v Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman flew to Moscow on Wednesday night to finalise what Israel hopes will be a landmark agreement with the Assad regime on the status of the border between the two countries.
After over a year of negotiations with Russia and the United States, Israel is on the verge of receiving assurances that no forces controlled by Iran will be within fifteen miles of the frontier in the Golan Heights.
The first public indication that the Russians are about to guarantee such a deal came on Monday, when Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called for the withdrawal of all non-Syrian forces, adding: “only representatives of the Syrian Arab Republic’s army [should] stand at Syria’s border with Israel.”
The message was clear: neither Iranian forces nor Shia militias such as Hezbollah or the Afghan Fetamiyoun brigades are to be allowed there.
Such an arrangement, if agreed by the Assad regime and underwritten by the Kremlin, would mean significant progress towards preventing Iran from using Syrian soil to threaten Israel — but it is far from perfect.
Security officials in Israel have pointed out in recent weeks that Moscow’s influence inland is more limited than it seems.
Russia’s presence in Syria consists mainly of fighter jets and air defence batteries, not boots on the ground. Should Iran seek to challenge the agreement, it would still be up to Israel to enforce it.
Nor does the impending agreement cover other parts of Syria further from the Israeli borders, where the Iranians are still operating. As one senior Israeli Air Force commander emphasised last week, the Syrian air base from which the Iranians launched a drone into Israeli airspace in February is “250 kilometres away from the border and we attacked the control cabin and destroyed it.”
Israeli officers said that the IAF would continue to target Iranian bases throughout Syria.
One Syrian opposition website reported this week the Syrian air force is attempting to keep Iranians out of its bases for fear of more air strikes.
If true, this is further good news for Israel, which has been hoping to drive a wedge between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Iranian patrons who supported him over seven years of civil war, ensuring his survival until Russia deployed its forces in 2015.
Another implication of the agreement is that Israel is now publicly acknowledging that the Assad regime is set to remain in power and reassert control over most of the country, if not all of it. While Mr Assad is an enemy, Israeli leaders regard Iran as the greater threat to Israel’s security and would prefer to see the Syrian regime relying on Russia rather than on Iran.
This will not be welcomed by rebel groups in the Golan which Israel has assisted with humanitarian aid and medical treatment over the last seven years. In recent months, their leaders have expressed concern that an agreement between Israel and the regime will leave them exposed to Mr Assad’s vengeance.
