Syria’s new president, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, is desperate to stay on the sidelines of the Iran-Israel war. Most middle eastern states have strongly condemned Israel for its surprise attack on Iran, but the Syrian government has been conspicuously silent. Since coming to power in December 2024, Al-Sharaa’s forces have confronted Iran-backed militias in many regions of Syria, and moved to curtail Tehran’s soft power by expelling Iranian clerics and closing Shia religious centres. The rag-tag collection of Sunni-Islamists, who now form a large part of the Syrian army, have a long list of scores to settle with the Shiites and their main patron.

But, simultaneously, Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes on Syria and significantly expanded its occupation, far beyond the Golan Heights. Damascus has adopted an astoundingly conciliatory stance to Israel in response. Al Sharaa is a highly pragmatic man – he wants to be remembered as the leader who unified Syria and ended its civil war – and so he can’t afford to accept Israel’s challenge to a fight. Having refused to resist Israeli aggression in any meaningful way, and Israel having made it impossible for Al-Sharaa to establish control south of Damascus, new Iran-backed forces are seizing the opportunity to fill a power vacuum. I recently travelled to the Golan Heights to see for myself. 

As we drove along the Bravo Line, one of the de-facto borders between Israel and Syria, a local Israeli-Druze man named Yousef directed my attention towards a Syrian village in the buffer zone. ‘That’s Hader. In 2014, we watched the fighting between [Syrian forces] and Isis there. We used to go near the border with snacks and just watch. That’s how safe it was, they wouldn’t dare turn their weapons towards Israel,’ he said. 

Majdal Shams sits in the northeastern corner of the Golan Heights – sandwiched between Lebanon and Syria. It was frequently targeted by Hezbollah during the war last year – the site of a horrific rocket attack that killed 8 Druze children on a football pitch. But it hadn’t been since October 2023 that rockets were fired from the Syrian side of the border.

On the evening of 2 June, for the first time since the fall of the Assad regime, Syrian militants fired two rockets at northern Israel, which landed in an unpopulated area of the southern Golan Heights. A few hours later, an Iran-backed militia named Uli al-Bass (UAB), part of a broader militia network in southern Syria known as The Islamic Resistance Front in Syria (IRFS), claimed responsibility for the attack. 

In return, the Israeli air force struck weapons facilities and other targets across Syria in the following days. ‘We hold the Syrian president directly responsible for every threat and firing at the state of Israel, and the full response will come as........

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