Israel Strikes Syria's Military HQ in Damascus

In addition, the IDF said that the regime has around 200 militia men committing atrocities against the Druze in Sweida, while another 1,000 more official Syrian regime army forces have the city surrounded and cut off.

The IDF implied that the Syrian regime may use this model to try to have plausible deniability that it was not directly involved in atrocities, but the military said that intelligence suggests that the mixing of using militias to do the regime’s dirty work appears to have been planned.

At the same time, the IDF did not accuse the Syrian regime of provoking the current crisis.

IDF implies that the Syrian regime may be involved indirectly in the conflict

Rather, it implied that the current crisis had developed organically between Syrian Druze and Syrian Bedouins and that the regime had seized the opportunity of the crisis to try to assert its power and control in this mostly Druze part of southern Syria once and for all.

This could mean that the IDF takes a price from the regime for its current acts in Sweida but fails to prevent it from killing any Druze that it views as a threat, even if it might eventually withdraw its forces once that “mission” is complete.

The picture of exactly what is going on in Sweida is shrouded in a fog of accusations and counter-accusations between clashing Syrian groups.

Israel is saying that it is intervening to protect the Druze, due to decades of supportive relations between Israelis and Druze, including many Druze Israelis serving in the IDF, as well as to keep Syrian regime forces out of a buffer zone which Israel declared in southern Syria in December 2024 after the fall of the Assad regime.