Israel’s Army Radio reported on Sunday morning local time that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had moved tanks into the demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria to deter Syrian rebels after the apparent fall of the Assad regime.
As Breitbart News reported, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was reported to have fled the capital city of Damascus on Sunday. Unconfirmed social media reports suggested that he had been aboard a plane that appeared to have crashed.
On Friday, the IDF said that it had reinforced Israeli positions on the Golan Heights, the plateau seized by Israel from Syria during the Six-Day War of 1967. (Syrian forces had used the Heights to shell the Israeli villages below for years.)
On Sunday, Israel’s Army Radio reported that the IDF had moved tanks into the demilitarized zone between Syria and Israel, an area that is supposed to be free of any military presence under the disengagement agreement that ended the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In that war, Syria and Egypt conducted a surprise attack on Israel during the holiest day on the Jewish calendar; Syria nearly overran the Golan Heights before IDF reservists pushed it back.
Army Radio also said that the IDF had set up checkpoints throughout the Golan Heights — i.e. within Israel itself — to prevent infiltrations by Syrian rebels, lest they attempt to cross the border. The rebels control the Quneitra province, which borders Israel.
Several years ago, the presence of the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) in the same region also caused Israel to take precautions, though none as active as those that are unfolding with the Assad regime’s collapse.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
