Joel Parker, researcher and the Internship and Visiting Scholar Manager at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and North African Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel, spoke to a July 21 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
The Arab Spring of 2011 began a revolution in Syria against the Bashar al-Assad regime’s “one-party dominated rule” that led to a civil war between the Alawite minority and the Sunni Muslim Arab majority. The ruling Assad family were Alawites, which is an offshoot of Shia Islam representing 12 percent to 14 percent of the population. Once in power, they gradually placed fellow Alawites in top positions in the military and the government, fueling the grievance among the Sunnis that “this minority was calling the shots.” Bashar’s late father, Hafez, who came to power in a 1970 coup, installed a “de facto sectarian government.”
The “realignment” unfolding during Trump’s tour of the Gulf States, and his handshake with al-Sharaa, left Israel out of the loop.
The Syrian civil war continued from 2011 until December 2024 when “the Syrian army just gave up.” Rebel forces under Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, aka Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), ousted Bashar al-Assad in a “10-day conquest.” HTS, a Salafi-jihadist group, had distanced itself from its al-Qaeda roots to focus on defeating the regime, making al-Sharaa “the man of the hour.”
Behind the scenes, there are signs that Western intelligence may have been involved. There were also reports that Ukrainian intelligence helped HTS develop drone technology. It is likely al-Sharaa was vetted with the thinking that he was “the guy who could talk the talk way better than anyone thought.” Al-Sharaa’s talk of a “new Syria” impressed Donald Trump to drop sanctions, and the American president eyed Syria as a potential addition to the Abraham Accords with the aim of normalizing relations with Israel.
The “realignment” unfolding during Trump’s tour of the Gulf States, and his handshake with al-Sharaa, left Israel out of the loop. Given his jihadi background, Israel was initially skeptical of al-Sharaa. Although Israel preferred a “weak, decentralized” Syria, it realized that, in light of Trump’s endorsement of al-Sharaa, Syria was likely going to be a centralized state.
Al-Sharaa’s insistence that Syria’s governance was to be centralized, despite the presence of disorganized armed militias, was in name only because al-Sharaa’s new government did not have “a legitimate monopoly of violence over every part of the border.” While most of southern Syria’s Druze were predisposed towards “allowing the Syrian government to extend sovereignty,” there was one Druze faction under the spiritual leadership of Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri who did not want to be part of the new Syrian regime. Sheikh al-Hijri formerly had ties with the Assad regime and was reported to have been involved in the illicit Captagon drug trade across the Middle East and Europe.
Al-Sharaa’s advisors misconstrued Israel’s understanding that Syria was going to extend its sovereignty to southern Syria to mean “that the Israelis were giving them the green light to extend security forces” there. Additionally, those advisors led Al-Sharaa to believe that most of the Druze were pro-Syrian and that he would only have to contend with a small pocket of resistance under Sheikh al-Hijri. Instead, the Druze were armed and prepared.
These two “miscalculations” convinced al-Sharaa to send in an initial wave of HTS rebels to Suwayda, southern Syria’s “main Druze majority town.” These “hardcore” Sunni jihadi fighters lorded themselves over the Shia Druze whom they consider heretics, filming videos of themselves first humiliating the Druze by forcibly shaving the men’s mustaches, then killing many of them.
Following the chaos, al-Sharaa sent a second wave of “official army people, and they were much more organized, much less extreme” and even videoed their apologies for the HTS’s actions. Unfortunately, “it was too little too late.” After seeing the videos of their distant relatives being humiliated and killed, the Druze living on the Israeli side of the Golan stormed the fence between Israel and Syria to join the fight.
Several of Israel’s high-ranking Druze officers threatened to quit if Israel did not help defend their kin against the HTS jihadis. Reactions were so intense that a member of Israel’s parliament crossed the border in an attempt to convince the Druze who breached the fence to respect the border between the two countries.
The remaining elephant in the room is Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, albeit militarily diminished, but likely still involved economically in the illicit weapons and Captagon drug trade.
However, there was a more compelling reason for Israel to start bombing convoys of armed Syrian troops. “The Israeli army was seeing massive waves of fighters from the regime coming towards the border with Israel.” An Israeli military site reported some 12,000 fighters were heading “from east to west towards Israel” to fight the Druze. “Israel suddenly realized there could be a bloodbath” with possibly thousands dead. It symbolically bombed Syria’s “entire ministry of defense building” near Damascus with no casualties reported. The U.S. administration, “taken by surprise by the ferocity of the attack,” criticized Israel for undermining the administration’s diplomatic efforts to engage with the new al-Sharaa government and stabilize the region.
The remaining elephant in the room is Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, albeit militarily diminished, but likely still involved economically in the illicit weapons and Captagon drug trade. A concern is that Hezbollah “will exploit the current situation to try and forge an alliance” with Sheikh al-Hijri’s group “to escalate the violence to draw Israel into a fight against Ahmed al-Sharaa.”
The many challenges that lie ahead for Al-Sharaa include a Syrian economy “in shambles” and government employees who are in financially dire straits, which account for many turning to criminal activities. The recent clashes that resulted from “the way that the Syrian regime bungled its ostensibly correct move to have Syrian state forces control all of Syria, it just bungled it up, and made it a big mess. Instead of doing it in a professional and clear-headed way, it turned towards the worst, worst kinds of sectarianism, which in turn will spark counter-sectarianism.”
The recent Druze retaliations against local Bedouin populations bear this out. No doubt it will trigger even more sectarianism in Syria, which will weaken al-Sharaa’s central authority. “The fact that he says general things everybody agrees with isn’t enough. You’ve got to do the right thing.”
