Conflict trendlines from Occupied Golan Area: The area was stabilizing over the last few months

 

 

 

Part of the interesting work that EQLIM.com does here in Beirut – building a large database for risk/conflict analysis in the region (this is just a rough extrapolation of their datasets). What seems evident is that over the last year, the rules of the game and the lines of division had relatively stabilized in the wider Golan area…until the attack more than a week ago – an attack that now threatens a further violent angle and area of contingency in an already greatly overloaded system.

For the Israelis, this stabilization had been working quite well. Coordination and interaction with rebel formations, including Al-Qaeda franchises in the area, was regular (according to UNDOF) and seemed – for the short term – to meet Israeli interests. (One must note here that in general, the Israelis seem to regard the DASH-Nusrah-Takfiri threat as a long term one for Israel and ultimately not that dangerous, especially vis a vis the Iranian-Hizbullah threat… thus the short term accommodation, albeit a dangerous and, I would argue, extremely short sighted and ultimately counter-productive approach for ALL concerned parties!)

This of course is intolerable for the Syrian-Hizbullah-Iran axis – not only because of the strategic threat that a possible budding Israel-Rebel arrangement represents – but also because of the apparent Israeli impunity in exercising military strikes when it sees fit in Lebanon and in Syria.

The resistance axis may have not yet had “fixed” military positions in the area – as Nasrallah had earlier claimed – but it seems obvious that their collective interest was indeed to go beyond political support and operationalize a new series of fixed and mobile military positions in the area that would meet the two fold purpose of monitoring and disrupting the rebel-Israeli axis as well as directly balance against Israeli military freedom of action.