Orientul Mijlociu

The failures of the Israeli intelligence community in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and of the American intelligence community on September 11, 2001 have been widely discussed. But there was another failure on the part of the Israeli intelligence community that merits attention: For over two years after the Oslo Accords signed on September 13, 1993, its experts failed to detect he threat posed by the Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The political climate that prevailed in Israel during the early 1990s had a negative effect on the assessment of the situation by the Israeli intelligence community, and there is a general lesson to be learned from these events. This article will first discuss the key failures of Israel’s intelligence community during these years, and then it will assess the role played in these failures by the contemporary political climate in Israel.

Overview

This past week no unusual incidents were reported along the Israel-Lebanon border. Hezbollah-affiliated media outlets reported on works carried out by Israel in the Ghajar region. The exposure of Iran and Hezbollah’s secret airport in south Lebanon continued to make headlines. Hezbollah has yet to address the issue directly.
Preliminary details have been published about the plan of Amos Hochstein, the American president’s coordinator for energy security, to resolve the issue of the land border between Israel and Lebanon.
Tensions continue in the Ein al-Hilweh refugee camp. Several meetings were held in an effort to calm the situation.
So far, there has been no solution to the presidential crisis in Lebanon nor is one on the horizon. Hezbollah and Amal continue to promote the candidacy of Suleiman Frangieh.

Tensions continue to rise along the Lebanese border, centered around the town of Ghajar, a disputed area that straddles Lebanon and Syrian territory captured and occupied by Israel in 1967.

What seems to be unfolding as a controlled escalation, deterring all sides from a more intense conflagration, could give way to all-out conflict, a situation most of the belligerents would like to avoid.

Iran is equipping its regional allies with sophisticated armed unmanned aerial systems (UAS) – drones – to help them project power on Tehran’s behalf against shared adversaries.

In June and July, Lebanese Hezbollah used Iran-supplied aerial surveillance drones to signal its opposition to Israel’s development of offshore natural gas fields in disputed waters.

Twenty years after the Iraq War began, scholarship on its causes can be usefully divided into the security school and the hegemony school. Security school scholars argue that the main reason the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq was to safeguard the United States against the conjoined threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups. Hegemony school scholars argue instead that the purpose of the Iraq War was to preserve and extend U.S. hegemony, including the spread of liberal democratic ideals. Debates between these camps inform broader disputes about the lessons of the Iraq War for the future of U.S. foreign policy and the analysis of other key questions about the war’s origins. Nonetheless, this binary may not be productive for Iraq War scholarship, and more attention to global and cultural factors would be a useful way to advance this field.

• On August 3, 2023, ISIS’s Al-Furqan Media Foundation released an audiotape with a statement by Abu Hudhaifa al-Ansari, ISIS’s spokesman. In the tape, the organization’s spokesman announces the death of Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi, the organization’s leader, and the appointment of Abu Hafs al-Hashemi al-Qurashi as his replacement.
• ISIS’s spokesman blames the leader’s death on the Al-Qaeda-affiliated HTS, which is considered the dominant organization in the rebel enclave in Idlib. He denies the official version published by Turkey, according to which Al-Qurashi was killed by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT). HTS issued a statement denying its involvement in killing ISIS’s leader. It should be noted that alongside the news of his death, rumors also circulated about the ouster of the leader even before he was killed.
• Although the date of his death is not specified on the audiotape, the ITIC estimates that he was killed in April 2023. As ISIS has done in the past, this time too, the information about the leader’s death has not been officially published by ISIS. This is apparently because the organization waited for a new leader to be chosen by the Shura Council and for establishing support and recognition for his appointment by the operatives in the various provinces.
• This is the fourth leader of ISIS killed since the establishment of the organization. The last three leaders were killed after a relatively short term of office and it seems that their term of office is getting shorter after the first leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, served for six and a half years while the last leader served only six months. It should be noted that the short terms of office of the organization’s leaders and the high turnover of the organization’s leaders are a severe blow to ISIS’s power, capabilities, and image. It should also be noted that the four leaders were killed on Syrian soil, to which the center of gravity of the organization’s leadership has moved. All four were killed in areas where the Syrian government had limited control (Idlib and Daraa).
• If HTS is indeed responsible for the leader’s death, this is the second time that ISIS’s leader has been killed by a rival organization in Syria. This time it is an organization affiliated with Al-Qaeda operating in the Idlib region. It is possible that his death will lead to attempts by ISIS operatives to carry out a series of acts of revenge.

ISIS orchestrates ‘prison breaks’ in order to provide manpower for the group’s resurgence. In the last decade, mass escapes have taken place under the watch of Americans, Kurds, and some Iraqis, whose dedication to containing and punishing the thousands of incarcerated terrorists in their custody must seriously be questioned.

Foreign intelligence agencies, including Israeli and US intel and their regional partners, have been instrumental in fueling recent anti-government protests in Suwayda, just as they did in 2011.

On 17 August, anti-government protests erupted in Suwayda, a province in southern Syria with a Druze-majority population. These demonstrations were triggered by the Syrian government’s decision to lift fuel subsidies, which came amidst a severe economic crisis exacerbated by US economic sanctions.