In the next several months, Israel is likely to aggressively strike Syrian regime headquarters in Damascus.
As we saw in last weekend’s Israeli Defense Force strikes in southern Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is determined to defeat Iran’s emerging power projection stronghold in Syria. They are right to do so.
With Iran now in effective control of a contiguous land corridor between its own territory through Iraq up to Syria’s border with northern Israel, the Iranian hardliners – most notably, the revolutionary guards (IRGC) – have an unparalleled ability to threaten Israel.
Iran’s basic aspiration here is to threaten Israel in the same way that North Korean forces have the credible ability to fire thousands of artillery rounds into Seoul in the opening hours of any conflict.
In turn, Iran’s growing threat has unleashed an Israeli strategy that is bold in its objectives and highly aggressive in tactical means.
After all, Damascus is only 130 miles from Tel Aviv, and less than 100 miles from northern Israeli cities like Acre, Haifa, Nahariyya, Natanya, and Nazareth. With those Israeli population centers in range of Iranian artillery-rocket and missile forces such as those of the Fateh family, Israel could face tens of thousands of immediate casualties in the event of a conflict.
It gets worse.
Ongoing Iranian efforts to perfect ballistic missile capabilities mean that Syrian territory would give Iranian short-range ballistic missiles the easy ability to strike the entirety of Israel. And remember, Iran’s ballistic missile program seeks to facilitate a nuclear strike capability.
Facing this emerging threat, the Israelis are willing to do whatever is necessary to prevent Iran from establishing a missile fortress in Syria. Their strategy currently appears to have two forms.
First, hitting Iranian missile forces and commanders inside Syria so as to educate them as to their own vulnerability and defeat their missile-fortress construction efforts. While the Israelis are currently focused on Iranian forces in Syria, their assessment of the missile threat will lead them to escalate into Iran if necessary.
Israel’s second pursuit is to convince Bashar Assad’s regime that the benefits of enabling Iranian missile forces (paying the IRGC back for their continuing support for his regime), are outweighed by the costs. In that sense, striking Assad’s military and intelligence headquarters in Damascus would draw the dictator’s attention to the regime-survival risks of what he is doing. Be under no illusions, the Israelis will keep escalating until Assad gets the message. You can bet that Netanyahu has made this clear to Assad’s daddy, Putin, in their increasingly frequent phone calls and meetings.
Ultimately, however, what’s happening in Syria is just one part of an increasingly aggressive struggle for the balance of power in the Middle East. From Riyadh to Tehran to Jerusalem, and Damascus to Beirut to Baghdad, the risk of a major regional conflagration is growing every day.
