Inside Israel's buffer zone in Syria

Yahoo

2 days ago

The Merkava main battle tank is parked as discreetly as possible behind the makeshift antenatal clinic, but its enormous turret still pokes out.
Batal Ali, 25, does not seem fazed, however. Her mind is elsewhere.
Nine months into her fourth pregnancy she has just been informed that the level of amniotic fluid around the baby is dangerously low.
'She needs to have a C-section and we're just working out which hospital to evacuate her to – probably Haifa,' says the chief physician.
If this conversation were taking place just two miles to the west it would be unremarkable.
But we are standing in Syria, part of Israel's controversial 150 square mile 'buffer zone' along its north-eastern border, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seized in December 2024 after the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
To critics it was a cynical land grab, nothing short of an invasion.
According to the Israelis, however, it is a vital defensive measure to safeguard their communities in the Golan Heights from marauding jihadis and ultimately to prevent another Oct 7-style massacre.
Nine forward operating bases have now been built across the dramatic countryside between Mount Hermon and the Jordanian border.
Machine gun-mounted Humvees bearing the flag of the front-line Golani Brigade, and more ponderous armoured personnel carriers, churn up the roads in clouds of dust while sentries watch from the hilltops.
The soldiers are fully armed and body armoured at all times.
In the words of one Israeli military official from the 210th Division, the communities here are 'fragmented, suspicious'. Tension radiates out of the hills.
The official says that Hezbollah elements have been detected in the region. There are also Isis supporters in the more southern section of the border zone, he claims.
Although he concedes that the IDF has detected no active plots for an incursion into the Israel-controlled Golan Heights, he says hatred of the Jewish state constitutes a perpetual threat.
'There are streams that run underground,' he says. 'It's not happening yet but it will happen.'
Alongside the military presence, the Israelis are providing humanitarian assistance to the Syrian border communities – those who will accept it at least.
By and large these are the Druze, the minority Arab sect of Islamic origin with strong links to Israel thanks to the roughly 150,000 who live there.
The liberation of Syria from Assad's tyranny has been a troubling time for many of them, with reports of sectarian clashes and massacres at the hands of the Sunni majority.
The new IDF field clinic near the village of Hader is, in part, designed to give the Druze access to advanced healthcare now that the road to Damascus, less than 40 miles away, is so dangerous for them.
'I would rather go to Haifa for the birth than take my chances going to Damascus,' says Batal, who is now sitting in the waiting room, a large khaki tent, with her husband. 'It isn't safe for us.'
She is one of about 40 patients who will visit the clinic that day, a collection of temporary metal cabins and army tents in the lee of Mount Hermon that has been open now for nearly a month.
There, the team can carry out essential diagnostic work, such as Batal's ultrasound, along with blood tests and X-rays.
'Anyone with an immediate threat to life we evacuate [to Israel],' says the chief physician, an IDF colonel who cannot be named.
'We're trying not to replace the local doctors in the villages, that's a key humanitarian principle. But we'll tell them that, for example, on Thursday we'll have an orthopaedic clinic, on Monday we have our Obgyn specialist [obstetrician-gynaecologist], so they can tell their patients when to come.'
Judging by the men's exuberant moustaches, distinctive dark clothes and short-sided white and light-blue hats, all the dozen or so patients waiting are Druze.
The official confirms that the Sunni villages, by and large, want nothing to do with the Israelis, although the clinic will treat anyone who turns up.
At first patients were presenting with war injuries, some months old, that had been left untreated. Now it's more likely to be everyday complaints.
Once seen, each patient is handed a detailed discharge form written in Hebrew and English.
In the past, this would have been a highly dangerous practice.
During the early years of the Syrian civil war, when the IDF provided some medical care in this border region, they went to vast lengths to do so in secret, cutting the labels out of clothes they gave patients, aware that anyone known to have received Israeli help would be in grave danger.
'It's different now,' says the chief physician. 'Everyone knows we're here and we're helping them.'
As well as assisting a community to which Israel has traditionally felt a strong sense of responsibility, the clinic at Hader serves their agenda by reminding the world of the sectarianism and continued violence east of the border, justifying their military takeover of the region and their wider scepticism of the new regime.
Since Ahmed Al-Sharaa, a former jihadi with previous links to both al-Qaeda and Islamic State, swept to power in December 2024, Israel has been reminding anyone who will listen that you can't trust a 'terrorist in a suit'.
They have continued their campaign of air strikes against former regime facilities and heavy weapons that could be used against Israel, and even bombed near the presidential palace recently as a 'warning' to the new leader not to allow attacks on the Druze.
However, it is an argument they appear to be losing, as demonstrated by Donald Trump's decision in May to lift all sanctions to give Syria 'a chance of greatness'.
Indeed, rather than fretting about his terrorist past, much more of a neo-conservative preoccupation than a Maga concern, Mr Trump praised Al-Sharaa as an 'attractive, tough guy'.
There have even been suggestions of a Trump Tower in Damascus.
On Thursday, the US's newly appointed envoy for Syria was in the capital as the Stars and Stripes were raised over the ambassador's residence for the first time since 2012.
Meanwhile, seemingly ignored by its closest ally in Washington, Israel digs in, literally.
It is digging a vast anti-tank defensive ditch along the border, with 30km now completed and another 30 to go.
'Mortal danger. Active military zone,' reads the sign on the border fence, topped with coils of vicious-looking barbed wire.
That more or less sums up Israel's attitude to Syria at the moment, despite the great wave of hope across the Middle East unleashed by the fall of Assad.
The day before The Telegraph visited, troops stationed on the Israel-occupied Golan side of the border conducted an exercise to see how fast they could reach certain Syrian villages in an emergency.
And they say that while they have had some success in persuading villagers in the border zone to give up their weapons, few communities trust the situation enough to hand over all their guns.
'We don't want to occupy, we don't want to kill,' the official said. 'We just want to protect the border and protect our people.'
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