Hopes for a Quick Deal With Syria Are Gone, But Israel Needs a Strategy Beyond Strikes
Only last week, optimism was swirling over the prospects of a formal truce agreement between longtime enemies Israel and Syria, designed to put an end to the strikes Israel had been carrying out on military assets of the new regime.
US President Donald Trump had formally dismantled American sanctions against Syria at the end of June, a watershed in the push to bring the regime in Damascus into Western acceptability.
“The civil war was won not by a cohesive, organized, and single-minded opposition with a clear vision of what comes next but by a patchwork of rivals who had nothing in common other than enmity towards Assad,” said Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
“Sharaa might hope to cobble a state together out of these disparate factions, but he does not appear to have yet been able to make them disarm or follow his orders. Until he does, such paroxysms of violence by armed groups pursuing their own prejudices and agendas will likely remain common.”
…
The US president clearly wants to bring Syria onto the American side for good, and is eager to see the Sharaa regime stabilize.
“The Trump administration appears guided less by any specific view of the regime than by a general preference for, as President Trump often says about conflicts the world over, ‘ending the killing,’” said Misztal. “This violence will likely only reinforce that sentiment, as well as the hope that Sharaa can bring about some sort of end to bloodshed.”
…
Read the full piece in the Times of Israel.