Afrasianet - Ibrahim Alloush - What is happening in Syria today is largely made by Turkey and Turkey, and relying on them on other Syrians establishes strife and massacres that will remain in the land after the temporary entity disappears.
Among the hundreds of new square miles occupied by the Zionist entity in southern Syria since 8/12/2024, Jabal al-Sheikh, in particular, or Mount Hermon as it is called by its ancient Canaanite name, stands out high with its peak, which is only 35 kilometers from Damascus, which is less than the maximum range of the 155 howitzers if they are loaded with "Excalibr" precision missiles.
It is known that the United States supplied Ukraine with this type of missile, and that the latter used it against Russian forces on the ground. There is a great deal of obscurity in the search engines regarding the possession of the Zionist enemy "Excalibur" missiles, but we have to assume that they are in the possession of the artillery of the occupation "army", because how can the United States give an Arab army what it did not give to the Zionist entity?
The idea is that Damascus, since the new regime came to it, has become closer to the occupying forces and its weapons at the closest range, and that this puts it in a weaker position vis-à-vis Tel Aviv politically.
The Zionist enemy does not have to use howitzers to bombard Damascus from Jabal al-Sheikh, but it can rain it with very short-range rockets.
Jabal al-Sheikh is also not the closest point to Damascus where the occupation "army" has established a firm foothold, but rather Qatna, in the Damascus countryside, which is about 21 kilometers from Damascus, and where the occupation has established a base in the headquarters of the former 78th Brigade, which Avichai Adrei visited a few days ago.
But Jabal al-Sheikh is the most important new location that the occupation has strategically controlled. This mountain, which was occupied by the Zionist enemy just hours after the overthrow of the former regime, has a 2,814-meter-high peak that directly overlooks Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, northern Jordan, and farther from Iraq to Egypt.
Far from the traditional military advantage of controlling such a high point, Zionist strategists consider it a security mine that allows electronic surveillance cords to be dropped over the ocean in an integrated manner that is not possible by aerial surveillance. The location, as a high and dominant land, allows the installation of heavy equipment and huge antennas that are difficult or impossible to target.
This new intelligence base remains a serious target for the attention of the concerned brothers when the rounds with Hezbollah or Iran are renewed, or in the context of responding to the Zionist aggression on Yemen, or when those who sleep in the mud wake up to the danger of the Jabal al-Sheikh base on their security systems much more than an opposition post here or a controversial tweet there.
Incidentally, there has always been an intelligence base for Unit 8200 at a lower point in the Zionist-occupied rear of Mount Sheikh (Israel Hayom, September 16, 2012). But the new, higher one, which can exercise 360-degree surveillance, has become more dangerous for the periphery.
In the strangest places, a distinguished American university, Loyola Mary Mount University in Los Angeles, signed a report published on 22/7/2025 entitled "Threat Detection: The Shadow of Mount Sheikh as Iran's Missiles Target Israel", which talks about the danger of Iran or Hezbollah infiltrating the areas adjacent to Mount Sheikh in southern Syria, so that they do not target the new Israeli position, in the context of talking about that mountain as a dominant and ruling geopolitical point.
The recurring breaking news in the media, sometimes driven and incomprehensible, about Israeli special operations targeting "militias or groups affiliated with Hezbollah or Iran" in southern Syria, especially in the governorates of Quneitra, Damascus countryside and Daraa, apparently stems from this Zionist obsession with the threat to the regional occupation base in Jabal al-Sheikh.
It is obvious that firing missiles with a range of only a few kilometers, or drones, from the vicinity of the new Jabal al-Sheikh base would be easier operationally and politically than launching them from places far away.
In the immediate context of the Jabal al-Sheikh base, the discourse of disarming Hezbollah in the Nabatieh governorate in particular goes in the same direction, as well as its disarmament in the south of the Bekaa Governorate, in the district of Rashaya and farther away, and east of it, all the way to Baalbek, which explains some of the attempts to reinterpret Resolution 1701 to include the disarmament of Hezbollah in the east and north of the Litani, rather than only in the south.
The point here is that securing the protection of the new Jabal al-Sheikh intelligence base objectively requires the transformation of the surrounding area, in Syria and Lebanon, into a militarily demilitarized zone and a political Israeli protectorate, just as controlling the ocean to the north requires the ability to monitor "everything" radar and electronically from the summit of Jabal al-Sheikh.
However, despite being a governing point, it would be a mistake to interpret Israel's strategic objectives in Syria solely from the Jabal al-Sheikh base, rather than the new occupation base in Jabal al-Sheikh from its overall strategic objectives in Syria.
A formula that Israel has always sought to impose on the periphery is to establish its freedom of military action and special operations in it, first, without the forces operating in the targeted places having the ability to impede that "freedom", secondly, or even the ability to respond to it effectively.
The imposition of this operational principle requires undermining military capabilities, dismantling command and control systems, or even disbanding the army, in order to turn the periphery, not just Syria, into a "backyard" that Israel can redesign and coordinate landscaping to suit its strategic vision for the region.
Anyone who looks at the map of the expansion of the Zionist occupation in southern Syria, on the eve of 8/12/2024, finds that it takes the form of a tongue that expands in the vicinity of the city of Quneitra, and then returns to expand north and east the closer it gets to Damascus, despite Netanyahu's statements on the eve of that expansion that "Israel only wants to protect itself, and that it is not interested in interfering in Syria's internal affairs."
It was not in vain that the Israeli operation in Syria, after 8/12/2024, was called "Bashan's Arrow", in a biblical reinterpretation of southern Syria, which can only indicate ambitions for expansion based on the saying of the "Promised Land" from the Euphrates to the Nile.
Finance Minister Smotrich appeared in a documentary for the European public channel Arte, about two months before Operation Bashan Arrow, to say that he had "written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus" and that Israel would expand "little by little" to eventually include all of the "Palestinian territories," as well as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Then comes the expansion of the cordon of the buffer zones, the expansion of the demilitarized reserves to protect those buffer zones, and the imposition of political arrangements with the rulers of Arab capitals to submit to the logic of "Israeli national security", in this particular sense, confirming that the Zionist expansion project is in full swing, whether militarily or non-militarily.
The attempt to impose "demilitarized" zones in southern Syria, or south of the Litani in Lebanon, or in all areas of the Palestinian Authority, is nothing but a repetition of the model of demilitarized zones to varying degrees in Sinai, under the agreement of 26/3/1979, especially the completely demilitarized Area C, which has become an incubator of takfiri terrorism as a natural result of the decline of the state's authority from it, and this was one of the fruits of normalization with the Zionist enemy, of course.
Operation Bashan Arrow included:
a) Geographical expansion of the Zionist occupation, in line with its expansionist ambitions.
b) Systematic destruction of Syrian military capabilities, in the form of missiles, air and sea.
c) Undermining the central authority, or the remnants of that authority, after a decade and a half of war and siege, by insisting on a demilitarized zone in the governorates of Quneitra, Daraa and Suwayda.
Netanyahu had stated on February 23, 2025, that Israel would not allow the army of the new regime in Syria to operate south of Damascus.
However, the results of Operation Bashan Arrow are not read in isolation from the experience of destroying military capabilities, disbanding the armed forces, and undermining the central authority, from Iraq to Libya, and the results of the "no-fly zones" imposed by the United States in Iraq, especially the consolidation of separatism in its north, or the no-fly zone imposed by the Security Council in Libya in 2011, and the resulting dismantling of the country into 3 states. Buffer Pockets", from the former South Lebanon Army to the Yasser Abu Shabab group east of Rafah recently.
It can be documented, without much effort, that the Zionist fingers were not far from the aggression against Iraq, Libya or Syria, or the efforts to dismantle those countries, or from the efforts to dismantle Sudan, which today is witnessing a new bloody chapter in the process of splitting the Darfur region from it, after separating its south and three-quarters of its oil wealth.
The Zionist lobby in the United States was the first advocate of the secession of Darfur more than twenty years ago under the pretext of defending non-Arab civilians there. The Janjaweed, who are accused of slaughtering these civilians, are now taking on the task of separating southwestern Sudan from Khartoum in a context not far removed from the Israeli project itself.
In southern Syria, as in Sudan, we are witnessing today a conflict between two parties, both of which are openly normalized with the Zionist enemy, and both of which think and act in a closed factional manner that produces division and massacres, and flows into the pocket of Tel Aviv, because it leads to disintegration.
Of course, this does not diminish the seriousness of the massacres, violations and crimes that would have naturally been committed by the Takfiri terrorist party, because it is a mountain on this, and the monkey does not turn into a gazelle by the magic of regional and international recognition, but we say that the absence of a national and national project on all sides, the absence of national and national leaders and elites, and the absence of a sensitive compass on the issue of normalization with the Zionist enemy, gives ample room for the exploitation of the grievances of the "majority" or "minority" in the service of the Zionist agenda.
Have we entered the "Israeli era"? On the one hand, there are the arrows of Bashan, not a single arrow, in all directions, and on the other hand, there is the pressure of the "Abrahamic Project" to integrate the Zionist entity into the region, economically, politically, and religiously, in exchange for various prizes, including the lifting of sanctions, or obtaining the approval and protection of the American administration.
Various media reports speak of an Israeli project to establish the so-called "Passage of David" in Syria, to reach the Euphrates River from the Syrian Golan through Daraa and Suwayda, passing through the Al-Tanf base, where the Americans insist that they will stay after their gradual withdrawal from Syria, to Albu Kamal and the areas controlled by the SDF militias in eastern Syria, and then to northern Iraq.
Some place the "David's Passage" project in the context of the Indo-Europe corridor, through the Middle East, in the context of the Western confrontation with Russia and China.
However, the term "David Corridor", which has been increasingly circulating in recent weeks, is only the current version of the project to dismantle Syria, through the establishment of a "minority alliance" in Syria, under the auspices of the so-called "SDF", in the face of what is being highlighted as the "incursion of the majority" that the Takfiri terrorist militias have become its tool. This "minority" project is only the other side of the "majoritarian" project, because both are in the process of tearing Syria apart.
Of course, this does not mean that there is a consensus on the dismemberment of Syria here and now, as some on the American-Zionist side have learned the lesson of Iraq, and they saw that tearing it apart in an uncalculated way has led to an increase in Iranian influence in it, and some fear that Turkey will expand in Syria in the same way if the new regime collapses completely.
It is worth paying attention here to an important article developed by two Israeli experts, published on the Atlantic Council website on 2/7/2025, entitled "Why is the success of Sharia in Syria beneficial for Israel and the United States?".
These two experts point out that the collapse of the new regime in Syria now may provide room for Iranian penetration, as happened in Lebanon, and may leave room for the Takfiri militias to escape, and will lead to Turkish expansion that will pit Israel against Turkey in Syria.
The two experts reassure those concerned about the inclusion of foreign terrorists in the new Syrian army, or the inclusion of Syrian opposition militias, that "the new government in Damascus is not Hamas, and it does not appear to seek an open confrontation with Israel," after enumerating its "achievements" in the areas of deleting Palestinian factions in Syria and vigorously confronting arms smuggling operations to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
On the other hand, the two experts believe that Syria, under its new regime, offers Israel promising opportunities in the field of "energy development," the establishment of potential land trade routes on the India-Middle East line, "containing Iran's proxies," and even engaging in full normalization within the crucible of the Abraham Accords.
What is important here is that the project of "excessing" the new Syrian regime, and dismantling Syria now, is not resolved even among the Israeli elites. Therefore, my humble estimate is that the American-Zionist side will keep the new regime weak and disjointed enough to carry out what it dictates externally, and strong enough so that Iran's experience in Iraq will not be repeated with Turkey in Syria, and that there will be a party legally authorized to sign normalization agreements (this is the meaning of the overwhelming regional and international recognition of the new regime, despite the fact that the experience of Iran in Iraq will not be repeated). from his criminal record and his Takfiri terrorist background).
On the other hand, everyone must understand that Israel cannot be a savior, that what is happening in Syria today is what it and Turkey made to a large extent, and that relying on them on other Syrians establishes strife and massacres that will remain in the land after the temporary entity disappears.
Great figures such as Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, Saleh al-Ali, Fares al-Khoury, Ibrahim Hanano, or Kamal Jumblatt made their name by employing the sect in which they were born in a major national and national project, rather than by reducing the homeland to a narrow sectarian, ethnic, or regional dimension.
Today, we do not find heroes like Essam Zahr al-Din or Samir Kuntar, but rather dwarf figures who derive their role from the Zionist, Turkish, or American occupation, and in my humble opinion, this is a general problem in the narrow factional "consciousness" in general, whether it is "minority" or "majority."
One of the achievements of the Baath Party in Syria was that it created a framework of integration that transcends sects and regions, with a national and national dimension, and the erosion of the Baath Party from within, the erosion of its role in Syrian society, and its distancing from its ideology under the pretext of "modernization" was one of the reasons for the great collapse in Syria. But that is another title for another time.