TEL AVIV — Jordan and Israel have increased cooperation in recent days regarding the ceasefire in southern Syria to ensure against Iran filling the security vacuum in swaths of Syrian territory, an Arab intelligence official told Breitbart Jerusalem.
The official said Israel and Jordan have already found instances of Iran attempting to destabilize the ceasefire, which was brokered last month under the auspices of Russia and the U.S.
“The working assumption of the two countries is that despite the Russian and American support for the ceasefire, Iran will try to find a window of opportunity to move closer to the area with the goal of presenting a much larger threat to Jordan and especially to Israel,” said the source.
“Jordan and Israel have identified efforts from the Syrian regime and the Iranian units cooperating with it to bring about the collapse of the ceasefire,” continued the source. “Every day there are assassinations among the leaders of the opposition. Every day there are military actions in the city of Daraa and the surrounding area. The goal is to get the opposition to respond harshly to these events, which, afterward, would justify a massive response from the regime and its allies.”
“In the current situation, in the shadow of the deepening divisions among opposition organizations and Hezbollah’s subduing of al-Qaeda on the Syrian-Lebanese border, Jordan and Israel fear that the Syrian army support by Iran and Hezbollah will begin a large attack in southern Syria that would bring the Syrian army, the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah fighters to their closest point to Jordan and Israel since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.”
The official said Jordan estimates that Russia won’t make a major effort to enforce the ceasefire and the U.S. won’t want to engage in a large-scale operation in the event of any significant Iran-backed destabilization effort. “This will leave Jordan and especially Israel with the task of coping with the Iranians, their Syrian allies and Hezbollah,” he said. “From the perspectives of Jordan and Israel, this is a scenario that must not be allowed to play out, but it is a very realistic scenario that must be prepared for.”
The official said that the U.S. is aware of the fears of the Jordanians and the Israelis, and has been updated on the details of the coordination between the two countries.
He noted that despite the incident at the Israeli embassy in Jordan in which an Israeli security guard killed two Jordanian citizens after one of them tried to stab the guard, the two countries are continuing to coordinate their positions on the developments in Syria through intelligence channels.