Abdulrahim, Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2015—Soon after the military police came looking for the 25-year-old computer engineer at his family’s home, he fled Syria.
The Lessons of the Syrian Chemical Weapons Discovery: Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, JCPA, May 18, 2015—In early May, inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) reported that they had located traces of sarin-type chemical weapons and ricin-type biological weapons in at least three sites in Syria which the Assad regime had not reported.
With Syria Crumbling, Israel's Security Situation Has Never Been Better: Yossi Melman, Jerusalem Post, June 3, 2015 —Deputy IDF Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan said Monday that Israel’s security situation on the northern border has improved as a result of the Syrian civil war, which has served to drain the blood of Hezbollah.
