The Mask Slips: Ahmed al-Sharaa’s Regime and the Return of Syrian Duplicity

One need hardly be surprised. The same Syrian president who, only weeks ago, was being feted in certain Western quarters as a moderate, tolerant reformer (Ahmed al-Sharaa, once known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) has now been credibly linked to direct attacks on Israeli soldiers and, even more grimly, to the organized persecution of Syria's ancient Druze minority.

According to a report by Israel’s public broadcaster KAN, citing informed sources, it was none other than "Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa's general intelligence" that orchestrated Thursday night's ambush of an IDF arrest raid in southern Syria, as well as earlier assaults on Druze communities in the country's east. The very same regime operatives who opened fire on Israeli reservists as they withdrew from Beit Jinn, wounding six, are said to be the identical group that has been terrorizing the Druze in Khader.

Let us be clear about what happened. In the early hours of Friday, soldiers of the IDF's 55th Reserve Paratroop Brigade entered the Syrian town of Beit Jinn to detain two brothers affiliated with the terrorist organization Al-Jama'a al-Islamiya. These men had planted roadside bombs and had participated in launching a high-altitude missile toward Israel. The arrests themselves were textbook: the brothers were taken quietly from their beds. It was only as the Israelis withdrew that regime-linked gunmen opened fire, triggering a fierce exchange in which several terrorists were killed and six Israeli reservists wounded (one of them the brigade commander who had raced forward to extract his trapped men). Syrian media, with their customary regard for truth, promptly claimed thirteen "civilians" had been slaughtered.

All of this, we are now told, was directed by the intelligence apparatus of the man who assured the world he had broken with jihadism.

One struggles to recall a more rapid unmasking. Barely had the champagne corks stopped popping in Washington and certain European salons (where al-Sharaa was hailed as the acceptable face of the Syrian opposition) than his regime began doing precisely what the Assad apparatus did for decades: using proxy militias to bleed Israel while simultaneously waging low-intensity genocide against religious minorities inconveniently parked along the new ruler's path to absolute power.

The Druze of southern Syria, who have already endured years of siege and starvation at the hands of Islamist factions, now find themselves targeted by the very government in Damascus itself. Syrian Druze who have spoken to The Jerusalem Post have been unequivocal: Israel's buffer zone, so noisily condemned by Damascus as a "violation of Syrian sovereignty," is the only thing that currently allows humanitarian aid to reach their villages and prevents their complete annihilation.

Yet the al-Sharaa government continues to denounce the zone, even as his own militias fire on the soldiers who keep it functioning. The cynicism is breathtaking.

Meanwhile, reports multiply that Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are quietly rebuilding their infrastructure inside Syria with the new regime's tacit blessing. The old Iranian playbook (use Syrian territory as a forward base against Israel) has evidently been dusted off and handed to the new management.

Western governments that rushed to embrace al-Sharaa as a bulwark against ISIS and a potential partner for peace would do well to study the photographs emerging from Damascus: crowds waving portraits of a man whose intelligence service now shoots Israeli soldiers in the back and drives the Druze toward extinction. Those images tell a simpler and truer story than any number of carefully stage-managed interviews.

The lesson, as ever, is that jihadist movements do not moderate; they merely learn to smile for the cameras while reloading. Israel, having learned that lesson the hard way across decades of betrayal, will continue to do what it must: arrest terrorists in their beds, return fire when ambushed, and maintain the thin buffer that stands between Syria’s minorities and the abyss.The rest of the world is free to keep pretending that the new boss in Damascus is fundamentally different from the old boss he replaced. The Druze, and the wounded paratroopers of the 55th Brigade, know better.

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