Washington’s Syria referee has a conflict
Tom Barrack is building the mechanism meant to keep Israeli and Turkish aircraft from shooting at each other over Syria — a standing deconfliction cell, staffed around the clock in Hebrew, Arabic, English and Turkish. He is also the American ambassador to Ankara. One man, both jobs. And the second one is representing the United States to one of the two air forces the first is trying to keep separate.
A deconfliction cell requires both sides to believe the operator doesn’t care which of them is right. Washington has staffed it with a man Jerusalem has concluded does care, and strongly.
Israel struck the Abu al-Duhur airbase in Idlib on the 18th of August. Israel Katz says the IDF had recommended that strike several times on clear intelligence that Turkey meant to operate there, that Israel warned the Syrian government directly at the highest level, and that it handed the intelligence to the relevant American authorities. The warning went unanswered.
Barrack claims the story: Israel raised Turkish movement with Washington roughly six days out, he said, and the Americans checked with the people who would know and were told nothing was happening.
The ascertainable facts don’t bear out Barrack’s story.
Barrack called the strike an escalation nobody needed and said it does nothing for regional stability. He then vouched for the government of Ahmad al-Sharaa — the former jihadist commander who seized Damascus in 2024 — which in his account “has neither adopted a predatory posture nor maintained proxy forces.” He has floated a theory that the Israelis were baiting the Turks as a pre-election concept, with Netanyahu trying to give his constituency what it wants. A Turkish attempt to intercept the jets, he added, could have produced a third world war. He has also said that Israel’s hold on the Golan defies UN resolutions and the whole international order.
Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty on the Golan in 2019. His own ambassador argues the other side of it.
Israel’s defense establishment reads Sharaa differently. A senior official told Walla at the start of September that the man is still rooted in the ideology of his jihadist past and is operating, in the official’s words, in a “super sophisticated” manner — brigade-level exercises already run, an army being rebuilt around him. That is the government Barrack stood behind.
Turkish radar and an air-defense battery at Abu al-Duhur would have shut the route both American and Israeli jets take across Syria toward western Iran, and that war has been running since Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz at the end of February.
The channel that actually kept the two air forces apart never ran through Washington. Ilham Aliyev opened a direct Israel-Turkey line over Syria and Baku carried the messages. On 2 September a senior Israeli diplomatic official said that channel has dried up, that the attempt to reach a security agreement with Damascus has failed, and that Turkey is now a rival which has moved against Israel in the economic, legal and diplomatic spheres. Erdogan flew home from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek at the start of September talking about full membership.
Barrack may be acting in perfect good faith. The structure is still the problem. You cannot have the officer writing the rules for separating two air forces when he is accredited to one of them and the other side has stopped trusting him. That it has to hold in four languages simultaneously does not make it easier. Give the Syria portfolio to somebody who does not also hold the embassy in Ankara.
