Jacob Montag
On Wednesday (April 2), invading Israeli forces in Tasil, a town in the Dara’a Governate of southern Syria, were attacked and forced out by a wave of guerrilla attacks by local militias. Two Israeli surveillance drones were reportedly shot down and Israeli casualties were confirmed by the Israeli press before the military attempted to cover it up.
Upon retreating on the ground, the Israeli occupation forces launched a cowardly attack against the resistance forces from the air, killing 11 and injuring at least 20. Such tactics only serve to further rally the people of Syria against the Zionist invasion, opening up yet another resistance front against Israel’s floundering and overextended forces as the recent counterattack demonstrates.
In December 2024, after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria to NATO-backed Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) paramilitary forces, Israel launched a military incursion further into southern Syria from the occupied Golan Heights while the Israeli air force carried out a sweeping bombing campaign, crippling Syrian military assets.
The IDF’s official justification for these acts of aggression against Syria was the supposed need to establish a “demilitarized buffer zone” between Syrian-controlled territory and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel occupied the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War in 1967 and has illegally occupied the area since then, subjecting its Syrian population to routine terror and abuses. Under the leadership of Hafez Al-Assad, the Syrian Arab Army sought to liberate the Golan Heights with a counteroffensive in 1973, but later capitulated to Israel and U.S. imperialism with the 1974 Disengagement Agreement.
Since 2011, Israel has exploited the intensifying crisis of bureaucrat-capitalism in Syria to carry out blatant acts of war against Syria and further expand its sphere of influence in the country. The Israeli Air Force carried out several bombing raids against civilian infrastructure in Syria, receiving a blank check to do so by the Russian imperialists who controlled Syrian airspace from 2015 to 2024. Israel also provided material and logistical support to several opposition militias in Syria throughout the course of the Syrian civil war.
With the rise of the new HTS-led regime in Damascus, the subjugation of Syria to Israeli expansionism has only intensified. Apart from formal complaints filed at the United Nations, the new Syrian regime has done little to combat growing Israeli seizures of Syrian territory. This task has instead been taken up by spontaneously-formed civilian militias in southern Syria who have sought to throw back the invading Israeli forces.
A particularly outrageous aspect of Israel’s latest massacre is that Tasil lies outside of the territory the IDF claimed as a “demilitarized buffer zone” around the Golan Heights. This indicates that the Israeli occupation forces intend to continue expanding their territorial control over southern Syria, taking advantage of the HTS-led regime’s treacherous servility to their interests and the interests of U.S. imperialism.
Photo: A recent Israeli airstrike on the Syrian capitol of Damascus. Retrieved from Palestine Chronicle.
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