Iranian-sponsored Hizbollah recently renewed attacks on Israel, capturing four soldiers in the last two months and killing one with a roadside bomb. It is acting on the pretext that Israel is still occupying the Shebaa Farms, a small pocket of what it claims was originally Lebanese land that was seized by Syria in the 1940s and in 1967 occupied by Israel as part of the Golan Heights. Israel's annoyance with Syria's new young president has been heightened by disappointment that he has not proved any more likely to succumb to Israeli demands than his father, Hafez al-Assad, who died in June. The Israeli military is alarmed by Bashar al-Assad's eagerness to forge closer relations with Iraq in contrast to his father, whose hostility towards Saddam Hussein reached a peak in 1991 when he supported Operation Desert Storm. Last month Izzat Ibrahim, a member of the Revolutionary Command Council, was the most senior Iraqi official for two decades to visit Damascus.
Reports abound that Iraq is piping oil to Syria in defiance of sanctions.
But he is behaving just the opposite way. He is very extreme. He has turned very hard in the direction of the Iraqis. This week, Israel bombarded a Lebanese town after a Hizbollah bomb killed one of its soldiers. But Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister, has held back from retaliation over the captured men three soldiers and a reserve colonel because he did not want to open another front while battling the Palestinian intifada.