In the Levant, diplomatic complacency toward regional developments has consistently proved risky. Western policymakers, meanwhile, have long embraced the fantasy that regional stability relies on appeasing dictators, signing treaties, and ignoring covert weapons proliferation.
First, the Mossad must reach the facility, extract some of the material, and analyze what its enrichment percentage is.
Within this context, the recent discovery of additional nuclear material in the restricted Syrian nuclear facility Site 99 renders past platitudes ineffective. A more confrontational approach to counter the Syrian nuclear threat is necessary. Specifically, Jerusalem should mount a two-front attack on the remaining Syrian nuclear enterprise. First, the Mossad must reach the facility, extract some of the material, and analyze what its enrichment percentage is. This is critical because Ahmed al-Sharaa’s regime could have falsified the discovery to cover up the development of a secret nuclear program. Secondly, the Israeli Air Force should organize an attack to destroy Site 99 and eliminate the threat, once and for all.
This dual approach serves several purposes. By combining the decisiveness of the 2007 destruction of Syria’s North Korean-built al-Kibar reactor with the audacity of Mossad’s 2018 raid on Iran’s nuclear archive, Israel will demonstrate its might and technical prowess in spying on its enemies’ suspect sites. A surprise attack would further deter Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, who recently saw his neo-Ottoman ambitions weakened after Israeli jets successfully targeted an airbase inside Syrian territory to which Turkey sought to deploy. Such a demonstration of regional capability might also reassure Washington that Jerusalem remains the Middle East’s only dependable hegemon, contrasting sharply with Turkey’s increasingly capricious Islamist dictatorship.
History confirms that only a direct display of force can compel Arab capitals to reconsider hostility to Israel. During the tense 1998 Adana Memorandum crisis, Turkish military mobilization forced Damascus to expel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan. Hard power, not dialogue, dictates Syrian alignment. Today, residual Russian forces, Hezbollah cells, and smuggling networks continue to complicate the Syrian chessboard, leaving tactical half-measures doomed to fail. Leaving Site 99 fully intact allows Iran to permanently aspire to re-establish a secondary nuclear redoubt in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In addition, the United States and Israel must operationalize an electronic warfare and cyber-interdiction mesh network across the northern Levantine airspace, utilizing autonomous signals intelligence to sever the logistical telemetry and drone control links shared between Ankara’s hostile northern proxies and the radical Damascus-backed Salafist elements.
Damascus must choose between integrating into the emerging Abrahamic Security Network or suffering military defeat.
Concurrently, the Mossad should quietly offer protection to Bashar al-Assad—now exiled in Russia, reportedly poisoned twice, and recently sentenced to death in absentia by a Syrian court—in exchange for an operational debrief. Several precedents provide ample justification for this approach. The Mossad’s successful recruitment of Nazi commander Otto Skorzeny in the 1960s to extract critical information about Egypt’s German-assisted missile program is a textbook example and helped Israel neutralize the threat. By analogy, Assad should provide detailed information about any other secret sites, Iranian logistical routes, and Turkish penetration areas while utilizing similar real-world counterintelligence tactics. Simultaneously, the Mossad should begin to recruit former regime technical nuclear personnel, pursue a clandestine Israeli-Syrian intelligence fusion cell, and establish persistent high-altitude Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) orbits to surveil hardened facilities.
Finally, Damascus must choose between integrating into the emerging Abrahamic Security Network or suffering military defeat. If it chooses the first path, an innovative diplomatic initiative could provide al-Sharaa’s regime a way to save face, perhaps by occupying a small portion of the Golan Heights within the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force’s area of control to end permanently the century-old territorial dispute over the plateau. Syrian officials must internalize, however, that harboring clandestine nuclear ambitions inevitably will convert their fragile state into Iran’s pariah twin, with its economy, industry and military likewise ruined.
