Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is openly rebuilding his country’s military. Some analysts see that effort as in line with a familiar pattern in Syrian history of a leader consolidating the loyalty of his officers after taking power by force. But it has enlivened fears in Israel of a new military threat, one it has countered with discreet military operations in recent months.
Syria has budgeted roughly $4.3 billion for defense and security in 2026, or about 41 percent of its $10.5 billion budget. The country spent about $3.45 billion across its entire government budget in 2025.
One focus of Israel’s concerns is the Golan Heights, a swath of highland it has occupied and administered since 1967. Most of the international community considers the area Syrian territory under Israeli occupation, but in his first term U.S. President Donald Trump recognized Israel’s sovereignty there. Speaking to the Atlantic Council ahead of last month’s U.N. General Assembly, Sharaa recounted sitting with Trump and jokingly telling him that instead of giving Israel the Golan Heights, he should give it something that actually belongs to the U.S., like New Jersey.
“The Golan will remain a Syrian land,” Sharaa said a day later when he addressed the UNGA. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, before the same forum, retorted: “The Jews have been on the Golan Heights since the days of Moses.”
Israel has also expressed a broader concern about Turkey’s influence over Sharaa’s government and its growing military. In mid-August, Israeli jets struck the Abu al-Duhur airbase in northern Syria, reportedly after intelligence findings that Turkey intended to build a radar station there. The action was a clear demonstration of Israel’s free rein over the skies of its northeastern neighbor.
In that context, analysts differ on whether Sharaa’s rebuilding of his military is primarily an effort to regain state control after a brutal civil war or the groundwork for a more bellicose stance toward foreign rivals, including Israel.
A military in transition
Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, Sharaa and his transitional government have worked to distance themselves from the past and demonstrate a new direction for Syria. Their efforts have helped pave the way for the U.S. to drop sanctions against the country, remove Sharaa’s now dissolved militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), from its catalogue of designated terrorist groups, and, most recently, delist Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism.
Securing international acceptance, though, is only part of Sharaa’s effort to rebuild Syria. Among the others is the more difficult task of transforming a motley collection of former rebel factions into a unified force capable of securing the state.
A stronger Syrian state, and particularly a stronger Syrian military, has raised security concerns in Israel. Officials there are focused not just on who Sharaa is today, but on what a more capable Syria could become, citing among other reasons for caution its president’s militant past and its placement of hostile forces near the Israeli border.
What worries Israel
“Israel’s concern does not stem from the mere fact that Syria is rebuilding an army, but from the nature of the force being built,” said Dana Polak, a researcher at Alma Research and Education Center, an Israeli nonprofit focused on Northern Israel’s security issues. She pointed to a senior command structure still populated by former HTS members and others from jihadist backgrounds, and to Turkey’s expanding role in training and equipping the force.
Forces built to fight ISIS, secure borders, and restore state control are “a natural part of rebuilding a functioning state,” Polak said. But for her, the picture would change if Syria pursued capabilities that exceed internal security needs: advanced air defense, long-range missiles, attack drones, heavy artillery. And she expressed concern that Syria is bolstering its forces in regions close to Israel and the Golan Heights. “Military build-up in Daraa and Quneitra is different from military build-up in eastern Syria,” Polak said.
As to Syria’s intentions, the researcher said, they remain uncertain. In the near term, the military exists “to stabilize Syria, establish central government control, and confront armed groups,” and Sharaa currently needs international legitimacy and has every interest in avoiding confrontation. But since October 7, Polak said, Israel has learned not to rely solely on assessments of an adversary’s intentions. Capability is what can be tracked and is “one of the most important indicators for understanding the direction Syria may take in the future.”
A familiar pattern
Those concerns are misplaced at this point, said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “The instinct to read a rapid military buildup as evidence of external ambition misreads what such buildups have typically meant in Syrian political history,” he said.
Leaders who take power by force have prioritized building the loyalty of their officer corps as “a first act of governance, not a prelude to war,” Landis said, pointing to Syrian military leader Husni al-Za’im after his 1949 coup and to Hafez al-Assad after 1970. Sharaa’s own stated ambition – ending foreign military presence and reasserting sovereignty over Syrian bases – expresses more of a domestic rationale than an external one, the analyst said.
Whatever the intent, Landis said Syria lacks any capability to threaten Israel. The country has shown itself to be “incapable of defending itself, either from constant Israeli incursions or from Iranian missiles and drones.”
The arming dilemma
In rebuilding his military, Sharaa faces at least one problem every Syrian president has faced since Israel’s creation, Landis said: “Western powers will not sell Syria advanced military systems that could be used against Israel.” That leaves the president to turn to lesser powers – now largely Turkey, since Sharaa “for obvious reasons” is avoiding Russia, which supported and now harbors Assad. Landis expects Israel will keep striking Syrian military targets– “mowing the lawn” — to keep the force weak and slow Turkish resupply.
Meanwhile, Syrian outlets have reported that Israel has intensified its military activities in Syria in recent months, including artillery shelling of farmland. Earlier this month Syria’s official news agency said the government “condemned in the strongest terms the ongoing violations committed by the Israeli occupation against Syrian territory.”
Landis sees Sharaa as trapped on the issue. Condemning Israeli strikes is necessary, but doing so invites more of them.
“If the United States is ultimately forced to choose between Israel and Syria, it will choose Israel,” he said. Trump will back Sharaa “only so long as Syria remains deferential toward Israel and accepts Israeli sovereignty over the Golan.”
For Landis, Syria as a country still focused on basic survival rather than confrontation. For Polak, “Intentions can change faster than capabilities.” The two views aren’t wholly incompatible: A military built first to secure a fragile state could, in time, take on other tasks.
