When, at the height of the Arab Spring, Syrian troops began gunning down peaceful protestors, the country’s ruler falsely claimed that his victims were terrorists. He then strove to make reality resemble his lie and, as Michael Totten writes, “created a terrorist menace to fight.”

For years Bashar al-Assad had been keeping radical Islamists quarantined in his jails, many of whom had fought returned home after fighting with al-Qaeda in Iraq, and in the most cynical “criminal-justice reform” in history, he let them out of their cages. They did exactly what he knew they would do—coalesced into terrorist armies out in the [Syrian] desert.

One of them was the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and the other was Islamic State (IS), forged from the shattered remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq whom the world hadn’t heard from in years. . . . Assad . . . finally had the war that he needed. . . .

Assad is nothing if not a brilliant manipulator. Against all evidence, he managed to convince the secretaries of state John Kerry and Hillary Clinton that he was a “reformer” at a time when he was precisely the opposite, and he managed to convince [many others in high levels of government] that he’s fighting IS even though he and [his Russian allies] have spent more than 99 percent of their time, energy, and ammunition on every rebel army in the country except IS.

[Assad] still has plenty of supporters in the West, though, because he’s “secular” and therefore preferable to Islamists. As an individual, yes, Assad is secular. . . . The problem is, his chief political and military backers—Hizballah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—are radical Islamists. His own army has been reduced to a shattered husk of its former self and will likely never again be able to impose secular rule on the entire country.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.