Almost immediately upon the fall of Damascus to Syria’s opposition forces, the Israeli military decided to invade and change what had been the status quo since 1974. Israel publicly declared its intention to create its long-desired buffer zone in the entirety of the Golan Heights, yet the picture has become much more complex.
The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria has now created a situation of relative uncertainty inside the country. Although the victory of the 13-year-long bloody war is firmly that of what was once the Syrian Opposition, the new reality on the ground will not be established for some time and involves a myriad of different groups, many with different international financial backers, that makes almost all analyses that depict a hypothetical future tantamount to useless for now.
How Israel fits into this picture is somewhat clearer, however, especially since it decided to immediately launch a war and illegal land grab inside the country, while the new Syrian government had barely even issued victory statements yet. ….more
