The Battle Between Israel and Iran Is Spreading
As the Syrian Civil War winds down, a potentially more dangerous conflict intensifies.
When Israeli missiles rained down on multiple Iranian targets across Syria overnight, it was one of Israel’s largest military operations in Syria in decades. The bombing came after Israel said that Iran, too, had committed an action without recent precedent, when its forces in Syria launched some 20 rockets against Israeli forces in the Golan Heights.
It was a dramatic escalation, but it also fit a longer ongoing pattern. The two adversaries have been engaged in a low-level conflict mostly outside their own borders, using the chaotic terrain of the Syrian conflict to confront each other. Yet if the confrontation seemed to be contained—and one of the many different wars
