Extract from ABC News
Analysis
By global affairs editor John Lyons
Israel struck Syria, deploying troops into the buffer zone.
Syria slowly emerges from the shadow of a 50-year dictatorship.
The enemy of my enemy is my new enemy
Israel had wanted to see the end of the Assad regime. In this sense, they shared an ambition with an unlikely bedfellow — Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the rebel group who had based themselves in the north of Syria who, in eight days of a lightning military operation, forced Assad to flee in ignominy to exile in Russia.
For decades, there's been an axiom in the Middle East that tends to ring true: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Israel has just turned the "enemy axiom" on its head. Their response to the end of Assad and the arrival of HTS is that the enemy of my enemy is my new enemy.
Israel's rationale appears to be that it is using this opportunity to hit weapons supplies or military facilities that may pose a threat to it and has seized land to make Israel safer.
But at any time during the last 50 years, Israel could have struck any target that it deemed as a threat and for many years, the current buffer zone had been large enough to ensure Syrian troops could not mass near its border.
Over recent years, when Israel has decided that any activity or facility inside Syria has been a threat, it has been able to take action — there have been occasions when Israeli intelligence detected trucks in Syria carrying weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel has bombed them.
The defeat of Assad and the arrival of HTS has cut the supply chain delivering weapons to Hezbollah.
Iran, the ultimate controller of Hezbollah, is one of the big losers of the end of Assad. Assad was a key element of Iran's crescent of influence — a crescent of Shia supporters that allowed Iran to arm Hezbollah so that it could be the source of attack and destabilisation on Israel's border.
That Shia influence has been replaced by a Sunni group.
IDF video shows strikes on weapons stockpiles in Syria.
From brutal regime to bombings
Syrians are only now able to speak openly about the trauma of the regime of Hafez al-Assad and then his son, Bashar.
The true horrors of the half-century of dictatorship are emerging. The stories emanating from the prisons alone are horrifying — the Sednaya prison alone is one window into the brutality of the Assads.
The Guardian reported that as many as 100,000 people disappeared in the 14 years after the initial uprising against the Assad regime in 2011.
Reporting on the scenes happening since Assad fled this week, The Guardian wrote: "Many emerged frail and emaciated into the bright December sunlight, greeted by weeping family members who had no idea they were still alive … verified videos from Damascus showed dozens of women and small children being held in cells, the rebels opening the doors telling them not to be afraid. The prisons infamous for torture in and around Damascus itself — including Sednaya, the most notorious, where satellite imagery showed a new crematorium was built in 2017 to dispose of bodies — were broken open early on Sunday."
In 2020, Amnesty International reported that between 2012 and 2020, the regime's use of barrel bombs — which it defined as oil drums, fuel tanks or gas cylinders filled with explosives and metal fragments, plunged from helicopters — had killed more than 11,000 Syrians.
So while Netanyahu appears in court in Israel facing charges of corruption, he has ordered saturation bombing of his neighbour.
This means that in recent months, Israel has bombed Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, the southern suburbs of Beirut, central Beirut and now Syria.
No reasonable person would question Israel's right to respond — harshly — to the horrors committed by Hamas when it crashed into southern Israel on October 7 last year.
But the proportionality of that response is increasingly being questioned and will continue to be questioned.
The Norwegian Refugee Council's secretary-general, Jan Egeland, in a recent report entitled "Humanity is being erased in Gaza", concluded of Israel's behaviour in the enclave:
"This is in no way a lawful response, a targeted operation of 'self-defence' to dismantle armed groups, or warfare consistent with humanitarian law. What Israel is doing here, with Western-supplied arms, is rendering a densely populated area uninhabitable for almost two million civilians. The families, widows and children I have spoken to are enduring suffering almost unparalleled anywhere in recent history. There is no possible justification for continued war and destruction."
Amnesty International has also made a damning assessment of Israel's conduct of the Gaza war. It recently released a report based on field and desk research, 212 primary interviews, analysis of an extensive range of visual and digital evidence including satellite imagery, video footage and photographs — much of it geo-located — interviews with Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, decisions taken by the Israeli Supreme Court and public statements by Israeli government and military officials.
It says of its report: "It assesses allegations of violations and crimes under international law by Israel in Gaza within the framework of genocide under international law, concluding that there is sufficient evidence to believe that Israel's conduct in Gaza following October 7, 2023, amounts to genocide."
Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Israel rejects genocide claims
Israel rejects any suggestion of genocide, saying that the reason for the civilian death toll is because Hamas fighters embed themselves in civilian targets. Of the Amnesty report, the Israeli foreign ministry said: "The deplorable and fanatical organisation Amnesty International has once again produced a fabricated report that is entirely false and based on lies."
Whether one accepts that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza or rejects it, one only needs to look at photographs to see that neighbourhood after neighbourhood have been reduced to rubble. Having had much of its housing, water systems, hospital system, communications networks, roads and schools destroyed, Gaza will be unlivable or close to unlivable for as much as a generation.
Likewise, vast sections of southern Beirut are now unlivable, as are sections of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Significant parts of the West Bank have also been hit by Israeli army and air force attacks.
On the Israeli side, much of the north of the country has been made unlivable, at least in the short term, due to Hezbollah's rocket attacks since October 7. An estimated 60,000 Israelis have fled from the north, and most have still not returned despite a recent ceasefire. Many houses and apartment buildings have been damaged or destroyed by the rockets that Hezbollah fired in support of Hamas.
All of this makes the question about Israel's longer-term vision more pressing. While Iran and Russia have lost influence in Syria, Türkiye has emerged as the most influential regional power in terms of what happens next.
What's Syria's place in the world now?
HTS poses a dilemma for countries such as Australia. In September, Australia designated them a terrorist organisation.
An Australian government security assessment said: "HTS is a Sunni Islamist religiously-motivated violent extremist group based in north-western Syria. HTS opposes the government of Bashar al-Assad and aims to replace the government with an Islamic caliphate. HTS leaders have sought to transition the group from an insurgency to an organised paramilitary force and civilian authority in an attempt to gain domestic and international support for its objectives."
But it adds that "it almost certainly retains no formal links to Al Qaeda and does not publicly advocate for global jihad".
The United Nations and some European countries are suggesting that they should offer early support to a new government in Damascus in the hope of ensuring that groups like Islamic State have little chance of filling the vacuum created by the sudden departure of a dictator.
Rather than engaging in an instant military response, wouldn't Israel have been better off talking to Türkiye about the nature of the incoming regime and how to ensure it was moderate rather than radical?
And what message does it send to Syrians, celebrating the end of a horrible chapter in their country's history, to have Israel taking land and engaging in saturation bombing?
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