It makes for a stirring and uplifting story, and it’s been making the rounds quite a bit lately: Israel has rushed to the aid of a harmless minority that cowers in fear of genocide, besieged and vastly outnumbered by the savage army of a powerful jihadist demagogue.

This is not a true story about the recent upheavals in the Syrian governorate of Sweida, where Israel has intervened in sectarian bloodshed that has taken the lives of more than 1,300 people in clashes this month between the local majority of Druze people and their neighbours among the Sunni Arab Bedouins. The tragedy in Sweida has also pitted Donald Trump’s White House squarely against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

With an eye on the Druze, on Syria’s powerful, well-armed Kurdish resistance in Northeast Syria and the beleaguered Alawites of Syria’s Mediterranean coast, the United States has come down forcefully on the side of a unified Syrian Republic with military capabilities sufficient to enforce order through the entire country. In sharp contrast, Netanyahu has demanded that Syria’s new army stay out of the country’s southern governorates entirely — Sweida, Quneitra, and Daraa – the whole country south of the capital, Damascus.

“We demand full demilitarization of southern Syria” Netanyahu said at a military graduation ceremony in February. “And we will not tolerate any threat to the Druze sect in southern Syria.” Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has gone further. Ben-Gvir accuses interim Syrian president Ahmed Al-Sharaa of bearing full responsibility for the atrocities committed against Syria’s Druze sect in Sweida in recent days, and has called for Al-Sharaa’s assassination. “Get rid of him,” Ben-Gvir said earlier this week. “He’s a jihadist. Why are we letting him live?”

In Beirut on Monday, an exasperated Tom Barrack, U.S. president Donald Trump’s recently appointed envoy to Syria and ambassador to Turkey, took pains to point out that Al-Sharaa’s troops have not had anything to do with the killings in Sweida. “The atrocities that are happening are not happening by the Syrian regime troops,” Barrack told Reuters. “They’re not even in the city because they agreed with Israel that they would not go in.”

A great measure of the difficulty in sorting out the facts about what’s been happening in Sweida and identifying the parties responsible for the killings is the breadth and range of the revolutionary and Islamist forces Al-Sharaa has dragged into Syria’s new army — another policy supported by the Americans. There’s also the matter of divisions and factions among the Druze themselves.

The Druze follow an insular, Abrahamic faith that Islamic hardliners consider a heresy. About 250,000 Druze live in Lebanon, another 50,000 or so live in Jordan, and Israel’s 80,000 Druze occupy a respected place in Israeli society and its institutions, including the IDF.

The most prominent figure among Syria’s 800,000 Druze is the slippery Hikmat al-Hijri. Nominally the hereditary spiritual leader of Syria’s Druze, the Venezuelan-born Hijri, Israel’s main interlocutor in Sweida, is also something of a cunning warlord.

According to the independent think tank Etana Syria, by the time Al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) swept into Damascus last December and the hated Baathist regime collapsed, and Syria’s murderous supreme leader Bashar Assad fled to Moscow, there were 160 organized armed groups in Sweida. The militias have not disarmed, and the largest militia bloc is led by Hijri.

Hijri’s spiritual ascendancy occurred in 2012 when the way was cleared by the death of his brother in a mysterious car accident that may been an assassination carried out by the Assad regime. It was nearly two years into the Syrian uprising, which at the time was still a mostly democratic revolt that U.S. president Barack Obama had not completely abandoned to Moscow and Islamist extremism. Bashar Assad attended Hijri’s brother’s funeral, and scandalously, Hijri praised him.

”This event has turned to joy,” Hijri declared. “You are the hope — Bashar the hope, Bashar the nation, Bashar of pan-Arabism and the Arabs.”

That’s not something that many Syrians can easily forgive.

Hijri went on to denounce the anti-Assad Druze movement known as the Men of Dignity. In 2017, Hijri was presented with the “Islamic Resistance Shield” by Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, an Iraqi Shia militia that answers to the Quds Force of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. In January last year, the U.S. targeted HHN in a strike that killed at least one of the terrorist group’s senior commanders.

Two years ago, mass protests against the Assad government finally broke out among Syrian Druze, who had become accustomed to just keeping their heads down. It was only then that Hijri began giving the impression that he too wanted the regime overthrown.

Hassan I. Hassan, co-author with Michael Weiss of the 2016 book ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, has grown increasingly suspicious of Hijri’s maneuvering over the past few months, and he’s suggested that Hijri may be sabotaging Druze efforts at reconciliation with Damascus, to Netanyahu’s advantage.

Israeli concerns about the Islamist elements in and around Al-Sharaa’s government are perfectly reasonable, and the Israelis’ sense of solidarity with the Syrian Druze is admirable. The evolution of Al-Sharaa’s HTS from the al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra is not something that can be easily overlooked, despite Al Sharaa’s decade-long turning away from jihad and Islamist extremism.

But all the evidence suggests that Al-Sharaa’s transitional government remains the last best hope for the Greater Middle East.

The recent reconciliation between Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in Ankara and Turkey’s Kurdish militants was made possible in part by Al Sharaa’s determination to reconcile with Syria’s Kurds. The PKK insurgency in Turkey and Ankara’s cruel repressions have taken 40,000 lives over the past 40 years, but with the receding threat of a hostile Kurdish statelet spread out along the Turkish-Syrian frontier — and now that there’s a government in Damascus that’s on good terms with Turkey — the possibilities for lasting peace and stability haven’t been this good in decades. The stakes are enormous.

While tensions persist and talks continue, the powerful, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces — the tip of the NATO spear in the war against ISIS — should be expected, especially with American help, to find its place in Al-Sharaa’s new Syria.

Al-Sharaa’s first big test in dealing with Syria’s explosive sectarian flashpoints came this week with the results of an investigation Damascus ordered into the massacres of Alawites in March, and it was no whitewash. The transitional government’s fact-finding committee reported that 1,426 people died in attacks on security forces and reprisal killings of Alawites.

The report found that the violence was almost entirely random and rage-fuelled, sparked by a revolt staged by Alawites connected to Assad’s regime and by the killing of more than 200 security forces personnel. The committee concluded that no Syrian commander ordered reprisals, and in fact army commanders gave orders to halt them. The committee identified 298 suspects involved in targeting Alawites, and while their names have not been released their cases have been handed over to the judiciary. Thirty-one people who committed violations have already been arrested.

It’s no small irony that Al-Sharaa’s enemies, primarily Iran’s Quds Force and Hezbollah, are also Israel’s enemies, and Al-Sharaa has gone out of his way to purge Palestinian officials who grew comfortable in Damascus during the Assad years. He has refused entreaties from Hamas and shuttered the offices, confiscated the guns and vehicles and property belonging to the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP — General Command, the Palestine Liberation Army, Fatah al-Intifada and the Baath-aligned Al-Sa’iqa movement.

Israel has performed miracles in recent months. Hezbollah’s military power has been smashed, its chain of command decapitated. Hamas is crawling around in the rubble of Gaza, the Khomeinists have been badly bloodied, and Tehran’s “axis of resistance” in the region is scattered and broken. It would be a tragedy of unforgivable proportions if these victories were squandered by allowing either Al-Sharaa or Netanyahu to make a hash of things in Syria.

As the American Syria envoy Tom Barrack put it the other day: “With this Syrian regime, there is no Plan B. If this Syrian regime fails, somebody is trying to instigate it to fail,” Barrack said. “For what purpose? There’s no successor.”

National Post