In late April, Syria plunged into renewed sectarian violence, with clashes erupting between extremist Sunni factions affiliated with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led (HTS) Syrian government and Druze armed groups in Suwayda and Damascus, leaving at least 100 dead.
A close examination of the events leading up to the bloodshed points to Israel’s role in inciting sectarian unrest – part of its post-7 October 2023 strategy to redraw West Asia’s map by destabilizing and ultimately dismantling Syria.
On 29 April, as fighting escalated between Druze militias and government-affiliated forces, extremist Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared:
“[We] will end this campaign when Syria is dismantled, Hezbollah is severely beaten, Iran is stripped of its nuclear threat, Gaza is cleansed of Hamas, and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are on their way out of it to other countries.”
From empowering Julani to dismantling his rule
As Syria analyst Kevork Almassian notes, the occupation state played a decisive role – alongside Turkiye – in installing Syria’s new leadership, led by former Al-Qaeda commander and current self-appointed President Ahmad al-Sharaa, previously known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani.
On 27 November 2024, Israel and Lebanon signed a ceasefire agreement following a devastating two-month Israeli bombing campaign that killed Hezbollah's secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, and effectively shattered the Lebanese resistance.
That same day, militants from HTS, formerly Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, wasted no time in launching a lightning assault on Aleppo from their Idlib stronghold. With Turkish backing, HTS captured Damascus two weeks later, toppling president Bashar al-Assad and installing Julani as Syria’s new ruler.
"The collapse and removal of [Hassan] Nasrallah really broke the axis. It was a terrific blow ... Having delivered that blow to Hezbollah, we also delivered a blow to Assad because Assad was relying heavily on [Hezbollah],” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated in a speech on 28 April.
Netanyahu revealed that Israeli warplanes intercepted Iranian aircraft headed toward Syria, preventing them from delivering troops meant to assist the country’s embattled president amid the HTS assault.
“They had to rescue Assad,” Netanyahu said, claiming that Iran wanted to send “one or two airborne divisions” to help the Syrian leader. “We stopped that. We sent some F-16s to some Iranian planes that were making some routes to Damascus,” he said. “They turned back.”
"Being shed of any support from the West and any support from the East, the Assad regime collapsed. And just to make sure, we destroyed 90 percent of their armaments ... and then improved our positions,” Netanyahu explained, citing Israel’s massive bombing campaign on Syria and occupation of new territory following Assad’s ouster.
Fomenting sectarian chaos to divide and conquer
Barely two months after helping Julani seize power, Israel began laying the groundwork for an insurgency against his rule – seeking to fragment Syria into weak, ethnic enclaves.
In February, Tel Aviv began lobbying Washington to back a “weak, decentralized Syria” and allow Russia to maintain military bases to offset Turkish influence, according to Reuters.
This lobbying campaign included a “white paper” shared with US officials, in which Israeli officials claimed they did not trust HTS and that they would not tolerate HTS or any affiliated forces operating near its borders.
Around the same time, Khaldoun al-Hijri, envoy of Druze spiritual leader Hikmat al-Hijri, reportedly met US officials to propose an armed rebellion against Julani’s government – allegedly coordinated with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Alawite factions. The proposal, according to Hijri, had Israeli support and coincided with Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, where he reportedly presented the Syria white paper.
This raises questions over whether Israel played a role in pushing Alawite members of Assad’s former army, so-called “regime remnants,” to launch a failed uprising against Julani’s government in early March.
On 7 March, extremist Sunni factions recently incorporated into Syria’s Ministry of Defense responded by carrying out the brutal sectarian massacre of over 1,600 Alawite civilians, including many women and children, on the basis of their religious identity.
Alawite leaders immediately began calling for international intervention to protect their terrorized community, pushing Syria closer to division, while Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz feigned outrage at the atrocities committed against it by Julani’s forces.
The Druze turn against Julani
Two months later, sectarian flames reignited when an audio clip – allegedly of a Druze commander insulting the Prophet Muhammad – went viral on Syrian social media, sparking a violent Sunni backlash.
Druze students were assaulted in Homs and Damascus, and mobs in Hama chanted genocidal slogans. Extremist Sunni factions attacked Jaramana from the neighboring town of Mleiha, triggering clashes with Druze armed groups. At least 13 people were killed, including Druze fighters and members of Julani’s General Security Service.
Government-aligned militants also attacked the Druze-majority town of Sahnaya. Reinforcements from Suwayda were ambushed on the Damascus–Suwayda highway, with nine Druze fighters killed. Pro-government forces reportedly executed Druze civilians at a poultry farm near Sahnaya.
By week’s end, over 100 had been killed – fighters and civilians alike. Among them were Sahnaya’s Druze mayor, Hossam Warour, and his son Haidar – executed by General Security agents the day after appearing on state media welcoming those same forces.
The killings caused Druze leader Hikmat al-Hijri to declare that Julani’s government was illegitimate, stating on 1 May that, “This collective killing is systematic, clear, visible, and documented.”
“We no longer trust a group that calls itself a government, because the government doesn’t kill its own people through extremist gangs that are loyal to it, and after the massacre claims they are loose forces,” he added.
Israeli support for Druze separatism
Israel has a history of supporting Druze separatists in Syria, including during a wave of protests in Suwayda beginning in August 2023. This support came via elements from the occupation state’s own Druze community, many of whom are active in the Israeli military and intelligence, and led by the country’s most prominent spiritual leader, Sheikh Mowaffaq al-Tarif.
In contrast, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri formerly supported the Syrian government and the unity of Syria during the covert CIA war to depose Assad that began in 2011. However, Hijri shifted his stance and began opposing Assad in 2021, reportedly under Israeli influence.
Syria Direct reported that during a secret meeting with a Russian military delegation in April 2021, Hijri “rejected Assad’s continued presence in power” for the first time.
According to two Syrian Druze journalists speaking with Syria Direct, the change came as a result of “advice given to him by the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt in Lebanon, and Sheikh Muwaffaq Tarif, the head of the Druze in [Israel], that he needed to stay away from the regime and oppose it.”
However, Jumblatt, prone to switching sides domestically, would go on to warn in March that “The free Syrians must be cautious of the plots of Israel,” adding that “In Syria, there is a plot for sabotage. There is a plot for sabotage in the region and for the Arabs' national security.”
The sectarian fighting between Sunnis and Druze that erupted to Israel’s benefit raises the question of whether Israeli intelligence may have created and spread the inflammatory audio recording insulting the Prophet, resembling the spread of the fake videos of former Syrian army commander Meqdad Fatiha claiming to launch the Alawite uprising.
Israel intervenes to ‘protect’ the Druze
On 30 April, Israeli officials announced they had conducted a “warning strike” on an extremist group preparing to attack Druze civilians in Sahnaya. The Syrian Interior Ministry stated that an Israeli drone strike had targeted Syrian government security forces, killing at least one.
The following day, Israel launched airstrikes near the presidential palace in the capital, with Israeli leaders declaring the strike a message to Damascus.
In response to the Israeli strikes, prominent pro-government journalist Qatiba Yassin vowed that if Julani was killed, the government and its affiliated armed factions would become worse than any terror group that emerged during the 14-year war, in a reference to ISIS.
On 3 May, Israel launched 20 airstrikes, hitting military targets across Syria in the “heaviest” bombardment of the country so far this year. That same day, under the pretext of protecting minorities, the occupation army announced that it had deployed forces in southern Syria “to prevent the entry of hostile forces into the area of Druze villages.”
Israeli bombing of the Syrian government forces was ironic given that during the covert CIA war to oust Assad, Tel Aviv had ordered its air force to bomb Syrian army positions in support of Julani’s forces, at that time known as the Nusra Front.
Israel also stood by the side of opposition militants “in a heroic way,” covertly providing weapons, salaries, and medical care to groups in southern Syria, including the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Nusra Front, to oust Assad.
In 2019, outgoing Israeli army chief Gadi Eisenkot finally acknowledged providing weapons to the opposition armed groups. The support had previously remained secret to avoid making the opposition look like “stooges of the Zionists,” the Times of Israel reported.
Playing all sides for partition
Despite its airstrikes and public threats, Tel Aviv continues to maintain quiet ties with Syria’s new extremist rulers.
On 29 April, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani met with a delegation of American and Syrian Jews in New York, followed by a photo op with Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center – a longtime backchannel to Arab governments on Tel Aviv’s behalf.
Two weeks before, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, Julani’s strongest foreign backer, met with his Israeli counterparts as well to coordinate mutual “deconfliction” in Syria. Turkish and Israeli officials held meetings on 10 April in Baku, the capital of their mutual ally, Azerbaijan.
“We have no intention of confronting any country within Syria, including Israel,” Fidan told CNN’s Turkish affiliate.
Shaibani and Fidan’s meetings indicate that Julani and his Turkish backers are likely coordinating events in Syria with Israel, creating sectarian violence to justify forming an autonomous Druze region to complement the existing US and Israeli-backed Kurdish autonomous region in the country’s northeast.
Such a division of Syria along sectarian lines benefits both Ankara and Tel Aviv, with each regional power winning zones of influence in a dismantled Syria. While losing control of Suwayda, a region void of natural resources but with a population hostile to Turkish dominance, Turkiye would be given permission from Israel to consolidate its control of the Sunni Muslim areas of the country, including its major population centers, Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, in a manner satisfying Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions.
Israel, meanwhile, would dominate a Druze-Kurdish corridor stretching through Syria’s Badia desert – home to both ISIS and the US military base at Al-Tanf. This so-called “David’s Corridor” would permanently break the long-feared “Shia crescent” linking Tehran to Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut.
A blueprint decades in the making
Israeli–Turkish coordination in Syria echoes their seven-year collaboration in the CIA’s Timber Sycamore operation, as well as a partnership with Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani in 2014 to enable ISIS conquests across Iraq – including Mosul and Sinjar – to unlock Kurdish oil to be sent to Israel via Turkiye’s Ceyhan port.
Ankara’s quiet effort to provide Tel Aviv with oil, despite Erdogan’s public condemnations of its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, has continued as Turkiye now allows Azerbaijan to send oil via pipeline across its territory to Ceyhan for delivery by ship to Haifa.
The Zionist strategy: Let Arabs kill Arabs
During The Cradle’s recent visit to Damascus, an Alawite critical of Assad summed up the conflict bluntly: 75 years after its creation, Israel still prefers to defeat its enemies by encouraging them to kill one another.
David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, boasted that Israel would not conquer and control the West Asia through its power, or nuclear weapons, but by using psychological warfare to partition the three large states around it, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, into mini states consumed by religious and sectarian fighting.
“Our success in achieving this does not depend on our wisdom,” he said, “as much as it depends on the ignorance and stupidity of the others.”
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of HOS
0 Comments