The days of ‘rolling back’ Iran in Syria are gone. Containment and deterrence may be all that is left. And the situation is too dangerous for Trump to kick down the road.
CHARLES LISTER FOR The Daily Beast
In the early hours of Monday morning, two Israeli fighter jets crossed into southern Lebanon and launched a number of missiles at Syria’s strategic T4—or Tiyas—airbase in Homs province. The missiles struck a section of the base used exclusively by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its external specialist Quds Force and Hezbollah to house senior personnel, strategic weaponry and sophisticated drones in semi-hardened air hangars. At least 14 people were killed in the missile strike, which Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later labeled a “very dangerous development” in an unusually harsh rebuke of the sort of Israeli action that Moscow usually has glossed over quietly.
It seems likely therefore that for the first time Israel chose not to pre-warn the Russian Ministry of Defense of its strike plans—sending a strong message about the increasing intensity of its concerns about the scale of Iran’s presence in Syria and Russia’s apparent failure to contain or limit it. Russian troops are stationed at T4 and its aircraft frequently conduct operations from its runways, making an unannounced Israeli strike even more of a bold move, and an escalatory development.
Two months ago, the world stood by and watched as Israel and Iran engaged in a brief series of intensifying tit-for-tat military engagements over the skies of Syria—in which the IRGC’s facility in T4 was again involved. In the space of several hours, an advanced Iranian drone and an Israeli F-16 fighter jet were shot down, and 12 Syrian and Iranian military facilities were damaged or destroyed.
Only a stern phone call from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ensured that a much more expansive Israeli wave of retaliatory bombings did not take place. If it had gone ahead, the most significant Israeli-Iranian military engagement in seven years of the Syrian crisis could easily have spiraled into an uncontrollable conflict.
As President Donald Trump appears determined to bring closer the date of a U.S. withdrawal from Syria, it is not just important to remind him of the continued threat by remnants of the so-called Islamic State, but the critical importance to international security of containing and deterring Iran. There is nowhere that can be done more effectively than in Syria.
“There is nowhere that Iran can be contained and deterred more effectively than in Syria.”
The days of “rolling back” Iran in Syria are arguably long gone, but containment and deterrence may be all that is left to prevent what could be a debilitating Israeli-Iranian conflict fought on multiple fronts, sucking in multiple adversaries and resulting in a further destabilization of the region. This is not a challenge that can continue to be kicked further down the road and the Trump administration must urgently include it within its strategic thinking on the Syrian issue.
To all extents and purposes, the incident on Feb. 10 looked to have begun as an Iranian ‘bait-and-trap’ operation, in which an Iranian drone (a cloned copy of an American RQ-170 Reaper captured by Iran in December 2011) was dispatched from an aircraft hangar used by Iran’s IRGC within the T4 airbase. The drone was then flown at low altitude along the Jordanian border and toward the Israeli-held Golan Heights in an attempt to lure an Israeli response.
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