On the night of August 17-18, 2026, Israeli aircraft cratered the runway of the Abu al-Duhur airbase in eastern Idlib. Syrian state television counted eight strikes; the base was damaged but, by most accounts, no one was killed. Five days later, on Sunday, August 23, Syria’s foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani, joined a United States–mediated conference call with the head of the Israeli Mossad, Roman Gofman. The two events belong to a single story, and the short distance between them – bomb on Tuesday, negotiate the following Sunday – is the most revealing fact about where the Syria–Israel relationship now stands.
That proximity deserves attention precisely because it is not an aberration. It is the pattern. Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 – and more so, since the events last year in the Druze city of Suweyda – Israel has launched hundreds of strikes on Syrian territory and sent its troops into the United Nations–patrolled buffer zone in the Golan. While Washington has spent more than a year trying to seat the two governments at the same table, the relationship continues to oscillates between the language of kinetics and the possibility of a détente. Can the Amman meeting launch a different trajectory that could break a long impasse or will it be just another in this familiar road with two parallel tracks?
The strike was about a third party
The most important thing about Abu al-Duhur is that it was not, at its core, about Syria. Israeli officials told Israeli and American outlets that the strike followed intelligence that Ankara intended to install a radar and an air-defense system, manned by Turkish personnel, at the base, a facility Turkey had been quietly rehabilitating after years of wartime disuse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office framed the operation as enforcement of an agreed “status quo in security matters” that Damascus was, in Israel’s telling, on the verge of breaching. Defense Minister Israel Katz said a direct warning had been passed to senior Syrian officials before the strike, and reporting indicates Gofman himself had phoned al-Shaibani days earlier to restate Israel’s red lines on a Turkish military footprint.
This reframes the bilateral standoff as a triangle. Israel and Turkey – both American partners – are now openly jockeying to shape post-Assad Syria, and Damascus is the terrain on which that contest plays out. It is a dynamic Washington views with alarm. The U.S. special envoy for Syria and ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, publicly called the strikes an “unnecessary escalation” that did not advance regional stability, and pointedly noted that al-Sharaa’s government had neither adopted a predatory posture nor maintained proxy forces. Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia condemned the strike as well. In an unusual inversion, the sharpest rebuke of an Israeli operation came not from an adversary but from Israel’s own principal ally.
For Syria’s interim government, the episode crystallized a strategic bind: the same Turkish partnership that offers reconstruction assistance, security cooperation and a “strategic” upgrade in relations is precisely the thing most likely to draw Israeli fire. For Israel, the strike advertised a red line while risking a rupture with Ankara that neither Jerusalem nor Washington can fully control.
This points to the deeper question hanging over Damascus: whether al-Sharaa’s government can hedge Turkish influence rather than be captured by it. Turkey’s posture in Syria has grown steadily more assertive, and its diplomatic weight now matches its military one, its embassy in Damascus is, by several accounts, is the largest missions it maintains anywhere in staff and resources. A Syrian state that leans too heavily on Ankara risks trading one patron for another; a state that can balance Turkey against the Gulf, Jordan and the United States preserves the room for maneuver on which its sovereignty depends. Whether Syria can strike and sustain that balance is, for now, an open question and one Israel watches as closely as anyone.
What the two sides have learned
Step back from the immediate crisis and a longer arc comes into view. It has been less than two years since Ahmad al-Sharaa took power, and a little over a year since the Suwayda bloodletting of July 2025. In that span the two governments have had time to learn, and test policies against changing realities, to build a negotiating channel that was close to produce a breakthrough and to watch it collapse once again.
The channel is real. According to Shibani, by the start of 2026 the two sides had agreed “on paper” to nearly everything in a draft security arrangement, including security zones in southern Syria and a buffer where only UN forces would be present. These understanding had followed a similar set of understanding that were reached via the Azerbaijan talks, that broke as the Suweyda massacre began.
A trilateral U.S.–Israel–Syria meeting in January advanced that framework. Then, at the end of February, the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran erupted, and the Syria track froze with no date to resume. The Amman meeting was the first substantive contact in months, and it reopened on familiar terms: Damascus wants a halt to Israeli strikes, arrests and targeted operations; an Israeli withdrawal to the lines held before December 8, 2024; and the full restoration of the 1974 disengagement agreement as the legal spine of any new arrangement. It also signaled two hard limits — it will not accept constraints on rebuilding its armed forces, nor on choosing its own alliances and partners.
Israel pressed for the demilitarization of Syria’s south — Quneitra, Daraa and Suwayda; on no presence of foreign militias or forces on Syria’s soil and on limits of positioning of systems like Turkish-enabled air defense, as a threat. The minority file was also on the table as Israel continued to hold its commitment to defend the Druze of Syria, an important kin community to the influancial Druze community in Israel.
The unresolved south
If any single issue can wreck the process, it is the south and the Druze question. The July 2025 violence in Suwayda was catastrophic: a United Nations Commission of Inquiry documented more than 1,700 people killed and close to 200,000 displaced, with abuses – summary executions, torture, sexual violence, the burning of homes – attributed to multiple actors, including Syrian government forces and Druze armed groups. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both flagged the accountability vacuum since. The Druze insurgency did not end with a ceasefire; figures such as Hikmat al-Hijri continue to call for armed resistance, and local governance structures have hardened against Damascus.
For Syria’s government, Suwayda is a governance failure with a long tail, and one that complicates its claim to represent all Syrians. For Israel, it has been both a genuine humanitarian concern and a strategic opening: Jerusalem has cast itself as protector of the Druze, delivered aid, and struck near Damascus in what Katz described as a warning against harming the community. The result is a southern belt where Syrian sovereignty, Israeli security demands and minority protection collide, a situation that is destabilizing for both capitals and that no security agreement can ignore. The south is where the abstract question of trust becomes concrete.
The case for convergence
For all the friction, the more interesting analysis is not of the conflict but of the overlap. Beneath the kinetics, Syrian and Israeli interests point in some of the same directions.
Syria’s core interest is stabilization: sovereignty, territorial control and the consolidation of a functioning state after fourteen years of war and half a century of Assad rule. Israel’s core interest is security: keeping radical and Islamist forces at a distance, preventing the reconstitution of hostile militias, and containing the influence of outside powers – Iran yesterday, Turkey today – over Syria’s armed landscape. These are not identical goals, but they are compatible ones. A Syrian state strong enough to control its own territory is also a state better able to prevent the militia fragmentation and cross-border smuggling that Israel fears. Smuggling networks, armed and proxy type militias and other players with independent agendas that seek to rekindle the Syrian conflict serves neither side and a security agreement that addresses some of these issues can have positive ramifications for both.
Underneath all of this sits the single question that will decide Syria’s trajectory: whether the new government can disarm, demobilize and reintegrate the constellation of civil-war militias into one professional army – a genuine DDR process – or whether those armed factions will instead feed on state resources, capture the military, and in time govern the state from within. The distinction is not academic. A disciplined national force under civilian command is the precondition for the kind of Train, Advise and Assist (TAA) relationship the United States extends to partner militaries; it is also what would let Damascus credibly guarantee any security arrangement with Israel. A military that is merely a federation of militias in uniform can guarantee nothing, and would confirm every Israeli fear about who actually holds the guns south of Damascus. DDR, in other words, is where Syria’s domestic transition and its external security bargains converge.
An improved security architecture can address other issues as well. Advocates of engagement point to a rapidly developing U.S.–Syria intelligence and security relationship. American tips, perhaps with some Israeli help – reportedly enable Syrian raids on Iranian-linked tunnel and weapons networks around al-Bukamal, and joint operations against the Islamic State. They also help Syrian seizures of thousands of weapons systems that had been staged, according to Syrian sources, for smuggling to Hezbollah in Lebanon. These claims come largely from parties sympathetic to Syria’s transition and should be read with that in mind, but the underlying trend – a Damascus government actively dismantling Iranian and jihadist networks – aligns with what independent reporting on U.S.–Syria cooperation shows, and it is exactly the kind of behavior that ought to interest Israel’s security establishment.
The convergence extends to a third party neither side fully trusts. A Syrian government wary of becoming a Turkish dependency and an Israel determined to cap Turkish military expansion share, awkwardly, an interest in bounding Ankara’s role. That shared wariness is uncomfortable to name, but it is one of the few things pulling the two toward the same table.
The economic dimension: corridors as connective tissue
The most forward-looking reason for a Syria–Israel accommodation may be economic. The war on Iran and the periodic weaponization of the Strait of Hormuz have made maritime chokepoints look dangerously fragile, and that has revived interest in overland trade corridors through the Levant — with Syria, for the first time in a generation, a plausible node rather than a black hole.
The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), unveiled at the 2023 G20 as a rail-and-port alternative to China’s Belt and Road, originally ran from the India to the Gulf, through Jordan and Israel to the Mediterranean. Since the Iran war, that routing has come under pressure. Saudi Arabia has reportedly explored redirecting the corridor through Syria to sidestep Israeli territory entirely, and has signaled willingness to help finance Syrian reconstruction to make it viable; an Atlantic Council study in mid-2026 sketched an expanded “network of routes” running through Egypt, Jordan and Syria with a potential trade pool in the hundreds of billions. French and Emirati operators have already taken long-term concessions at Latakia and Tartus. Against this sits Turkey’s competing “Development Road” through Iraq, and the older Syrian aspiration – the “Four Seas” vision of Damascus as a crossroads linking the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian and Gulf basins – now echoing again in corridor politics.
This is usually told as a story of rivalry. It can also be read as a story of potential synergy. Trade routes create interdependencies, and interdependencies can become instruments of deconfliction. A Syria embedded in regional logistics – with Gulf capital, Mediterranean ports and Jordanian and, conceivably, Israeli connectivity – has more to lose from perpetual conflict and more reason to accept verifiable security arrangements. The corridor competition is real, but the same infrastructure that powers rivalry could, under the right political conditions, knit the region’s antagonists into a web of economic inter-decencies where escalation carries a price.
Security first, and the limits of optimism
None of this points to a warm peace. It points, at most, to a security-first arrangement: a “trust and verify” understanding built on the 1974 lines, backed by U.S. guarantees, with a joint coordination cell of the kind the Amman talks reportedly discussed. Damascus has signaled openness to exactly that sequencing — security agreement now, broader relationship later — and there is a coherent logic to it. None of this, ultimately, lies within the region’s own gift: Syria’s stability now hinges on the United States playing an active offshore-balancer role, injecting a global variable that no regional actor — Turkey, Israel, Iran or the Gulf — can command. Washington has filled that role before, from holding the European balance against Soviet domination through the Cold War to reversing Iraq’s 1990 seizure of Kuwait, and its continued military preponderance across the Middle East and Europe remains the anchor that makes the role credible.
There is also a colder reading of Israel’s conduct, and it deserves to be stated plainly. Israel has adopted much the same modus operandi toward Damascus that it uses elsewhere: keeping open intelligence channels to pass messages and, above all, to enforce red lines — Gofman’s call to al-Shaibani before the Abu al-Duhur strike being the template. Declining to sign a formal non-aggression agreement is, on this view, a feature rather than a failure. An unsigned relationship preserves Israel’s freedom of movement and operation over Syrian territory, which it has used to curb Turkish entrenchment and to sever Iranian logistical access — a priority made sharper by the ongoing standoff with Hezbollah, for whom Syria remains the essential land bridge. From Jerusalem’s vantage, ambiguity is leverage, and leverage is not something to trade away cheaply.
Refusing to sign away that freedom also dovetails with the deterrence doctrine Israel has embraced since October 7 — one that prefers defending from a distance, curving new “Yellow Lines” and striking threats early and at range, to tolerating a high-risk adversary entrenched on its borders.
The skeptics have the better of several arguments, and an honest reading has to weight them. Israel points to a worrying trend of videos showing the new recruits to the growing Syrian military reciting the familiar ISIS chants about slathering the Jews and conquering Jerusalem. While the idea of incorporating the militias in “One Army and One Country” is positive at its core, turning the military into an official militias is not one that can bring comfort to the Israelis who still carry the scars of October 7th. Israel’s strikes have repeatedly outrun its diplomacy; analysts note that its track record makes any single round of talks unlikely to hold. Syria’s demands on rearmament and alliances collide head-on with Israel’s security ceiling. The Suwayda file hangs over Damascus’s credibility as a partner and a protector of minorities. And the Turkey triangle can escalate faster than any negotiating table can absorb. The frozen January channel is itself a warning: external shocks — an Iran war, a contested airbase — can freeze progress overnight.
That calculus, however, is not fixed, and it points toward a more constructive posture. Much of the current contest over Syrian territory is downstream of the unresolved fight with Hezbollah; a resolution there – disarmament, or a durable settlement in Lebanon – would drain much of the urgency from Israel’s need to police Syria’s skies and supply routes. And Israel’s stake in a stable Syria is real, not rhetorical: chaos on its northern frontier serves no one in Jerusalem. That argues for shifting from a posture defined by drawing and enforcing red lines toward one that also wields soft power. If the aim is to balance Turkish influence, economic interdependence is a better instrument than airstrikes, deepening Syria’s commercial ties to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would anchor Damascus in a web of relationships Ankara cannot match, and raise the cost of instability for everyone inside it.
Yet the throughline of the past twenty months is that both governments keep returning to the table, and that the interests pulling them there are structural, not sentimental. The tragedy would be to read the bombing of Abu al-Duhur only as evidence that peace is impossible, when the meeting in Amman five days later suggests something more complicated and more hopeful: two states that fight and talk at once, feeling for the terms of a coexistence neither yet trusts but both increasingly need. Between kinetics and alliance, the space is narrow — but it is not empty. Could common interest take the lead over fear, mistrust and foreign influence? Time will tell but the opportunity exist.
Key sources
• Reuters / Asharq al-Awsat / Al Jazeera / Middle East Eye — Syria–Israel US-mediated talks in Jordan, August 23–24, 2026
• Reuters — Asaad al-Shaibani interview, Damascus, 22 August 2026: Syria and Israel had “agreed on paper” to almost everything in a draft security arrangement (southern security zones; UN-only buffer) around the start of 2026, though Damascus doubted Israeli implementation (reported by Reuters, Asharq al-Awsat, Al Jazeera, Ynet, The New Arab)
• AFP / The Times of Israel / Kurdistan24 / TIMEP — Syria–Israel talks in Baku, Azerbaijan (al-Shaibani–Dermer, late July 2025), following an earlier Paris meeting and disrupted as the Suwayda violence erupted
• The Jerusalem Post / NPR / Al Jazeera / FDD Long War Journal — Israeli strikes on Abu al-Duhur airbase, August 17–18, 2026, and the Turkey dimension
• Alma Research and Education Center — Turkey’s activity in Syria and Lebanon, July–August 2026
• UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria; Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International — July 2025 Suwayda violence and accountability
• Atlantic Council (Beyond the Corridor, June 2026); Middle East Institute; ECFR; The Jerusalem Post — IMEC, Syrian rerouting and Levant trade corridors
• Provided op-ed on Syria’s transition and US–Syria security cooperation (author’s source material)
