After seven years of utter devastation and bloodletting, a
consensus has emerged among all the belligerents of the Syrian war to
de-escalate the conflict, except Israel which wants to further escalate the
conflict because it has been the only beneficiary of the carnage in Syria.
Over the years, Israel has not only provided medical aid and
material support to the militant groups battling the Syrian government –
particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s
Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the
Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force has virtually played the
role of the air force of the Syrian jihadists and has conducted more than 100
airstrikes in Syria and Lebanon during the seven-year conflict.
Washington’s interest in the Syrian proxy war is mainly
about ensuring Israel’s regional security. The United States Defense
Intelligence Agency’s declassified
report [1] of 2012 clearly spelled out the imminent rise of a Salafist
principality in northeastern Syria (Raqqa and Deir al-Zor) in the event of an
outbreak of a civil war in Syria.
Under pressure from the Zionist lobby in Washington,
however, the Obama administration deliberately suppressed the report and also
overlooked the view in general that a proxy war in Syria will give birth to
radical Islamic jihadists.
The hawks in Washington were fully aware of the consequences
of their actions in Syria, but they kept pursuing the ill-fated policy of
nurturing militants in the training camps located in the border regions of
Turkey and Jordan to weaken the anti-Zionist Syrian government.
The single biggest threat to Israel’s regional security was
posed by the Shi’a resistance axis, which is comprised of Iran, the Assad
administration in Syria and their Lebanon-based surrogate, Hezbollah. During
the course of 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into
northern Israel and Israel’s defense community realized for the first time the
nature of threat that Hezbollah and its patrons posed to Israel’s regional
security.
Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call
for Israel’s military strategists that what will happen if Iran passed the
guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close
to the northern borders of Israel.
In a momentous announcement at an event in Ohio on March 29,
however, Donald Trump said, “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS. We’ll be
coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it
now.”
What lends credence to the statement that the Trump
administration will soon be pulling 2,000 US troops out of Syria – mostly
Special Forces assisting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces – is that
President Trump has recently sacked the National Security Advisor Lieutenant
General H.R. McMaster.
McMaster represented the institutional logic of the deep
state in the Trump administration and was instrumental in advising Donald Trump
to escalate the conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria. He had advised President
Trump to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan from 8,400 to 15,000.
And in Syria, he was in favor of the Pentagon’s policy of training and arming
30,000 Kurdish border guards to patrol Syria’s northern border with Turkey.
Both the decisions have spectacularly backfired on the Trump
administration. The decision to train and arm 30,000 Kurdish border guards had
infuriated the Erdogan administration to the extent that Turkey mounted
Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin in Syria’s
northwest on January 20.
After capturing Afrin on March 18, the Turkish armed forces
and their Free Syria Army proxies have now cast their eyes further east on
Manbij, where the US Special Forces are closely cooperating with the Kurdish
YPG militia, in line with the long-held Turkish military doctrine of denying
the Kurds any Syrian territory west of River Euphrates.
It bears mentioning that unlike dyed-in-the-wool globalists
and “liberal interventionists,” like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who
cannot look past beyond the tunnel vision of political establishments, it
appears that the protectionist Donald Trump not only follows news from
conservative mainstream outlets, like the Fox News, but he has also been
familiar with alternative news perspectives, such as Breitbart’s, no matter how
racist and xenophobic.
Thus, Donald Trump is fully aware that the conflict in Syria
is a proxy war initiated by the Western political establishments and their
regional Middle Eastern allies against the Syrian government. He is also
mindful of the fact that militants have been funded, trained and armed in the
training camps located in Turkey’s border regions to the north of Syria and in
Jordan’s border regions to the south of Syria.
According to the last year’s March
31 article [2] for the New York Times by Michael Gordon, the US ambassador
to the UN Nikki Haley and the recently sacked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
had stated on the record that defeating the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq was
the top priority of the Trump administration and the fate of Bashar al-Assad
was of least concern to the new administration.
Under the previous Obama administration, the evident policy
in Syria was regime change. The Trump administration, however, looks at the
crisis in Syria from an entirely different perspective because Donald Trump
regards Islamic jihadists as a much bigger threat to the security of the US
than Barack Obama.
In order to allay the concerns of Washington’s traditional
allies in the Middle East, the Trump administration conducted a cruise missile
strike on al-Shayrat airfield in Homs governorate on April 6 last year after
the alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun. But that isolated
incident was nothing more than a show of force to bring home the point that the
newly elected Donald Trump is an assertive and powerful president.
More significantly, Karen De Young and Liz Sly made another
startling revelation in the last year’s March
4 article [3] for the Washington Post: “Trump has said repeatedly that the
US and Russia should cooperate against the Islamic State, and he has indicated
that the future of Russia-backed Assad is of less concern to him.”
Mindful of the Trump administration’s lack of commitment in
the Syrian proxy war, Israel’s air force conducted an airstrike on Tiyas (T4)
airbase in Homs on April 9 in which seven Iranian military personnel were
killed. The Israeli airstrike took place after the alleged chemical weapons
attack in Douma on April 7 in order to convince the reluctant Trump administration
that it can order another strike in Syria without the fear of reprisal from
Assad’s backer Russia.
Despite scant evidence as to the use of chemical weapons or
the party responsible for it, Donald Trump, under pressure from Israel’s lobby
in Washington, eventually ordered another cruise missiles strike in Syria on
April 14 in collaboration with Theresa May’s government in the UK and Emmanuel
Macron’s administration in France.
What defies explanation for the April 14 strikes against a
scientific research facility in the Barzeh district of Damascus and two alleged
chemical weapons storage facilities in Homs is the fact that Donald Trump had
already announced that the process of withdrawal of US troops from Syria must
begin before the midterm US elections slated for November. If the Trump
administration is to retain the Republican majority in the Congress, it will
have to show something tangible to its voters, particularly in Syria.
The fact that out of 105 total cruise missiles deployed in
the April 14 strikes in Syria, 85 were launched by the US, 12 by France and 8
by the UK aircrafts shows that the strikes were once again nothing more than a
show of force by a “powerful and assertive” US president who regards the
interests of his European allies as his own, particularly when he has given a
May 12 deadline to his European allies to “improve and strengthen” the Iran
nuclear deal, otherwise he has threatened to walk out of the pact in order to
please Israel’s lobby in Washington.
Finally, the Trump administration will eventually realize at
its own risk that placating the Zionist lobby is unlikely if not impossible
because Israel has conducted another missile strike in Aleppo and Hama on
Sunday (April 29) in which 26 people, including many Iranians, have been killed
and 60 others wounded.
According
to NBC [4], the blast at the Brigade 47 base in Hama which serves as a
warehouse for surface-to-air missiles was so severe that it caused 2.6 magnitude
earthquake and shockwaves were felt as far away as Lebanon and Turkey. This
seems like a last-ditch attempt by Israel to further escalate the conflict and
to force the Trump administration to abandon its plans of withdrawing US troops
from Syria.
