{ "archive_path": "archive/1787688747.504965", "base_url": "www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417", "basename": "article-906417", "bookmarked_date": "2026-08-25 20:12", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.jpost.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417.html" }, "domain": "www.jpost.com", "extension": "", "hash": "1KY088AQKPJSJ50Q9CMX", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "60", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.jpost.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:28.875602+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787688747.504965", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:28.384406+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "60", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:29.221528+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787688747.504965", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:28.881200+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:45.204164+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787688747.504965", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:41.533411+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmps744gj8a", "https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:41.526778+00:00", "index_texts": [ "ByGIORGIA VALENTE/THE MEDIA LINEAUGUST 24, 2026 13:22Updated: AUGUST 24, 2026 14:32Israel\u2019s strike on the Abu al-Duhur military airbase in northwestern Syria has pushed an increasingly difficult Israeli-Turkish relationship into one of its most sensitive arenas yet, raising the prospect that Syria could become not only a point of competition between the two regional powers, but also the place where their respective security red lines overlap.\u00a0For more stories from The Media Line go to themedialine.orgThe Israeli strike on August 18 targeted the airbase in Idlib province amid Israeli concerns that Turkey could expand its military presence there. Turkey and Syria have not publicly confirmed reports that Ankara was preparing the type of deployment described by Israel.Israel warned against any expansion of Turkey\u2019s military footprint in southern Syria following an airstrike on the Abu al-Duhur airbase, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying such a move would threaten Israeli security and alter the existing regional balance.Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani rejected claims that Turkey intended to establish a military base at Abu al-Duhur, saying the site was being restored for use by the Syrian Air Force.US Ambassador to Turkey and Special Envoy for Syria and Iraq, Tom Barrack, publicly criticized the attack as an unnecessary escalation and said Washington is working on a deconfliction mechanism involving Israel, Turkey, and Syria.\u00a0US Special Envoy for Syria and Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack speaks during a session at Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Antalya, Turkey, April 17, 2026. (credit: REUTERS/UMIT BEKTAS/FILE PHOTO)Contradiction facing Syria's future exposedThe episode has exposed a contradiction now shaping Syria\u2019s postwar position. Turkey wants a stable and increasingly functional Syrian state closely tied to Ankara. Israel, meanwhile, wants to ensure that a stronger Syrian central government - and particularly deeper Turkish military involvement - does not restrict its freedom of action over Syrian airspace or create new security threats along its northern front.\u00a0For Syria, the immediate priority appears to be avoiding being turned once again into the battlefield where regional powers settle their disputes.Al-Shaibani said on Aug. 23 that Damascus expects security negotiations with Israel to resume soon despite the latest escalation. Syria is seeking an end to Israeli strikes and an Israeli withdrawal from Syrian territory as part of a possible security arrangement, while maintaining its growing defense relationship with Turkey.The diplomatic channel therefore remains open even as military friction increases.Professor Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, described the situation as already constituting direct friction between Israel and Turkey, although he stressed that neither government appears to want that competition to develop into war.\u201cFirst of all, unfortunately, this is a direct friction or collision between Israel and Turkey. Both sides do not wish to have such direct friction between them, certainly not currently,\u201d Michael told The Media Line.From the Israeli perspective, Michael said, the central concern is not simply Turkish political influence in Damascus but the possibility of Turkish military infrastructure eventually restricting Israeli operations in Syrian airspace.\u201cIsrael cannot accept Turkish military deployment in Syria because Israel must preserve full freedom of action, particularly aerial freedom of movement over Syria. We have not finished with Iran yet,\u201d he said.The Iranian dimension is central to Israel\u2019s calculations. Syria has for years served as a corridor through which Israel has conducted operations against Iranian and Iran-linked targets, while Syrian airspace also forms part of the wider geographic route toward Iran.Michael argued that this makes the potential installation of Turkish radar or air-defense capabilities particularly sensitive.\u201cOnce the Turks are able to deploy in Syria, at airbases or elsewhere, they could establish air-defense missiles, radars or other systems that would complicate the situation for the Israeli Air Force,\u201d Michael said.\u201cIf, for example, Israel had to reach Iran and the Turks tried to intercept an Israeli jet, Israel would attack those batteries - the Turkish batteries. That would be a direct military clash between Israel and Turkey,\u201d he added.That remains a hypothetical scenario, and Ankara\u2019s response to the Abu al-Duhur strike has so far remained relatively restrained.Bar\u0131n Kayaoglu, chair and assistant professor of American Studies at the Institute for Area Studies at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, said Turkey has given little indication that it wants to transform the current dispute into an open confrontation.Turkey seems uninterested in escalation, shows restraint\u201cRegarding de-escalation, we\u2019ll see. The Americans, particularly Ambassador Tom Barrack, have said they will work on it. Turkey is clearly not interested in escalating, as can be seen from its toned-down reaction. Whether that also interests Israel, we\u2019ll see,\u201d Kayaoglu told The Media Line.\u00a0That restraint is noteworthy because the Israeli-Turkish dispute is increasingly less about bilateral relations alone and more about the kind of Syrian state that will emerge from the country\u2019s political transition.For Ankara, a unified Syrian state offers the possibility of greater border stability, the consolidation of a friendly government in Damascus, and the expansion of Turkish political, economic, and security influence. For Israel, however, the strengthening of Damascus could gradually reduce the permissive military environment Israel has operated in since the fall of the Assad government.Kayaoglu argued that this longer-term change is part of what is driving Israeli concern.\u201cNetanyahu is using Turkey and President Erdogan as an election tool,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the long term, Israelis worry that Turkey will help Syria hold together and that Syria will cease to be a player they can easily bully or simply fly over on the way to Iran.\u201dThe argument that electoral politics may be influencing Israeli rhetoric has also entered the diplomatic debate. Barrack has suggested that the timing and nature of the Abu al-Duhur strike could have been influenced by Israel\u2019s approaching elections, although Israeli officials have rejected his characterization of the events and defended the strike as based on legitimate security concerns.Michael, while taking a sharply different view of Turkey\u2019s intentions, also criticized the way the Israeli government publicly handled the confrontation.\u201cI think Israel was wrong when it made this public and began with unnecessary declarations, mainly by the defense minister, fighting with the Turks through tweets and the media,\u201d he said. \u201cI think this is a problem.\u201dHis wider assessment of Turkish policy, however, is considerably more skeptical than Kayaoglu\u2019s.Michael sees Ankara\u2019s expanding role in Syria alongside its activities elsewhere in the region as part of a broader effort to increase Turkish regional power.\u201cThey have hegemonic aspirations in the broader Middle East, and they see Israel as the main obstacle to the realization of those aspirations,\u201d he said. \u201cThey want a weak Israel; they do not want a strong Israel.\u201dIt is precisely this difference in perception that makes Syria dangerous.From Ankara\u2019s perspective, helping Damascus rebuild functioning state institutions and security capabilities is part of the effort to stabilize a neighboring country after years of fragmentation. From the Israeli security perspective presented by Michael, the same process risks creating a Turkish-supported military architecture directly to Israel\u2019s northeast.Damascus, meanwhile, is attempting to avoid choosing exclusively between the two sides.President Ahmed al-Sharaa has previously said Syria is working toward a security agreement with Israel that could eventually open the way to something broader, while insisting such an arrangement would not mean abandoning Syrian claims to the Golan Heights.Michael said those negotiations remain significant but argued that Turkey\u2019s influence inevitably constrains Damascus\u2019 room for maneuver.\u00a0\u201cI think all of them, together with the Americans, are now working on a deconfliction mechanism,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is an American interest, an Israeli interest, and mainly a Syrian interest, because all of them have an interest in bringing things down.\u201dBut he added that deeper Turkish military, political, and economic involvement would make Syria increasingly dependent on Ankara.Kayaoglu sees the equation differently. For him, the pressure on Damascus may eventually come not from Turkish involvement but from continued Israeli action inside Syrian territory.\u201cSyria\u2019s preference will be to maintain domestic order,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if Israel continues making a mockery of Syrian sovereignty, Damascus will be forced to join the Mecca Pact.\u201dThat possibility introduces another layer into the regional competition.Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement on August 7, establishing a framework under which an armed attack against one member is to be regarded as an attack against all three. The governments have described the agreement as defensive and have stressed that it is not directed against any particular country.Michael questioned how far that collective-defense language would translate into actual military commitments. \u201cThe importance of this alliance, or this pact, is more symbolic than operational,\u201d he said, pointing to existing regional security crises in which Turkey and Pakistan have not automatically intervened militarily on Saudi Arabia\u2019s behalf.\u201cThe idea of the alliance was supposed to be something similar to Article 5 of NATO: if one member is attacked, it is considered as though all members were attacked, and they come to defend the attacked member. This is not the situation today, and I doubt it will become the situation in the future,\u201d Michael said.Kayaoglu similarly cautioned against reading the agreement as a replacement for Turkey\u2019s existing Western security commitments.\u201cDo not take seriously anyone who says Turkey will leave NATO for the Mecca pact,\u201d he said. \u201cIt won\u2019t happen unless NATO somehow ceases to exist.\u201d \u00a0The more immediate significance of the pact may therefore be political rather than the creation of an alternative NATO-style military command. It gives Ankara, Riyadh and Islamabad an additional framework for coordinating defense policy at a moment when regional states are seeking greater strategic autonomy.For Syria, joining such an arrangement remains hypothetical. But even the possibility illustrates how continued Israeli-Turkish friction could push Damascus further into emerging regional security structures, rather than leaving Syria as a neutral space between its neighbors.For now, however, the clearest signals from all three capitals point toward containment rather than direct confrontation.Follow us on Google" ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787688747.504965", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:39.671830+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "60", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:39.667208+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "Israel and Turkey face a dangerous clash over Syria's future | The Jerusalem Post", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787688747.504965", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:39.637685+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--backup-converted", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--timeout=60", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--warc-file=/data/archive/1787688747.504965/warc/1787688869", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:39.632283+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787688747.504965", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:14:29.227819+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "Israel and Turkey face a dangerous clash over Syria's future | The Jerusalem Post", "warc": null, "wget": "www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1787688747.504965", "newest_archive_date": "2026-08-25T20:14:41.533411+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-08-25T20:14:28.384406+00:00", "path": "/middle-east/article-906417", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "760546bd-0f46-43c3-b99a-366a62fc358c", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1787688747-import.txt" ], "tags": null, "tags_str": "", "timestamp": "1787688747.504965", "title": "Israel and Turkey face a dangerous clash over Syria's future | The Jerusalem Post", "updated": "2026-08-25T20:14:28.383934+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-08-25 20:14", "url": "https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906417" }