If the Assad regime falls
What Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared regarding the victorious offensive of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels and the Syrian National Army in the regions of Aleppo and Hama in northern Syria, claiming it to be “a conspiracy orchestrated by the United States and the Zionist regime,” cannot be proven. However, the shift in power dynamics on the Syrian battlefield benefiting Israel and, to a lesser extent, the USA is evident.
If the Assad regime falls
Bashar al-Assad’s regime is a crucial link in the Shiite anti-Israeli resistance axis that stretches without interruption from Tehran to the Bekaa Valley and the southern outskirts of Beirut in Lebanon, passing through Iraq. Rockets, missiles, and other Iranian weapons reach Hezbollah through Iraqi and then Syrian territory.
The fall of the dominant Alawite government in Damascus and its replacement with a Sunni Arab-dominated executive, or at least a severe crisis like the one in the early part of the last decade that saw the regime lose control of two-thirds of the national territory, would completely halt the flow of arms to Hezbollah and definitively neutralize its threat potential towards Israel.
The crisis plays into Israel and Turkey’s hands
If the Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi had wanted to state something truly original and courageous, he should have said that the succession of events suggests not a Zionist-American plot but a Turkish-Israeli conspiracy. The state that, along with Israel, stands to gain the most from the current course of events is evidently Turkey.
At this moment, the fighters of the Syrian National Army, a mosaic of factions long on Ankara’s payroll, are not only clashing with the Syrian Armed Forces and Iranian or Lebanese Shiite militias but are also gaining ground against the Kurds of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Erdogan’s grand design in Syria, which is unexpectedly making enormous progress these days, aims to create a 30 km security zone within Syrian territory along the entire northern border with Turkey, controlled by Ankara’s armed forces and pro-Turkish Syrian militias, dismantle the SDF and especially their YPG component linked to the Turkish PKK, transform the Syrian provinces of Idlib, Aleppo, and Hama into a sort of Turkish protectorate, and convince the Americans to greenlight all these objectives by demonstrating that Turkey is better at keeping Iran out of Syria than the SDF that the US continues to support.
Erdogan’s hand
The perfect convergence of tactical interests between Turkey and Israel in this new phase of the decade-long Syrian conflict is the true geopolitical paradox we are witnessing. Recep Tayyip Erdogan applauded the arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza issued by the International Criminal Court as “a courageous decision” that “renews the people’s trust in international institutions.”
The fact remains that without Turkey’s approval, the guarantor with troops on the ground of the ceasefire that in the difficult days of 2020 allowed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Syrian National Army to survive in Idlib’s stronghold against the Russian-Iranian pincer that was crushing them, the rebel’s victorious offensive in Aleppo and the rout of government troops would never have been possible.
An offensive that coincidentally coincides with the cessation of hostilities between Israelis and Hezbollah in Lebanon: exactly on November 27th, while the ceasefire between Israelis and Lebanese Shiites came into effect, the rebel offensive in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo began, leading two days later to the fall of Syria’s second city.
Israel has been waiting for this
Those who refuse to believe in operational collaboration between Syrian jihadists and Israeli strategists note that simply the rebels seized the opportunity created by the degradation of Iranian and Hezbollah military presence in Syria resulting from the numerous Israeli targeted attacks in recent months: the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) counted 150 Israeli airstrikes on targets in Syrian territory since last January. On November 20th, three raids on Palmyra against pro-Iranian groups killed 106 fighters; in September, a raid destroyed a missile production factory controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in northern Syria.
The rebels would have moved exploiting the weakening of allies who in these years have allowed Bashar al-Assad to remain in power: the losses caused by Israeli airstrikes add to the fact that Russians and Hezbollah had to transfer men and equipment to Ukraine and southern Lebanon respectively to support fronts that had opened in the meantime.
Indeed, now Hezbollah will have to return in droves to Syria (where they lost about 2,000 men between 2011 and 2023 to support the regime) to try to avoid something worse than a retreat north of the Litani River: the depletion of supplies from Iran and consequently their collapse as a military force. Music to Israel’s ears.
What does Turkey want from Syria
Turkey’s poker hand is more complicated. Erdogan knows that Russia and Iran have no intention of abandoning Assad to his fate: Tartus hosts the only Russian military naval base in the Mediterranean, and at Hmeimim, near Laodicea, the only military airfield outside the former Soviet Union; similarly, Tehran cannot afford to lose Damascus because it would also lose access to the Mediterranean (currently guaranteed by Assad and Hezbollah) and the ability to pressure Israel.
The Turkish President hopes to conclude new agreements and compromises with Moscow, including its commitment to exert pressure on Assad to abandon his hardline positions in negotiations for normalizing relations between Turkey and Syria. Essentially, Erdogan demands that Assad take back the three million Syrian refugees who have sought refuge in Anatolia, formally authorize a Turkish zone of influence in northern Syria, and involve opponents in power – naturally those friendly to Turkey.
Assad will have to change tactics
On some of these points, the Syrian President will finally have to compromise, now that his low-profile policy in the regional crisis is no longer a guarantee of survival.
Assad has limited himself to verbal condemnations after the start of the Israeli offensive against Gaza and has never reacted to Tel Aviv’s incursions into Syrian territory against his Iranian and Lebanese allies, to prevent his worn-out armed forces (engaged since 2011 in the endless war with jihadist and pro-Turkish rebels) from being further degraded by Israeli attacks.
Now that Israel seems to have decided that it is no longer enough to have its tacit permission to strike Iranian weapons in transit to Lebanon when identified but that it is necessary to completely halt the flow, the son of the “Lion of Damascus” (father Hafez, who held power for almost thirty years) will necessarily have to change tactics. Or his Russian allies will make him change them.
