Udi Dekel
INSS Insight No. 1550, Jan. 23, 2022
“Iran’s military and civilian entrenchment in Syria continues, albeit adjusting to changing circumstances and with more limited scope than was originally intended.”
One example of mistaken over-optimism: as part of the United States Senate investigation of the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, senior Pentagon officials – the Defense Secretary, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Commander of CENTCOM – admitted that they erred by relying on optimistic assessments of the consequences of withdrawal. Might this be instructive for Israel? According to the outgoing head of Military Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Tamir Heyman, speaking about the Syrian situation, “Iranian activity continues and is changing its form, but its entrenchment in Syria has stopped, and “Hezbollah is retreating from the Golan Heights.” Heyman described a situation in which there are currently a few hundred Iranian officers and about 20,000 Shiite militia fighters in Syria, operating under the command of the Iranian Quds Force. He also noted that “the IDF has achieved serious disruption of an Iranian attempt to build missile arrays and conceal them in Syrian civilian spaces, as they did in Lebanon,” and stressed that operations in Syria “have exacted a high price not only from the guest (Iran) but also from the host (Assad), and this has helped to curb Iranian entrenchment. We have driven a wedge between Assad and the Iranians – and he understood that he has been hit hard for hosting the Iranians.”
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