US envoy accuses Israel of failing to warn before Syrian strikes

Tom Barrack, the American ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, broke ranks this week with a sharp accusation: Israel had struck a Syrian military base without bothering to warn Washington first. The target was Abu Duhur, a facility in northern Syria. The timing was Tuesday. The strike, Barrack said in a Friday interview, amounted to an unnecessary escalation—and he suspected something darker underneath it. He believed Israel was trying to provoke Turkey, a country with real leverage in the region.

Israeli officials rejected the claim outright. Defense Minister Israel Katz posted on social media Saturday that his government had absolutely shared intelligence with authorized American officials before the operation. The disagreement was not small. It cut to the heart of how closely the two allies actually coordinate, and whether one was keeping the other in the dark.

The dispute also exposed a deeper rift over what was actually happening on the ground. Netanyahu's government said it had intelligence that Turkey was preparing to deploy troops to Abu Duhur and had ignored Israeli warnings to stand down. Turkey denied this flatly. Barrack went further: the United States, he said, had looked into the claim and found it baseless. The military activity Israel cited simply was not occurring. Syria's foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani, backed this up, saying his government had made clear to Israel that no Turkish military base was planned at the site. Turkish officers had visited only for routine training and coordination, he said.

Katz used Barrack's comments as a springboard for a broader attack. He accused the envoy of making statements "full of inaccuracies" that contradicted President Trump's own position on Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights—territory Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and has held ever since. The first Trump administration recognized Israel's annexation of the territory in 2019, a move that departed from decades of American policy treating it as occupied land under international law. Barrack, by contrast, has acknowledged the occupation, creating daylight between him and his own president.

The strikes themselves fit a pattern. Since Syria's former leader Bashar al-Assad fell from power in December 2024, Israel has conducted repeated military operations across Syrian territory. Israeli forces have expelled Syrians from homes in the country's southwest and built military infrastructure in occupied areas. The operations have continued even as the Trump administration, despite occasional public criticism, has taken no concrete steps to pressure Israel to stop. Trump has maintained what amounts to unconditional support for Tel Aviv, calling Israel a "great ally."

Meanwhile, the United States has been trying to broker talks between Israel and Turkey to lower the temperature. Syria's interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa—a former al-Qaeda fighter who has built relationships with both Washington and Ankara—has signaled that his government does not want conflict with Israel. But the dynamic is fragile. Israel has spent recent months issuing threats against Turkey, framing it as a regional rival bent on expanding its influence. Turkey, for its part, called the Abu Duhur strikes "reckless." The disagreement between Barrack and Israeli officials over whether a warning was given, and over what was actually happening at the base, suggests that the diplomatic effort to stabilize the situation is running into serious obstacles—and that the Trump administration's unwillingness to pressure Israel may be making those obstacles harder to overcome.