Austrian general appointed as aid to UN head in tension gripped Golan Heights

        
The Austrian Defense Ministry announced on Thursday that Austrian General Stephen Tuller was appointed as the new aid for the soldiers deployed in the United Nations observer force in the Golan Heights.                 

General Tuller will be serving as aid to the Indian general who heads the United Nations observer force on the Golan Heights as of mid May.                       

Israel is worried that the Golan, which it captured from Syria in 1967, will become a springboard for attacks on Israelis by Jihad fighters, who are taking part in the armed struggle against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.                      

In recent months, battles between Assad loyalists and rebels have raged in some villages on the Syrian foothills of the Golan, with mortar shells and machine-gun fire spilling across into Israeli-occupied territory.                          

Israel, which returned fire in some of those incidents, believes that around one in 10 of the rebels are Sunni Muslim radicals.                      

"Tension in the Golan Heights is the highest it has been since 1974," a senior Israeli military officer in the area told Reuters this week. "We simply do not know who will control the territory next to the border."                 



REUTERS/LBCI