The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 came as a surprise to most observers, although the government in Damascus had long been ailing and was only able to survive thanks to Russian and Iranian support.
Recently, however, there has been movement in the deadlocked fronts: the Arab states seemed to have resigned themselves to the survival of the regime and talks were held with Turkey immediately before the fall of the regime. Some observers see these – otherwise fruitless – talks as the catalyst for the start of the offensive by the “Syrian Liberation Movement” (HTS), which feared being abandoned by Turkey. The rapid success of the offensive is due in equal parts to the lack of resistance from the Syrian army and the good coordination of the HTS with other radical Sunni and jihadist groups. With the takeover of Damascus by a jihadist group, namely HTS, which emerged from the Nusra Front, i.e. Al-Qaeda, the strategic landscape of the Middle East is changing fundamentally.
The previous geopolitical order was based on Syria’s identity as a secular frontline state against Israel, led by an authoritarian party whose ideology was Arab socialism. In reality, this system had degenerated into the family rule of the Alawite Assad clan, which ruled the country in coordination with other influential families and regional groups. Until the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the regime was in ideological and regional political competition with Iraq, which explains the alliance with Iran.
This alliance was also useful to the Syrians against Turkey. Damascus traditionally laid claim to the Turkish province of İskenderun. From the 1980s until 1998, the Syrians openly supported the PKK, among other things to undermine Turkish dam projects in south-eastern Anatolia. The Arab Spring quickly turned into an identity and religious conflict in Syria because the regime took all minorities hostage: either they support the run-down regime or they fall victim to the wrath of the radical jihadist Sunni opposition. International support from Christian Russia and Shiite Iran exacerbated the religious-identitarian component of the conflict.
For Iran, Syria was the linchpin of the so-called “resistance axis” from the 1990s onwards, with which the Iranians wanted to coordinate ideologically different groups and states, such as the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Palestinian Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Syrian regime, on a common anti-Israeli basis. From the 2000s onwards, this loose alliance served above all to project Iranian power in the region and was thus an instrument of the Iranian power struggle with Saudi Arabia.
“International observers assume that the Israelis succeeded in taking out the entire Iranian air defense system with the last attack in autumn 2024.”
With the formation of the Shiite militias in Iraq, which fought against the Islamic State, and Iranian contact with the Houthis in Yemen, two further powerful elements were added to the axis of resistance. Tensions with Saudi Arabia were defused in 2022, while relations with the United Arab Emirates also normalized. On the other hand, tensions between Iran and Israel escalated after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which was not agreed with the Iranians but approved by Supreme Leader Khamenei.
In the following months, the Israelis killed important partners of the Iranians, including the entire leadership of Lebanese Hezbollah in Beirut and southern Lebanon, senior Iraqi militia leaders and generals of the Revolutionary Guard in Damascus and even the chairman of Hamas, who was in Tehran as a state guest. At around the same time, there were reciprocal missile attacks, which, in terms of casualties, were relatively mild.
International observers assume that the Israelis succeeded in taking out the entire Iranian air defense system with the last attack in autumn 2024. This permanently weakened Iran’s national defense and, with the fall of the Assad regime, Iran’s regional position. Tehran now has few options in Syria and Lebanon, especially as it must be expected that the pressure on Hezbollah in Lebanon will be increased to the point of military force. Although Iran should not be written off as a regional power for the time being, Tehran is in a much weaker position than it was a few months ago.
The loss of Syria as a strategic partner is also a defeat for Russia, but it weighs less heavily because Moscow’s war in Ukraine (-> current news from the Ukraine war), while Iran’s entire strategic disposition depended on the resistance axis. Moreover, Moscow was able to prove its loyalty to the alliance by bringing the Assad family safely to Moscow.
This gesture was noted attentively in the Middle East and contrasted with American behavior in Afghanistan. Moscow’s propaganda portrayed Russia’s previous involvement on the side of the Assad clan as a protective operation for “tolerant”, multi-religious Syria. Russian public relations work was aimed at conservative Christian circles in Russia and Europe.
This image had little to do with reality. Russia’s military presence served to protect the regime and, if at all, only indirectly to protect the minorities. Above all, however, it was essential for the Russian projection of power in Africa. Where the population was actually protected on the ground, for example by setting up deconfliction zones, this was done by Ramazan Kadirov’s Chechens, who were deployed as “Russian” military police. They were accepted as Muslims by the Syrian population and were able to establish contacts with the Chechen and other Caucasian ethnic groups that had settled in northern Syria during the Ottoman period without any problems.
The deterioration in Russian-European relations caused by the war in Ukraine not only led to the revaluation of the BRICS (-> Commentary: Should we be afraid of BRICS+?) and other formats, but also to the greater importance of Islamic states for Russian foreign policy. Despite Turkish arms deliveries to Ukraine, Putin accepted Ankara’s mediation in the grain agreement and Moscow also intensified its contacts with the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, where the Russians are respected discussion and trading partners. The fact that the last BRICS meeting took place in Kazan, Tatarstan, is just as much proof of Russia’s growing Muslim component as the greater independence Moscow has granted Ramazan Kadirov in shaping its contacts with Islamic states, particularly the (influential) wealthy Gulf Arabs.
The increasing importance of Kadirov’s Chechens became clear in August 2024, when Putin, as Russian president, kissed a Koran in a newly opened mosque in Chechnya. Just a few years earlier, he had pompously staged himself as an Orthodox Christian. It therefore comes as no surprise when Kadirov emphasizes his good relations with the new Syrian regime and promises to continue to promote Russian interests in the Middle East. For example, negotiations are currently underway on the continued Russian use of Khmeimin airport, which has become a point of refuge and hope for thousands of persecuted people in the wake of the recent massacres of Christians and Alawites.
Turkey is the clear winner of the change of power in Syria. Traditionally, Ankara has pursued a policy of containment towards Damascus dominated by the Kurdish question. After the phase of open support for the PKK by the Syrians, which ended in 1998, a new chapter began in the course of the Arab Spring. At that time, the Syrian PKK offshoots reorganized themselves when other Kurdish groups were able to assert themselves by uniting several areas in the north-east of the country to form the self-governing region of “Rojava” (West).
The Syrian offshoots of the PKK demonstrated their military and organizational capabilities in 2014 in the course of the fight against the Islamic State in the battle for Kobane and in the evacuation of the Yazidis from the Sinjar Mountains on the Iraqi-Syrian border. These events coincided with the Turkish government’s negotiations with the PKK between 2013 and 2016 and thus became a dominant issue in Turkish domestic politics. Ankara rejects the creation of a Kurdish entity on its southern border as a matter of principle and refused to cooperate with the USA, which wanted to take joint action with Turkey against IS. According to Turkish logic, this would only be possible if IS and the PKK were fought in equal measure. When the USA then united the Kurdish militias with Arab tribal organizations to form the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) and militarily upgraded them to fight against IS in Arab areas such as Raqqa, Turkey further expanded its network of Sunni jihadist groups in the north-east of the country, especially in the Idlib region.
In 2018, a coalition of various Syrian and international jihadists captured the predominantly Kurdish government district of Afrin. In the years that followed, a delicate balance was struck between the USA, Turkey and Russia. Ankara was able to expand its influence among Syrian and foreign jihadists and use it as leverage against both the Syrian regime and the Kurds when necessary. This became clear immediately after the fall of Damascus in December 2024, when groups allied with Turkey attacked Rojava several times without success.
Turkey’s influence on the new regime is undoubtedly extraordinary, but the question of how deeply Ankara intervenes in operational processes remains unclear. While direct support from Ankara can be assumed in the most recent attacks by Syrian jihadists on the Kurdish entity Rojava, which Turkey classifies as a security risk, this seems less likely in the case of attacks on the Syrian Alawites in the coastal region. These attacks escalated into systematic massacres or pogroms with over a thousand deaths, which also claimed the lives of Christians and evoked bad memories among the (Turkish and Kurdish) Alawites and (Arab) Alawites in Turkey: after all, they were regularly murdered and massacred in Turkey in the 20th century, and Alawite circles point to the ideological consonance between the AKP and the new rulers in Syria.
In contrast to the USA, which has sharply criticized the massacres, the Europeans appear to accept the image painted by Ankara of the new Syrian leadership as “moderate Islam”. The Turks also mediated the new head of government Ahmad al-Sharaa’s contacts with Western media and politicians and were probably also responsible for coaching his appearances in the West. The extent of Ankara’s influence on the new government was symbolically demonstrated by the visits of Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and intelligence chief İbrahim Kalın to Damascus and the first state visit of the new Syrian head of government to Ankara.
“The Turkish influence on the new regime is undoubtedly extraordinary, but the question of how deeply Ankara is intervening in operational processes remains unclear.”
Finally, the Turks achieved their main goal of maintaining pressure on Rojava. After Öcalan’s surprising declaration to the PKK to lay down their arms, which was published at Turkey’s request, the Syrian Kurds signed an agreement with the interim head of government Ahmad al-Sharaa, which Ankara can rightly claim as a success. In general, Turkish officials are very satisfied with the situation in Syria. Ankara has been able to expand its economic influence in the region and, for the first time since the end of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish influence extends directly to Damascus and beyond.
Israel undoubtedly benefits most from the new situation in Syria. Without Syria, it is almost impossible for Tehran to directly support Hezbollah and other allies with weapons, equipment and expertise or to deploy Shiite militias from Iraq in the vicinity of Israel.
The weakness of the Syrian state was immediately exploited by the Israelis to disable the strategic weapons systems of the arch-enemy (air defense, missile boats, …). In addition, the Israelis expanded their buffer zone along the Golan Heights, including the strategically important Mount Hermon. In the same breath, the Israelis declared the 1974 border agreement with Syria null and void. Subsequently, they declared their intention to establish a 15-kilometer zone of control and a 60-kilometer zone of influence. This plan was criticized even by Israel’s partners such as the Emirates. However, Israel justifies its actions with its willingness to protect the Syrian Druze, among other things. Their representatives initially condemned Israel’s invasion as a violation of Syrian sovereignty. At the same time, however, they formed a military council to defend themselves against attacks by the jihadists.
Israel insists on a demilitarized zone in southern Syria, wants to maintain contacts with the Syrian Druze and prevent Iranian arms smuggling and the establishment of Iranian-backed resistance groups in the region in good time. Above all, however, the Israelis are against recognizing and rehabilitating the new Syrian rulers, whom they, unlike the Europeans, correctly describe as extremists from the Al-Qaeda tradition. In this sense, the Israelis are in favor of the Russians remaining in Syria.
“Israel undoubtedly benefits most from the new situation in Syria. Without Syria, it is almost impossible for Tehran to directly support Hezbollah and other allies with weapons, equipment and expertise or to deploy Shiite militias from Iraq in the vicinity of Israel.”
The fragmentation of Syria into different zones of influence with foreign sponsors that many feared has come to pass. Israel controls the south and supports the Druze, the USA controls the north-west with the Kurds and Turkey supports the new regime. The massacres of the Alawites can therefore also be seen as the result of a kind of “Lebanization”, where the group that has no foreign protecting power behind it falls victim to the revenge of the victors.
Ideologically, the new regime is in the tradition of al-Qaeda and similar groups. Interim President Ahmad Hussein al-Sharaa, known as Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, has promised an inclusive Syria, but it is questionable to what extent he will be able to prevail militarily and politically against other jihadists. The massacres of the Alawites have shown that the political and military costs of putting a stop to these activities are too high for the government in Damascus. In the Sunni population, sympathy for the Alawites, who are held responsible for the Assad regime, is limited anyway. Syria needs international economic aid and investment, which is probably why Al-Sharaa, who comes from a middle-class Damascus background, presented himself as a moderate and pragmatic politician. Al-Sharaa must soon take a stand against the presence of Israel and implement the agreement signed with Mazlum Abdi. The agreement contains sensible points such as the recognition and integration of the Kurds into the state, an immediate ceasefire, the return of refugees and their protection, while at the same time the Kurds must relinquish their control over the strategic infrastructure and dissolve their self-administration. No binding security guarantees or protection or mediation mechanisms are envisaged.
At least both sides have given themselves some breathing space, as implementation is due to take place by the end of the year. Until then, we will see how the two sides envisage the implementation of the agreement. After more than a decade of Rojava, it will be difficult for the Kurds to integrate into the Syrian central state without further ado, while the Syrian side will reject any demand for federalization of the country, as desired by the Kurds and Druze.
