Syria – The New Battleground?

CrossFireArabia
Opinion
July 21, 2025

By Dr Amer Al Sabaileh

Southern Syria has returned to the center of regional attention with the recent outbreak of violent clashes. These developments, while not surprising, reflect the ongoing fragility of Syria’s political and security landscape. Since the collapse of the Assad regime, Syria has remained in a state of uncertainty, with internal power balances eroded and the rise of the Shar-Joulani administration in the absence of a viable and inclusive governance framework.

Over the past seven months, the country has witnessed massacres and targeted attacks against Alawites, Druze, Kurds, and Christians—clear signs of deep and worsening instability. This internal collapse is being exploited by external actors, particularly Israel, which views southwestern Syria as critical to establishing a demilitarized buffer zone along the Golan Heights. Despite the complexity of Syria’s internal landscape, Israeli strategic calculations in southwestern Syria remain a pivotal factor in shaping the region’s future.

While Israel initially entered the scene under the banner of “protecting the Druze,” this intervention risks inflaming sectarian tensions and sparking a prolonged conflict. At the same time, it has begun to impose a new reality on the ground—one that cannot be addressed without genuine understanding amongst key Syrian groups such as the Druze and Kurds, as well as broader arrangements with Israel itself. The latter has already sent unmistakable signals to Damascus through symbolic military strikes, indicating that future operations could escalate to directly undermine or even topple the current regime.

The ongoing clashes in Sweida and Damascus are likely to persist, especially in the absence of a clear military map for southern Syria. This suggests that Israeli strikes on military infrastructure in Damascus and beyond may continue. Furthermore, sectarian instability is set to deepen amid mutual distrust between the Druze, Bedouin tribes, and the central government—raising the probability of renewed violence. The recent developments have provided Druze militias with significant de facto autonomy, potentially opening the door for direct regional support, as they increasingly emerge as independent actors on the ground.

In parallel, this fragmentation heightens the risk of southern Syria becoming a multi-front proxy battlefield. Hezbollah—under internal pressure in Lebanon—alongside Iranian militias, may seek to open a new front against Israel, exploiting Syria’s geography to mount a tangible threat and divert Israeli focus away from Tehran.

These developments expose the deep institutional fragility of the Syrian state. The new transitional government remains unable to assert control or establish legitimacy in contested provinces, which paves the way for militias to expand their influence and for chaos to deepen. With the resurgence of extremist groups, the implications for long-term stability and reconstruction in Syria are deeply alarming.

Israel is moving forward with plans to establish a demilitarized buffer zone along its border with Syria, administered by friendly or at least non-hostile forces. The areas of Sweida and southern Daraa are of particular strategic importance, as Israel aims to prevent the advance of forces loyal to the new Syrian administration or the infiltration of Iranian proxies and Hezbollah operatives.

This unprecedented weakening of the Syrian administration may leave it increasingly prone to align with Israeli interests or offer major concessions simply to survive—an opportunity Israel will likely exploit to reshape not just Syria’s security geography, but its broader political map in accordance with long-term Israeli strategic goals.

From the Jordanian perspective, this evolving reality on Syria’s southern border presents a real and growing threat to national security. The concern goes beyond the spectre of chaos or fighting spilling across the border. It’s about a broader attempt to reshape the geopolitical landscape of the entire region—a transformation that will inevitably affect Jordan. Rising security threats are likely to be accompanied by political ones, as the drivers and dynamics of the Syrian conflict may cross borders. This makes it imperative for Jordan to adopt a proactive approach that prevents the spread of this new reality—both in its security and societal dimensions—into its own territory.

The author is a writer for The Jordan Times

CrossFireArabia

Dr. Marwan Asmar holds a PhD from Leeds University and is a freelance writer specializing on the Middle East. He has worked as a journalist since the early 1990s in Jordan and the Gulf countries, and been widely published, including at Albawaba, Gulf News, Al Ghad, World Press Review and others.

Opinion

A Middle East Whirlpool! View From Amman

Saleem Ayoub Quna
August 17, 2026

By Saleem Ayoub Quna

Unlike the grey terrain of the Middle East, known for its harsh aridity and barren landscapes, the region’s still-unsettled, multi-front conflicts that erupted after the 7 October, 2023 surprise Palestinian assault on Israeli settlements around Gaza Strip, almost literally, become associated in the public imagination with the colour blue: The sea, its waves, its vessels and its strategic waterways.

The Palestinians called that watershed event Al-Aqsa Flood. Israel described 7 October as a second Holocaust. If the Palestinians deliberately chose the word flood for its religious and symbolic connotations, the Israeli way of describing it, indicated how serious and tough their losses and injuries were.

What followed was a succession of milestones and unprecedented developments across the Middle East. They continue to unfold dramatically, resembling the abrupt and unpredictable movements of hurricanes and tempests on the high seas.

Yet the side-conflicts and mini-wars that followed 7 October have neither followed a single pattern nor obeyed the same rules. Instead, events have moved in different, sometimes opposing directions — unlike the orderly circular motion of an actual whirlpool. It is almost as though every confrontation has chosen a course of its own: The predictable alongside the unpredictable, the rational alongside the seemingly illogical.

It therefore takes more than intelligent guesswork or clever political analysis to determine which direction these events will ultimately take, and which may prove more dangerous — not only to the region and its inhabitants, but also to the many international powers with interests at stake.

If we were to capture the current Middle Eastern scene in a single frame, we might portray it as an extraordinary, almost unbelievable collision of man-made tides, currents and sub-currents, all moving simultaneously through one increasingly turbulent sea.

Because the first shots fired on 7^th October around Gaza strip, from a Palestinian point of view, came as a last desperate call and reminder of the injustice they are suffering, they soon found their echoes in the four corners surrounding it: In south Lebanon, Yemen to the south and Iraq and Iran to the east. Even to the west, there were international sailors who belonged to the Peace Flotilla, trying to bring medicine and food to the starving children of Gaza!

One of the most significant currents emerged on Israel’s northern front.

What initially appeared to be a relatively “controlled” confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah steadily intensified until September 2024, when Israel killed the party’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. Only a few months later came another geopolitical earthquake: The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus in December 2024.

Each development sent another powerful current through the already boiling waters of the wider Middle Eastern whirlpool.

Then came an even larger artificial wave.

In June 2025, the United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer, striking Iran’s three principal nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan while diplomatic efforts surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme were still underway.

Washington described the operation as an attempt to inflict decisive damage on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Tehran responded with retaliatory action against American military interests in the Gulf.

But that was not the end of the storm.

On 28 February, 2026, the world witnessed another major escalation when the United States and Israel launched coordinated, large-scale attacks against Iran. The two allies acted jointly but gave their military campaigns different names: Washington called its operation Epic Fury, while Israel called its campaign Roaring Lion.

The strikes hit Iranian military infrastructure and senior leadership and inflicted substantial damage. Yet they failed to produce one of the most far-reaching political outcomes sought by US-Israeli advocates of the military campaign: The toppling of the Iranian regime.

And so the whirlpool continued.

Iran responded not simply through missiles and military retaliation, but by shifting the struggle towards one of the most strategically sensitive waterways on earth: The Strait of Hormuz.

Through restrictions on shipping, attacks on vessels and increasingly assertive claims over the waterway, Tehran transformed Hormuz into another major front in the confrontation. The strait — through which a substantial share of the world’s energy supplies traditionally passes — became yet another current dragging regional powers and the wider international community deeper into the turbulence.

Here, the metaphor of the whirlpool becomes more than literary.

Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are no longer easily separable theatres. Each produces currents that flow into the others. A military strike in one location generates political pressure somewhere else; an assassination changes the balance of power hundreds of kilometres away; a blocked shipping lane reverberates through global markets thousands of kilometres beyond the Middle East.

And all the while, new currents are being created faster than old ones can disappear.

What begins on the shores of Gaza does not remain in Gaza. What happens in Beirut, Damascus, Tehran or the Strait of Hormuz does not remain there either.

The Middle Eastern whirlpool has become too wide, too violent and too interconnected to contain its turbulence within the region itself.

And as it keeps spinning, its waves will continue to splash far beyond the shores of the Middle East — reaching, sooner or later, virtually every corner of the globe.

Conclusion: As long as the waters surrounding the Middle East remain crowded with warships, missiles, blockades, retaliatory strikes and the debris of foreign intervention, the region’s old whirlpool will continue to spin.

News Opinion

‘No Need For Your Crocodile Tears’

Heba
August 13, 2026

By Ismail Al Sharif

“I’ll say it frankly: We should have exerted more pressure on Israel to adopt a different approach in Gaza” – Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to ex-President Joe Biden.

A striking phenomenon is recurring in American politics: Some presidents, cabinet members, and senior officials become more outspoken in their stances toward the Israeli occupation entity after leaving office, expressing regret for decisions that contributed to the injustice inflicted upon the Palestinian people.

This may be due to their liberation from diplomatic and partisan constraints, the pressures of Zionist lobbies, and the influence of tainted money, or perhaps their consciences awaken belatedly as they feel closer to death, realizing the enormity of the injustice they participated in or condoned.

Examples of this are numerous. Among the most prominent is former US President Jimmy Carter, who, after leaving office, shifted from a traditional pro-Zionist rhetoric to criticizing the Israeli occupation and its policies. Then there is Chuck Hagel, former US Secretary of Defense, who held the United States responsible for the Zionists’ continued aggression and described their practices as terrorism— but only after his retirement, of course.

Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, also criticized war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him ungrateful.

More recently, Jake Sullivan, former National Security Advisor, and Antony Blinken, Biden’s lackluster Secretary of State, joined the ranks of those who have expressed regret. Both men have blood on their hands from the blood of Palestinian children and played a shameful role in supporting the Israeli entity during one of the greatest acts of genocide in modern history.

This was revealed in a lengthy investigation published in The New Yorker magazine last 20th July, titled “How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Against Gaza – and Iran,” with the subtitle: “Top officials from the previous Administration now express regret over their failure to rein in Netanyahu.”

However, this regret will not absolve them for they knew full well that the Zionists were committing genocide in Gaza. On 5 March, 2024, five months after the start of the genocide, Mirjana Spoljarić, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), sent a confidential letter to President Biden. The ICRC, in addition to its humanitarian mission, is obligated under the Geneva Conventions to provide states with information and advice to help them avoid committing war crimes.

In her letter, Spoljarić reminded President Biden that the organization had condemned the “horrific” massacre perpetrated by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October 2023 and that it had continued to press the movement “tirelessly” for the release of the “hostages” it was holding.

However, this time she appealed to Biden with “grave concern,” warning that Israel, which had continued to bombard Gaza with heavy munitions since that October, was ignoring the ICRC in an unprecedented manner.

In her letter, she wrote: “The way Israel conducts hostilities is inconsistent with the laws of armed conflict, particularly the obligations to protect civilians, to distinguish between military objectives on the one hand and civilians and civilian infrastructure on the other, to ensure the humane treatment of detainees and the dead, to protect medical facilities and personnel, and to provide and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid.”

Despite these clear warnings, the United States remained a key partner in the genocide, providing weapons, money, and political and international cover to Israel. And now some of its officials come to shed crocodile tears for the children of Gaza!

I say to them: You have no right to repent now, after all these martyrs, after all these tragedies, to say: “We are sorry, we made a mistake.” You knew, and you had the power to pressure and prevent, but you chose to support, arm, and cover up. You bear the burden of what happened, and the blood of the children of Gaza will haunt you and pursue your names to the dustbin of history.

This piece by Ismail Al Sharif was originally published in the Arabic Addustour daily and reprinted in English in Crossfirearabia.com.