AVOIDING “NEW CONFRONTATIONS”
Syria’s de facto leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, said on Saturday that Israel was using false pretexts to justify its attacks on Syria, but he was not interested in engaging in new conflicts as his country focuses on rebuilding.
Sharaa – better known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani – leads the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group that swept Assad from power last Sunday, ending the family’s five-decade iron-fisted rule.
Since then Israel has moved into a demilitarised zone inside Syria that was created after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, including the Syrian side of the strategic Mount Hermon that overlooks Damascus, where its forces took over an abandoned Syrian military post.
Israel, which has said that it does not intend to stay there and calls the incursion into Syrian territory a limited and temporary measure to ensure border security, has also carried out hundreds of strikes on Syria’s strategic weapons stockpiles.
It has said it is destroying weapons and military infrastructure to prevent them from being used by rebel groups that drove Assad from power, some of which grew from movements linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State.
