White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that President Trump was “caught off guard” by Israel’s recent airstrikes in Syria and the Israeli tank shelling of the sole Catholic church in Gaza.
“He was caught off guard by the bombing in Syria and also the bombing of the Catholic church in Gaza,” Leavitt told reporters.
The comments come after several reports that the Trump administration was unhappy with Israel’s airstrikes in Syria, with one US official telling Axios that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a “madman” and “bombs everything all the time.”
Also on Monday, Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey who serves as a special envoy to Syria, also criticized Israel’s airstrikes on Syria and expressed strong support for the al-Qaeda-linked Syrian government despite the massacres its forces have committed against Druze civilians during the fighting in southern Syria’s Suwayda.
Barrack told The Associated Press that the “the killing, the revenge, the massacres on both sides” are “intolerable,” but that “the current government of Syria, in my opinion, has conducted themselves as best they can as a nascent government with very few resources to address the multiplicity of issues that arise in trying to bring a diverse society together.”
Israel bombed Syrian government tanks that entered an area of southern Syria it wants to be demilitarized and followed up the attack with airstrikes on the Defense Ministry in Damascus. Barrack said that the strikes “came at a very bad time” and insisted that the US “was not asked, nor did they participate in that decision, nor was it the United States’ responsibility in matters that Israel feels is for its own self-defense.”
Barrack also said that Israel would rather see a fractured and divided Syria rather than one with a strong central government. “Strong nation-states are a threat — especially Arab states are viewed as a threat to Israel,” he said.
After the regime change that ousted former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated and took credit for, Israel invaded southern Syria. The US has been pushing for a normalization deal between Israel and the al-Qaeda-linked government in Damascus, but Israel would likely rather keep the territory it has captured and is using the plight of the Druze as a pretext for continued military intervention.
The US is also putting pressure on its Kurdish allies in northeastern Syria to merge into the Syrian government. According to a report from Middle East Eye, the US and Turkey have given the Kurdish-led SDF a 30-day deadline to integrate. “The SDF was told that not all of its armed units would be integrated into the Syrian army. Units excluded from integration would be disarmed, and overall control would remain with the Syrian government,” a source told MEE.
The Trump administration has embraced the new Syrian government and its de facto leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, despite his al-Qaeda past, which included fighting US forces in Iraq. The US has lifted most sanctions on Syria and removed Sharaa’s jihadist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), previously the al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria), from the terror list despite the massacres of civilians by HTS-linked forces.
