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Syria – The New Battleground?

CrossFireArabia
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

Analyses

Iran-Israel War: Cost And Opportunities!

CrossFireArabia
June 17, 2025

By Mohammad Abu-Rumman

Benjamin Netanyahu has placed the Iranian regime, the Wilayat al-Faqih system, before a fateful challenge through a harsh pre-emptive strike. While extremely risky, the strike was not decisive enough to settle the confrontation. Netanyahu himself did not expect that an ideological-nationalist regime like Iran’s would surrender and offer immediate concessions following the strike, without launching a retaliatory blow against Israel.

Despite Iran’s unprecedented powerful strikes on Tel Aviv, the reformist current in Iran, represented by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, has also demonstrated its continued commitment to “the negotiating table” and to finding a way out of this war. Iran has deliberately avoided using its full missile capabilities against Israel to prevent the battle from reaching the point of no return.

Current indicators suggest that this war will likely not last long, nor will it expand geographically, because the destruction costs—for both sides—are immense. For Iran, this includes damage to its oil facilities, which are the backbone of its economy, as well as the protection of what remains of its nuclear program and infrastructure. For Israel, the fact that Iran managed to breach the Iron Dome and cause major direct damage in the heart of Tel Aviv and Haifa presents a reality that Israelis cannot endure.

In this light, there will likely come a tipping point at which both parties will be willing to end the conflict. The timing of that moment will be decided by the U.S. administration, which will step in to halt the military escalation. But when will this moment arrive? It will come when both sides realise that they can no longer achieve significant additional objectives, and that the cost of continuing the conflict far outweighs the cost of stopping it, especially given that a so-called “knockout blow” is impossible in such existential wars.

On the Israeli side, there are two major areas of superiority: First, Israel’s air force has successfully destroyed much of Iran’s air defense systems, allowing it to operate freely over Tehran and strike targets at will. Second, intelligence penetration, which could lead to further surprises that may force the Iranians to retreat or make subsequent concessions. However, Israel’s major vulnerability lies in its inability to withstand sustained, large-scale missile attacks, especially after a prolonged multi-front military conflict.

As for Iran, it has two primary objectives in the current military confrontation: To preserve the political legitimacy of the Wilayat al-Faqih regime, which is built on religious ideology and propaganda. Failing to respond or retreating now would reflect poorly internally and could erode the regime’s very source of legitimacy. To protect Iran’s deterrence capacity and prevent its regional standing from deteriorating—especially after losing the bulk of its regional influence in the aftermath of “Flood of al-Aqsa” (the Gaza war).

American intervention, whether military or diplomatic, will be decisive in ending this conflict. It is evident that President Donald Trump prefers a negotiated path, aiming for political, military, and economic gains. Netanyahu, however, is betting that a major military defeat for the Iranian regime will lead not only to concessions on its nuclear program (the primary stated objective) but potentially to changing or collapsing the regime itself, thereby neutralizing it within the regional power structure. This would constitute a strategic shift in the regional security equation in Israel’s favour.

Direct US military involvement remains unlikely, except in two scenarios: If Israel were to request assistance after a massive and successful missile strike against its territory. If the U.S. concludes that Iran will not back down unless there is a more dramatic shift in the military balance of power that compels it to return to the negotiating table and offer substantial concessions.

This equation was not the same two years ago. Back then, Iran had greater geopolitical space and extensive tools of influence in the region. However, what has occurred with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s corridor (the Syrian axis), and the diminished power of Hezbollah and Hamas, has cost Iran critical advantages in the regional balance of power. After this war, there will be significant consequences even for Iran’s remaining influence in Iraq, which may become the final outpost lost by Tehran, ending a twenty-year effort (since the 2003 invasion of Iraq) to weave its intricate carpet of regional influence.

Mohammad Abu Rumman is the Academic Advisor of Politics and Society Institute in Amman and has contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

Opinion

Haaretz: US Finally Independent From Israel

CrossFireArabia
May 12, 2025

An article in Haaretz reports that Israel has suffered several blows in recent days in its historical relations with the United States. And that US President Donald Trump no longer requires Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Tel Aviv for Washington’s nuclear cooperation with Riyadh.

Adding insult to injury to the Israel occupying state, Trump has reached an agreement with the Houthis Ansar Allah group to end US military strikes on Yemen. This is plus the fact the US has began negotiations with Iran without the blessing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Further to that a US official in the Trump administration also held direct contact with the Hamas.

However, Odeh Basharat in his Haaretz article argues that the most painful blow Israel has ever suffered was Trump’s dismissal of his National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, due to a discussion he had with Netanyahu, behind Trump’s back, about launching a military attack on Iran.

Basharat said the United States has finally begun to wake up and free itself from the shackles of Israel, and act as an independent state, not a “banana republic.” Basharat, a journalist from the Arab world, expressed his astonishment at these developments and wondered whether what was happening before his eyes was real or merely an illusion.

The writer believes that a seismic clash is taking place between the two countries and the two men, and that all the reasons are now converging. “America is gaining its independence 250 years after the beginning of its First Revolutionary War,” referring to the war that took place between 1765 and 1783, when 13 British colonies in North America rejected British colonial rule and gained their independence.

Basharat describes this emancipation as the Great American Rebellion, and attributes its causes to the fact that the world—and the United States as part of it—felt deeply concerned by what the writer, with biting sarcasm, called “Israel’s diplomatic acrobatics,” its “enlightened occupation” of the Palestinian territories, and its “closure (of the Gaza Strip) that allows only air in.”

According to the article, as soon as Israel reaches an agreement on a particular issue, it adds new conditions the next day. Although the Arab states that signed peace agreements with Israel were not required to recognize it as a Jewish and democratic state, only the Palestinians are required to do so, which, as Basharat argues, permanently relegates Israeli Arabs to second-class citizens.

According to the article, it has become clear that Netanyahu is deceiving everyone: Arabs, Jews, and Americans, not just Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, as he previously boasted to Israeli police investigators that he misled and deceived them, then bombed them.

Since the time of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, the state’s policy has been based on force. In contrast, Trump seems to believe in a policy of carrots and sticks—meaning diplomacy and force combined—according to the article.

The author claims that the US president thinks differently, as demonstrated by his actions toward the Houthis, Iran, and the tariffs. Once he realized he had failed, he took a step back.

As for Israel, its problem does not lie solely with Netanyahu, as Basharat argues, but rather with the fact that it has not offered an alternative to force. Only three of its former prime ministers, according to the article, have taken a different path: Moshe Sharett, whom Ben-Gurion was keen to overthrow; Yitzhak Rabin, who paid for it with his life; and Ehud Olmert, who was ousted before even presenting his plan.

Furthermore, Israel has long treated the White House as a branch of its prime minister’s office, intervening in the wording of every sentence in documents issued by Washington regarding Israel, according to the Haaretz article as reported in Al Jazeera.

Opinion

Iran-US Talks in Muscat: Winners and Losers

CrossFireArabia
April 12, 2025

EDITOR’S NOTE: This editorial, written by Abdul Bari Atwan, chief editor of the Arabic Al Rai Al Youm website, on Saturday, 12 April, relates to the first talks of the Tehran-Washington negotiations that started in Muscat, Oman relating to the Iran nuclear file.

Iran succeeded in scoring a major goal against the United States in the clash of wills that began today, Saturday, in the Omani capital, Muscat, by insisting that the negotiations be “indirect,” contrary to what its American adversary wants: Namely “direct” negotiations as announced by US President Donald Trump at the White House in his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, who was surprised by this shocking announcement.

The US delegation, led by Trump’s Advisor Steve Witkoff, is participating in these talks from a weak and defeated position, especially after the failure of the US plan to impose tariffs on more than 200 countries worldwide. America has become friendless, and even turned its friends into enemies, especially in Europe and Southeast Asia like South Korea and Japan.

Strategies of negotiations

Iran, represented in the negotiations by veteran Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, the man who led the negotiations for the first nuclear agreement with the six major powers in 2015 and possesses extensive experience in the art and strategies of negotiation, did not submit to the “threats and intimidation” adopted by President Trump.

They imposed their conditions in full on their American opponents and insisted on limiting the negotiations to the nuclear issue, not addressing other issues such as missile and drone systems, and severing ties with the arms of the resistance in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq. And they got what they wanted.

The one who called for a return to a diplomatic solution to the Iranian-American crisis and backed down from his threats of a devastating military strike was President Trump. This happened when he realized the threats of military strikes, coupled with the dispatch of three American aircraft carriers and squadrons of giant B-52 bombers, backfired.

These did not intimidate the Iranians, but prompted a response from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who declared a state of emergency in the Iranian military, placed giant missile platforms, advanced submarines, and ground and naval forces on high alert, and threatened to destroy all of the 10 military bases surrounding his country and housing 50,000 soldiers, close the Strait of Hormuz, and prevent Gulf oil exports to the entire world.

The Iranians do not trust President Trump, who tore up the nuclear agreement in 2018, and is well aware he has become an Israeli puppet. He also realizes that America, defeated in Ukraine, did not simply march to Moscow waving white flags, ready to sell Ukraine and its people to the Russians and surrender to all of its conditions, including the annexation of a fifth of Ukrainian territory to Russia, without consulting its European allies, whom it has become embroiled in this war.

When President Trump demands that the Muscat negotiations reach a quick agreement within two months, this is due to his bitter experience in the Vienna negotiations, which lasted a year-and-a-half and ended in failure due to Iran’s cunning use of the “yes, but” theory, without offering any concessions.

Globally hated…

We do not believe that this theory will be abandoned in the Muscat negotiations, especially since America, which is now globally hated and has lost all of its allies in the West and the East, has become weak, and is on the brink of bankruptcy due to the huge deficit in its annual general budget ($1.4 trillion) and its public debt that has reached more than $42 trillion.

What will encourage Iran to harden its position in these negotiations is China’s strong and defiant stance in the trade war against the United States. Its president, Xi Jinping, declared he will respond in kind to America and its president, and will fight this war to the end, no matter how costly the results.

He has decided to raise customs duties on American goods by a historic rate of more than 125 percent, and has given the green light to his allies in the BRICS group to declare war on the dollar and the global SWIFT financial system, through which America controls the global economy and financial movement.

Trump, wounded by the failure of his gamble to ignite a trade war, and the internal and global revolt against it, with the beginning of the decline in the value of the dollar and the escalation of the recession in the American economy as its first fruits, was forced to stop this war less than three days after its announcement under the cover of a three-month freeze on the application of customs duties.

Crushing military strike

Hence, his threats, i.e. Trump’s necessity of quickly to reach a nuclear agreement didn’t have any effect despite the threat of a crushing military strike. Iran’s respond to Trump forced him to make a major, unprecedented concessions to save face.

Iran, which has suffered significant losses in Lebanon, with the weakening of its powerful military arm in that country (Hezbollah), and in Syria with the fall of the President Assad’s regime, undertook rapid reviews internally and regionally, abandoning many of its policies pursued in recent years, after realizing that the knife is approaching its neck, and that the American-Israeli conspiracy does not only seek to destroy it and remove its military claws and fangs, but also to change the Islamic regime there.

The results of these reviews reflected in the transition from a phase of patience and long-suffering to a phase of confrontation in its military and political aspects, and the strengthening of its allied military arms, starting with the striking Yemen whose arm there is waging heroic wars not only against aircraft carriers and American warships in the Red and Arabian Seas, but also by intensifying ballistic missiles and drone bombardment of the occupied Palestinian interior in Jaffa, Haifa, and Eilat, accelerating the recovery process for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and finding other ways to deliver military supplies to it.

After the historic Syrian corridor was closed with the fall of the Assad regime, America became a farce in the first months of Trump’s rule. It’s no surprise that Iran and its allied proxies are among the biggest beneficiaries and gloaters. He who laughs last laughs loudest… and the days will tell!

Opinion

The Middle East Octopus

Dr Khairi Janbek
March 29, 2025

By Dr Khairi Janbek

When we think of contemporary Iran, one always believes that the Arab Middle East had always been dominated by three Non-Arab American allies: Iran of the Shah, Turkey and Israel. One thinks that those “neighborhood police stations” were the guarantors of stability through their convergence, and at times contradictions in the age of Cold War and oil. However, the Shah of Iran was deposed and the anti-communist Cold War ended, but that didn’t mean that oil stopped becoming important nor that both Russia and China were no longer threats.

One would say, that the rehabilitation of Iran and possibly turning it into a negotiations partner aims at keeping the third angle of the police stations triangle going, because non of the Arab countries, no matter how much they tried, could never replace Iran, because no “Arab police station” is permitted to emerge as a third angle.

Having said that, it would be beyond naive to think that the expansion of Iran’s power and influence happened by stealth or escaped the notice of the US and NATO. After all, Iran grew to become a Red Sea country through its influence on the Houthis in Yemen, a Mediterranean country through its influence in Syria as well Lebanon through Hezbollah, and the major Gulf country through its supporters in Iraq. In fact this Iranian domination of space is what has created a common space between all its long arm organizations in the region.

Essentially, if we compare Iran to an octopus, all those various groups are its tentacles, and they all serve the purpose of Iran’s strategic interests, albeit not through a push-button approach, but through not taking any action which would not please their master Iran. Of course, this puts Iran in a strong position to be a major player in the region and an inescapable negotiations partner for the US, which is also convenient for the Americans, in order to remind their Arab allies who is their protector in a region policed by Turkey, Israel and Iran.

Of course, this takes us to the point of saying that, for all intents and purposes, for the Americans a trusted adversary is more important than distrusted friends, and that it would be absurd to think that all those long arms of Iran in the Arab world can be amputated by military means; they certainly can be weakened, but without the consent of Iran and without the right price, so long as it remains behind them, nothing much can change.

At this point, from what one can only see, is that no one in their right mind or otherwise, will permit a war to emerge in which Israel is pitted against Iran and the US as well as NATO putting all their weight behind Israel and forcing the Arabs to choose their camp. That would be the scenario of the end of the world as we know it , or with major civil wars in the Arab countries controlled by the tentacles of Iran, and no one wants that.

Dr Janbek is a Jordanian writer based in Paris