Donations
Veridica.md
The fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime marks the end of the sphere of influence that Iran has painstakingly built since the beginning of the Ayatollahs' regime. It is another blow to the so-called "axis of resistance" after the defeat of Hezbollah and Hamas. Russia is left without its oldest (and currently only) Arab ally. Syria remains fragmented, though, and there is no guarantee that the factions left after Assad won't start fighting each other, or that a potential war won't spread to neighboring countries, as it did a decade ago.
The 'Iranian Crescent': How Tehran Built a Regional Empire and What Role Syria Played in This Empire
Bashar al-Assad's Syria was a key piece in the so-called "Iranian Crescent," the sphere of influence Iran has built in the Middle East over decades. Its foundations were laid in the early 1980s with the emergence of Hezbollah and the Badr Organization, an Iraqi Shia group that fought alongside Iran in its war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The ayatollahs from Tehran were then looking to export their revolution to the region, and the first tools were these political-militant groups. Some previously established ones, such as the Dawa party in Iraq, were also attracted into the alliance.
The Iranian crescent began to take shape after the US-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, when Tehran began training, funding and coordinating a host of Shiite militias in Iraq and expanding its influence to other countries in the region. Within a decade, Iran's sphere of influence stretched to the Mediterranean – via Iraqi Shiite militias, Bashar al-Assad's Syria and Lebanon's Hezbollah, plus a proxy in the Palestinian territories, the Islamic Jihad – and also to the Red Sea, where Tehran allied with the Yemeni Houthi militia.
The most important piece of this Iran-built scaffolding was Hezbollah, the burr that Teheran placed under Israel’s saddle, and virtually the only Arab actor to ever claim victory against Israel after it withdrew in 2000 from southern Lebanon, at the end of a long war with Islamist guerrillas.
The importance of Syria in the Iranian gear is given by its proximity to Israel and Lebanon (a country that was partially, for almost three decades, under Syrian occupation), which allows its use both as a base for preparing anti-Israeli attacks, as well as a logistical corridor to support Hezbollah. Moreover, a significant part of Hezbollah's impressive arsenal reached the Shia militia in Iran via Syria.
Bashar al-Assad's regime was a declared secular one, based on the ideology of the Baath Party, which is normally incompatible with Tehran's Islamism. The Assad clan is indeed part of the Alawite community, which is associated with Shia Muslims, but there are significant differences between their type of Shiism and the duodecimal one practiced by Iranians and Lebanese and Iraqi Shias. Syria's strategic position, but also common interests, led Tehran to overcome its ideological differences with Damascus and intervene decisively in the Syrian civil war.
The 'Axis of Resistance': From Winning the Wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen to Collapse in 2024
Iran sent to Syria hundreds or even thousands of its own military, particularly the Quds Force, and mobilized Iraqi Shiite militias and the Hezbollah to support Bashar al-Assad. This effort was enough to help Damascus halt the rebel advance in the early years of the war.
The success in Syria helped pro-Iranian forces strengthen the reputation they had built up in Lebanon, fighting Israel, and in Iraq, where they had faced off against the United States and which they had been largely controlling after the American withdrawal. New victories followed. In Iraq, Shiite militias and their Iranian advisers played a key role in the war against the Islamic State and the liberation of the vast territory the jihadist group had conquered. In Yemen, the Houthi militia captured most of Yemen and managed for years to hold off a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, which sees itself as the biggest power in the Gulf.
In 2023, on the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, the self-styled "axis of resistance" led by Iran was one of the strongest and most successful military alliances in the Middle East. The alliance at the time also included the Palestinian Hamas, a Sunni Islamist group whose relations with Tehran had been somewhat cooler during the height of the Syrian civil war, when Sunnis there were fighting Shiite Islamists.
However, the axis of resistance had also received a series of blows. The harshest of them had been, in January 2020, the killing in Baghdad, in an American airstrike, of its main architect and coordinator, Qasem Soleimani; together with Soleimaini, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a key figure in the coordination of Iraqi Shia militias, was also killed. Israel had also launched numerous airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria in an attempt to prevent Tehran from consolidating its presence near its borders while also stemming the flow of arms to Hezbollah.
The beginning of the end for the "axis of resistance" was October 7, when Hamas launched its terror attack on Israel. The latter responded forcefully, managing to eliminate the terrorist group's leadership and most of its fighters within a year (at a huge cost to the civilian population, with tens of thousands killed and wounded, and the entire population of Gaza thrown into a humanitarian crisis). While fighting Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, Israel also stepped up its airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria. What followed was the devastating campaign against Hezbollah, which lost its leadership, thousands of fighters and an important part of its arsenal. Iran was also given a direct message that it could take even harder hits when strategic targets on its soil were bombed by Israel in response to Iranian ballistic missile fire.
As a result of these confrontations with Israel, Hezbollah and Iran have largely lost the ability – but also the desire – to intervene in support of Bashar al-Assad's regime, as they did at the beginning of the war. The imminent arrival of Trump in the White House has also cut off the Iranians enthusiasm: the incoming White House leader has a close partnership with Teheran’s number one enemy, Benjamin Netanyahu, was himself on the verge of ordering airstrikes against Iran, and, during the last election campaign, he was the target of an Iranian plot to assassinate him. It is to be assumed, therefore, that Trump will be ready to respond harshly to the first Iranian provocation.
The signal that Bashar al-Assad would not withstand the unexpected rebel offensive was given by the extremely pale response from Iran and its allies; only a few hundred fighters from the region's Shiite militias crossed into Syria this time, too few to matter. When it was also learned that Tehran had begun withdrawing its military advisers, it became clear that it was only a matter of days before the regime collapsed.
With its "butchers" busy with the war in Ukraine, Russia could no longer help Syria. The greatest loss that Moscow has suffered in the East in the last half a century
Apart from Iran, the second state that helped Bashar al-Assad stay in power and regain control of a significant part of Syria was Russia. The alliance between Moscow and Damascus dates back to the Arab-Israeli wars, when the USSR armed several Arab countries with socialist-inspired regimes. The initial success of the Syrian and Egyptian forces in the 1973 war was largely due to military equipment – especially anti-aircraft weapons and armored forces – supplied by the USSR. Starting from the 70s, the countries in the Middle East began to reorient, one by one, towards partnerships with the West. During all these years, Syria remained an ally of Moscow, which received, in return, its only naval base in the Mediterranean Sea, that of Tartus.
After the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, in 2014, Russia protected Syria in the Security Council and in 2015, Vladimir Putin decided to intervene militarily in support of Bashar al-Assad's regime. It was such a brutal intervention that two of the generals commanding the Russian forces in Syria, Alexandr Dvornikov and Sergei Surovikin, were nicknamed the "Butcher of Syria." The first was also called "the Butcher of Aleppo" and the other one: "General Armageddon". Under their leadership, the Russians bombed numerous civilian targets, including hospitals; the war crimes committed against Syrian civilians would foreshadow those in Ukraine. Both Dvornikov and Surovikin were actually promoted by Putin to command Russian forces in Ukraine, when Russia started the full-scale invasion of that country. Bombing civilians and rebels who don't have anti-aircraft weapons is, however, not the same as confronting a well-trained and motivated army, so neither Dvornikov nor Surovikin have been able to show much in Ukraine. The second, though, has the merit of ordering the construction of the redoubtable defensive line that stopped the Ukrainian offensive in the summer of 2023.
Also linked to Syria is another name that became famous for its brutality and the war crimes committed in Ukraine: the Wagner group. The Wagner mercenaries fought in Syria , where the war crimes they committed there include at least one beheading, revealed by the release of a video and a set of morbid photographs in which the mercenaries pose smiling while holding the victim's head. In the same Syria, the mercenaries also showed their limitations - an unknown number of them, ranging from several dozen to several hundred, were killed when they attacked a small unit of the American army and the Kurds supported by it.
After three years of war in Ukraine, with the Wagner Group disbanded and its "butchers" discredited by battlefield failures, Moscow no longer had the ability or willingness to intervene forcefully, even if its planes carried out some scattered bombing. Moreover, the Russians also seem to have withdrawn their ships from Tartus. If Moscow loses this port, it would be the most significant blow suffered both in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean in the more than four decades since Egypt chose to partner with the United States.
Uncertain future for Syria and the region after the fall of Assad. Is the Middle East at risk of a new "war of the end of the world"?
A feature of the Syrian civil war in the middle of the last decade was the religious extremism of many of the groups involved in the conflict – generally the most effective groups. On the one hand, numerous Islamist and Sunni jihadist groups were involved in the conflict, the best known and most successful of which are the al-Nusra Front, affiliated with the Al Qaeda network, and the Islamic State, separated from the terrorist network and becoming an adversary of it and the al-Nusra Front. Beyond the conflict between them and the somewhat more brutal nature of the Islamic State, the ideological differences between the two were minor. They embraced the same radical interpretation of Islam, fought to establish a regime governed by the Islamic law, sharia, as seen by fundamentalists, and resorted to terrorism, including suicide bombings, to achieve their goals. In the other camp, the pro-Iranian Shiite militias were also motivated by religious fanaticism – from the desire to avenge Imam Hussein (killed in the 7th century), to that of defending holy places for the Shiites (the tomb of Sayda Zaynab, Hussein's sister). In both the Sunni and Shia camps there were individuals who believed that the war was the beginning of the final battle between good and evil, the Islamic Armageddon. A war of the end of the world.
The fanatics of ten years ago have not disappeared. The Islamic State, although defeated, has survived in small strongholds in the eastern Syrian desert and has recently become active again. The Kurdish forces, which, with American support, are controlling most of the eastern part of the country, have been making moves these days precisely to prevent the Islamic State from capturing some key cities, primarily Deir ez-Zor, and warned that the jihadists have been expanding their territories.
The al-Nusra Front formally broke away from al-Qaeda in 2016 and was renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, "the Front for the Conquest of the Levant". Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Golani, assures that the group has turned moderate, that it is not interested in operations outside Syria and that it intends to establish a regime in which the rights of minorities, brutally attacked by jihadist groups over time, will be protected. However, it must not be forgotten that the jihadist doctrine also includes the so-called taqiyya, the Islamic practice of dissimulation. In order to achieve his goals, a good Muslim is allowed to dissimulate and even violate religious precepts. Some of the jihadists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 had been living secular lives and even consumed alcohol in public, to hide their beliefs. Hamas masked its intentions in the years before attacking Israel, and even the Taliban feigned a certain moderation when the American withdrawal from Afghanistan was being negotiated.
It is possible, therefore, that once he sees his control over the largest part of Syria consolidated, al-Golani will return to a more radical discourse or seek to export his ideology to neighboring countries, just as it is likely that the Islamic State, if they manage to strengthen themselves, will seek to expand their operations in the neighboring countries, primarily Iraq, where the group still has active cells, but also, for example, Jordan. It is not excluded, at the same time, that from the territory controlled by the two groups, terrorist attacks will be organized, targeting even the West.
Beyond the uncertainties hanging over the jihadists’ intentions, the situation in Syria remains extremely complicated. Opposition groups, even if some have cooperated lately, are not united and many have their own militias. The Kurds control a large part of the territory and are supported by the United States, but Turkey does not take kindly to their presence and has shown in the past that it is willing to both attack them directly and cooperate with Islamist groups against them.
And beyond all these security issues and the factionalization of political forces and militant groups, two big issues remain: refugees and the economic situation. At least 14 million Syrians have been forced to leave their homes since the war began; about half are internally displaced, and the rest have taken refuge in the surrounding countries- which find it increasing difficult to support them and would like them gone- and in the West. Most of those refugees will have to return home, and here comes the second problem: what are they going to return to? The civil war has been devastating (and adding to that were the effects of the 2023 earthquake) and Syria's economy is down to its knees; in recent years, Bashar al-Assad's regime, in order to manage to stay afloat, has turned the country into a narco-state that lives off the production and export of drugs in the region.
The future of Syria and the entire region therefore remains unclear. The only certainty is that Iran and Russia have suffered a serious blow from the collapse of the bloodiest and longest-running dictatorial regime in the Middle East, which they brutally supported for years, but ultimately abandoned.
---copie-image.webp)
