Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Mossad Director Yossie Cohen asserted separately on Sunday, Aug. 13, that wherever the Islamic State is thrown out, Iran moves in.
This assessment was borrowed from American evaluations of the situation in Afghanistan and Yemen. It does not work as a guiding principle for Israeli security in its immediate neighborhood - certainly not for Syria.
Cohen was correct in stating in his briefing that Iran presents Israel with its greatest peril, and that the Islamic Republic has used its 2015 nuclear accord with the six world powers as an accelerant for developing nuclear weapons.
But that does not make the situation in Syria analogous to Afghanistan, as an examination of the facts show.
ISIS was pushed out of parts of northern Syria by the Syrian army, Turkish troops, Syrian rebel groups and Kurdish militias. But neither Iranian forces, nor Hizballah or the Shiite militias, imported from Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight under Iranian officers, have moved in to take their place.
Neither have they been allowed a role in the ongoing offensive for the capture of Raqqa. And no Iranian or Shiite presence is to be found in Tabqa, northwest of this former ISIS capital in Syria, or Al-Bab north of Aleppo. Both towns were wrested form the jihadists by other forces.
Had Netanyahu and Cohen noted that Iranian and Hizballah took part in some of the battles fought by Russian and Syrian army forces, they would have been correct. However, it must be said that the pro-Iranian forces’ participation in battles against ISIS was never more than a by-product of their overriding objective, which was to preserve Bashar Assad in the presidential palace in Damascus. Today, they are closer than ever to achieving their goal in view of the crumbling resistance: the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey this month signaled they were pulling their support from the Syrian anti-Assad insurgency. READ MORE
