A senior Israeli official acknowledged this week that Israel helped topple the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad indirectly by preventing the Iranian regime from reinforcing Assad’s failing military.
The regime fell late last year after Israel defeated Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon. Following the ceasefire in Lebanon in late November, Syrian rebels in the western portion of the country launched an assault that reached Damascus within days.
Turkey has long been acknowledged as one of the key backers of the Syrian rebel militias, who eventually installed former jihadist Ahmed al-Sharaa as interim Syrian president.
However, Israel’s role has not been widely known or understood.
It is public knowledge that Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah meant that Assad could no longer count on terrorists from Lebanon to act as his protecters and enforcers.
However, Israel also played a slightly more direct role. According to the senior official, Iran had sent two divisions to Syria, by air, when Israeli F-16s intercepted the aircraft and forced them to turn around.
Abandoned by Hezbollah in the west and Iran in the east, the Syrian regime was forced to stand on its own — and could not.
There were reports in December that the Israeli Air Force (IAF) had intercepted Iranian flights over Syria, but these had not been confirmed by officials at the time.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
