US envoy suggests Israeli strike on Syria aimed at ‘baiting’ Turkey into conflict for electoral gain

Tom Barrack, the US special presidential envoy for Syria and Iraq, suggests Israeli leaders were “baiting” Turkey into a conflict for electoral gain by striking a Syrian military airport where Israel claimed Turkey was set to deploy troops.

In an interview published Friday with Dubai-based social media personality Mario Nawfal, Barrack says that is one of two “postulated theories” for why Israel attacked Syria despite their high-level contact, including what Barrack described as a two-hour, in-depth conversation days beforehand between Mossad chief Roman Gofman and Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani.

“One theory is they were just baiting Turkey, and it’s a very aggressive, but maybe well-received, pre-election concept,” Barrack says.

“The other theory is that between the IDF, the Mossad and the Prime Minister’s Office there was a miscommunication,” he says. “That perhaps the Mossad director was conducting a really serious backchannel that he wasn’t finished with, perhaps he wasn’t satisfied with, that he was going to come back the next week and have another discussion. And in the meantime, a commander someplace, based on what they thought their intelligence reading was, thought we need to move quickly and we need to move now.”

Barrack also casts doubt on Israel’s claim that Turkey was moving military assets into Syria’s northwestern Abu al-Duhur military airport.

“To Israel’s credit,” he says, it told the US some six days before the strike that it had intelligence indicating “there might be Turkish movement into this site.”

“We all did our due diligence. We went back to our perspective intelligence agencies. The answers we got is, no, that’s not happening [sic],” Barrack says.

“Probably the most likely” explanation for the Israeli strike “is that they picked up some conversations of some contemplated strategy of the Turks increasing a training program on that site,” according to Barrack.

U.S. Ambassador to Türkiye Tom Barrack:

Let me give you the postulated theories. The first one is that the Israelis were baiting the Turks. If you remember, the Turks took out a Russian jet under the same kind of circumstances, right? Very dangerous game, having jets deployed on… pic.twitter.com/GLdrq2Ccu1

— Clash Report (@clashreport) August 21, 2026

He adds that current arrangements don’t forbid that, and that the Turks “openly train and supply and help the Syrian government” along the countries’ shared border.

In a separate portion of the interview, Barrack also refers to the Golan Heights as occupied by Israel, in an apparent break with Washington’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty there during US President Donald Trump’s first term.

“In the Golan, with Syria, they still occupy the Golan against the UN resolutions, against all the international order, which has said the Golan is Syria’s,” Barrack says, referring to Israel.