TEHRAN – More than a year after the collapse of the al-Assad government in December 2024, the “New Syria” has proved to be a cruel mirage.

Under the leadership of Ahmed al-Sharaa—the rebranded Salafi jihadi once known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani—the nation has not found stability.

Instead, it has become a fractured, dark country where central authority is a fiction and foreign powers treat the territory as an open buffet.

The reality is a permanent Israeli buffer carved out of Syrian soil, a land grab facilitated by a transitional government that lacks both the will and the legitimacy to defend its borders.The transitional government, rooted in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s extremist DNA, has traded national sovereignty for precarious survival, enabling a regime of domestic repression and external humiliation.

The most devastating indictment of this new era is the unchecked expansion of Israeli military aggression. Throughout 2025, Israel has systematically exploited Syria’s internal chaos to redraw the map.

Averaging nearly two strikes per day—totaling over 600 by late December—Israeli forces have hit targets from the heart of Damascus to the coastal heights of Latakia.

Beyond the air campaign, a silent ground invasion is underway.

In the final weeks of 2025, Israeli military patrols pushed deep into Quneitra province, establishing checkpoints in villages and detaining residents. These are not defensive measures; they are predatory acts of territorial theft.

In December, Israeli artillery even targeted unarmed civilians foraging for mushrooms in the countryside with smoke bombs and live fire.

By seizing over 350 square kilometers of the Golan buffer zone and moving toward Mount Hermon, Israel has effectively discarded the 1974 Disengagement Agreement.

For Syria’s Alawites and other minorities, the pot is their homeland itself—left to simmer with violence and neglect, because the new regime sees no value in protecting those outside its sectarian fold.While the al-Sharaa regime issues hollow condemnations, the reality is a permanent Israeli buffer carved out of Syrian soil, a land grab facilitated by a transitional government that lacks both the will and the legitimacy to defend its borders.

Beyond land, permissive skies have facilitated Israeli campaigns of coercion. Syria’s airspace has become a staging ground for sorties that project force against regional countries, transforming airspace into an instrument of aggression and expansionism.

Internally, al-Jolani’s rebranding has failed to mask the sectarian vitriol of his regime. The December 26 bombing of the Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib Mosque in Homs, which killed eight worshippers, was a horrific reminder that Alawites remain existential targets.

Saraya Ansar al-Sunna, which was part of the al-Sharraa-led HTS as late as February 2025 and had previously claimed a Damascus church attack in June, claimed responsibility for the attack.

This was no isolated incident; it followed a year of disappearances, such as the abduction of a pregnant woman in rural Homs and the cold-blooded murder of Hasan Ibraheem in Masyaf by regime forces.

In response, the coastal heartlands of Latakia and Tartous have erupted.

Thousands gathered in Azhari Square this December, not to demand the return of the old guard, but to plead for political federalism. They view the central government as a Salafi-extremist monolith that has failed its basic duty of protection.

The regime’s answer has been predictably brutal: curfews, security deployments, and gunfire that killed multiple protesters.

There’s a Persian-language proverb that says, “If the pot doesn’t boil for me, then let a dog’s head boil in it.” For Syria’s Alawites and other minorities, the pot is their homeland itself—left to simmer with violence and neglect, because the new regime sees no value in protecting those outside its sectarian fold.

Western power brokers are accomplices in Syria’s destruction, desperate to falsely advertise it as the crowning achievement of an imperial regime-change scheme.This disintegration has been accelerated by the Trump factor. U.S. President Donald Trump’s meetings with al-Sharaa and the subsequent lifting of the Caesar Act have effectively normalized a former al-Qaeda affiliate.

Trump has also emboldened Israeli expansionism. By signaling a “hands-off” American approach to “border adjustments,” Washington has allowed Israel to treat southern Syria as a laboratory for its own security ambitions.

With Turkey entrenched in the north, the SDF holding much of the northeast, and Persian Gulf Arab monarchies buying influence with billions, Syria is a nation for sale.

Now the shadow of “normalization” with Israel hangs over it, a bitter pill that is bound to strip its people of dignity and land, after years of regional strikes that have slaughtered innocents—women, children, families—laying bare a voracious war machine demanding total hegemony and surrender.

Meanwhile, Western power brokers have been trying to conceal the al-Sharaa regime’s decay—its edges bleeding under Israeli aggression and encroachment—because they are not bystanders but accomplices in Syria’s destruction, desperate to falsely advertise it as the crowning achievement of an imperial regime-change scheme.