DAMASCUS (Dispatches) -- In an interview with the U.S. public broadcaster NPR, apparently on behalf of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the governor of Damascus said that the new Syria rulers want to have cordial relations with Israel.
“We have no fear toward Israel, and our problem is not with Israel,” Maher Marwan told NPR, “There exists a people who want coexistence. They want peace. They don’t want disputes.”
“And we don’t want to meddle in anything that will threaten Israel’s security or any other country’s security,” he said. “We want peace, and we cannot be an opponent to Israel or an opponent to anyone.”
He added that Israel’s aggression against Syria after the fall of former president Bashar al-Assad was “natural.”
“Israel may have felt fear,” he said. “So it advanced a little, bombed a little, etc.”
Earlier in December, after militants and takfiri terrorists took control of Damascus, Israel launched a major act of aggression to destroy Syria’s strategic military capabilities, including missiles, air defenses, air force and navy targets.
In a move that drew some international condemnation, Israel also entered a United Nations-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights.
Syria’s new de-facto leader Jolani has said, “We do not want any conflict whether with Israel or anyone else and we will not let Syria be used as a launchpad for attacks.” 
Syria’s new rulers on Thursday launched a security crackdown in a coastal region where 14 militants were killed a day before.
The clashes in Tartous province, part of the coastal region that is home to many members of Alawite community, has marked the deadliest challenge yet to the takfiri-linked authorities which swept Assad from power on Dec. 8.
They came after a video dating from late November circulated on social media showing a fire inside an Alawite shrine in Aleppo.  
In a predominantly Alawite neighborhood of Damascus, Alawite sheikh Ali Dareer said that homes had been vandalized and people beaten on the basis of their religious identity, despite Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) promises the community would be treated with respect. 

Dareer told Reuters that the community had extended its hand to the new rulers but there “have been many violations”, citing multiple accounts of people being beaten at a checkpoint.
An HTS fighter in the area said there had been an incident on Thursday in which Alawites were taken off a bus and beaten because of their religion.
Protesters chanted “Oh Ali!” during a rally outside local HTS headquarters in Tartous, images posted on social media showed.
The chant was a reference to Ali ibn Abi Talib (AS), a cousin of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon Him) who is revered by Muslims but held in especially high regard by Alawites and Shia Muslims. 
On Sunday, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei called on Syrian youth to “stand with firm determination against those who have orchestrated and brought about this insecurity”.
Ayatollah Khamenei forecast “that a strong and honorable group will also emerge in Syria because today Syrian youth have nothing to lose”, calling the country unsafe.