At first glance, the international winners and losers following the overthrow of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad are obvious enough. The US, Israel and Turkey come out ahead because their long-term enemy in Damascus has lost power, while his traditional supporters – Russia, Iran and Hezbollah – have seen a crucial ally defeated.
This tally is accurate enough, but all the players in the Middle East political chess game are in a state of shock after an important piece, in the shape of Assad, has unexpectedly disappeared from the board.
Is Syria finished as a unified nation state? And, if not, who will be in charge and what will their policies be?
Israel is an obvious beneficiary from the fall of Assad and a weakened Syria, a country which, not so long ago, was a potent military adversary. Yet last weekend, Israeli ground forces advanced without resistance beyond the demilitarised zone on the Syrian-Israeli border into Syrian territory, taking over the Syrian-held part of the summit of Mount Hermon.
Meanwhile, Israeli air strikes range all over Syria, from Tartus and Latakia on the Mediterranean to the outskirts of Damascus, destroying the heavy weapons of a Syrian army that has just disintegrated.
Israel can claim a crucial role in the fall of Assad because it was its open war against Hezbollah since September, combined with its attacks on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria, that deprived Assad of help from two of his most important allies. Israel now has an uncontested regional dominance it has never possessed in the past, able to make air strikes everywhere from Yemen to Iran.
This could not have happened without unconditional support from President Joe Biden, but US backing might be even greater with President Donald Trump back in the White House. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might feel in a few months that Trump will allow him to expel Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, and formally annex the West Bank.
Yet the undiluted nature of Israeli success can be exaggerated and, in some respects, Israel, despite its recent military successes, is a more insecure and uncertain place today than it was 18 months ago.
If the purpose of the Hamas raid into Israel on 7 October 2023 was to destroy a political status quo in the Middle East unacceptable to Palestinians, then it was a wild success. Israel may have shattered Iran’s much-vaunted “Axis of Resistance” against Israel, but this grouping never did much between 2006 and 2023. Degrading it is not the game-changer that some imagine.
The US, Israel and the rest of the world face the same dilemma, which is that they do not know who or what will replace Assad in Damascus. Wishful thinking abounds.
Supposedly, Abou Mohammed al-Golani, along with the former al-Qaeda affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have converted since 2016 into pluralists, tolerant of Syria’s religious and ethnic diversity. Golani said all the right things about abjuring revenge and respecting the religion of others while he was on the road to Damascus, but speaking in the great Umayyad Mosque he spoke critically about “Shia Iranians”, frightening Syrian Alawites, who belong to a branch of Shi’ism and were formerly the ruling elite. Some are already in flight.
It is not every day that Western states cautiously welcome into power a man and a movement they had formerly labelled as “terrorists”. They may also gulp a bit when they hear that the Taliban in Afghanistan has also congratulated them for having the correct “Islamic values”.
Moreover, Golani was not first radicalised by Assad’s atrocities, but by the Palestinian second intifada in 2000. “I was 17 or 18 years old at the time, and I started thinking about how I could fulfil my duties, defending a people who are oppressed by occupiers and invaders,” he is quoted as saying in an interview in 2021.
He went to Baghdad in 2003 to fight against the American invasion and occupation, becoming a member of al-Qaeda until he was detained and imprisoned in Camp Bucca, the US-run prison camp close to the Kuwait border.
Turkey is the other country in the Middle East that benefits most from the victory of HTS, playing a substantial, though somewhat uncertain, role in organising it. It was Turkey that sustained the Idlib opposition enclave, refuge to three million people on the Syrian side of the Turkish frontier. Turkey greenlighted the HTS offensive, but apparently saw it as a way of putting pressure on Assad to have a dialogue with the opposition and to get him to stop bombing Idlib. Ankara was astonished by the swift unravelling of the regime.
But Turkey had a further objective, which was to drive back the Syrian Kurds, numbering two or three million, from Aleppo province, west of the Euphrates and – in the longer term – to destroy their US-protected quasi-state in northeast Syria.
This military campaign is barely reported in the media, but it has already produced bloody clashes and forced thousands of Kurdish refugees to flee. The Turkish-controlled Syrian militia, the Syrian National Army, has captured the Kurdish-controlled, though predominantly Arab, city of Manbij in fighting in which 50 died, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It says that 11 members of the same family, including six children, were killed by a Turkish drone.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will draw a domestic political benefit from the fall of Assad, since some of the three million Syrian refugees in Turkey can begin to go home. What is less clear is how far Turkey will want to develop into a greater regional power by making itself the protector of a new Syria.
As for the losers in the political earthquake in Syria, Russia and Iran will downplay their losses, blame everything that went wrong on Assad’s wrongheadedness – and seek to fish in troubled waters. Hezbollah, badly damaged in its war with Israel and now with its supply route to Iran cut, is in far deeper trouble.
Syria will probably stay as the arena where foreign powers fight each other through local proxies – and Syrians will be their victims.
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