Assad Falls (Hard Questions, Tough Answers- December 9, 2024)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. A rebel coalition has taken over large swaths of Syrian territory including the capital, Damascus. The rebels are mainly Islamist and are backed by Turkey. President Bashar Assad has fled and the Syrian army has collapsed. Iranian and Russian allied forces have abandoned the regime. What does this mean for Israel, the region, and the world?

A. Once again, and not surprisingly, events are not unfolding as expected in the Middle East. Israel’s battlefield achievements in Lebanon and against Iran appear to have ended up, in neighboring Syria, weakening some actors and empowering others in a manner anticipated by almost none.

This is a major strategic and intelligence surprise on all fronts--for all parties, Israel included, with the sole exception of Turkey. One obvious interim conclusion at the intelligence level is that the degree of Syrian military dependency on Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian forces, meaning the inherent weakness of the Assad regime, was vastly underestimated by not only Israel but practically everyone else.

The rebels are led by Hayat Tahrir a-Sham, an offshoot of al-Qaeda that survived the years since the Qaeda defeat in Iraq and Syria by sheltering in the northwest corner of Syria under the auspices of Turkiye, which is led by the Erdogan government with its Islamist leanings. But the rebel coalition includes non-Islamist Arabs as well as non-Arabs: Kurds and Druze.

The dust has not even begun to settle yet, so this is a very preliminary assessment of the strategic consequences for Israel and for additional regional and global actors.

Q. Let’s start with the Israel-Hezbollah-Syria-Iran dynamic . . .

A. In the course of recent months, Israel inflicted heavy losses on Hezbollah as well as its patron, Iran. This had the effect of weakening the Assad regime in Syria, which Iran and Hezbollah had been supporting in its conflicts with Syrian Islamists and Kurds. And while Bashar Assad was no friend of Israel and the Iranian and Iranian-proxy presence in Syria was seen as a threat, the specter of resurgent Islamists setting up shop in Damascus is hardly welcomed by Jerusalem.

Under prevailing geostrategic circumstances, there is no ideal neighbor for Israel across the Golan border with Syria. Israel confronts the reality of its battlefield accomplishments in southern Lebanon contributing to a dangerous destabilization in Syria and a possible Islamist threat on Israel’s northern border with Syria. This is particularly worrisome insofar as those same battlefield accomplishments against Hezbollah will not necessarily lead to a stable ceasefire on the northern border with Lebanon.

Not necessarily, yet with Hezbollah weakened and no longer supported by an Iranian arms pipeline via Syria, the balance of power within Lebanon is changing. Admittedly, Lebanon is a largely dysfunctional state. But if relatively moderate Lebanese actors--Christians, Sunni Muslims, Druze, moderate Shiites--now even begin to get their political act together, Israel may be able to contemplate a more tranquil Lebanon border and even genuine cooperation in the maritime gas sector.

On the other hand, a resurgent Sunni Islamist Syria could seek to empower Lebanon’s Sunnis or to reassert hegemony in Lebanon. In other words, too many options are opening up to be able to project the future course of Syrian-Lebanese and Israeli-Lebanese relations.

At the very least, a million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, a similar number in Jordan, and several million in Turkiye--another Erdogan concern--may now go home. On the eve of this revolution, roughly a third of all Syrians were refugees or internally displaced.

Q. And within Syria?

A. Remember Caesar? “Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est”: ‘All Gall is divided into three parts’, the opening sentence of The Gallic Wars. (Well, you’ll remember only if you’re old enough to have studied Latin.) The notion of fragmented countries brings Syria to mind.

At the heart of the Levant, Syria is divided territorially among US-backed Kurds in the northeast, a Sunni Arab majority in the center, Alawites along the Mediterranean coast, Druze in the south around Suweida near both Jordan and Israel, and important contingents of Christians, Ismailis and Shiites. Iraq, Libya and especially Lebanon are also badly fragmented ethnically, but Syria is in the worst shape. At the time of his demise, Bashar Assad ruled over less than 70 percent of his country.

The Assad clan, Alawites, ruled for 57 years by coopting the Sunnis economically, bringing the other minorities into the armed forces and, once confronted by Sunni Islamists and additional rebels in 2011, falling back on Russian, Iranian and (Iranian-proxy) Lebanese Hezbollah forces. This was a mafia-family regime and a major Middle East drug manufacturer and smuggler. Hafez the father and Bashar the son each murdered hundreds of thousands of their own citizens, some by using lethal gas. Good riddance!

Now the Sunni majority has retaken power. But these are primarily Sunni Islamists, not the Sunni merchants who in past centuries made the Levant a trading center. At least for now, the rebels’ 42-year-old leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, projects an enlightened image on CNN.

How will the Sunni merchants respond? How will the new regime treat Syria’s minorities, especially Assad’s Alawites who oppressed so many Syrians? And how will the minorities react? Then there are Syria’s Arab Muslim neighbors in Jordan and Iraq, who fear a Sunni Islamist neighbor and a domino effect.

One way or another, there will now be hostile Syrian forces near Israel’s border. The IDF is already digging a deep boundary trench. It has stepped up the ‘Campaign between Wars’ bombing of Assad’s chemical and additional strategic weapons stockpiles lest they fall into Islamist hands.

The IDF could potentially be drawn into Syrian territory. It has already quickly occupied no-man’s land east of the Golan border. It has grabbed the highest Hermon peak, which dominates Syria to the east. All this makes sense at least until the dust settles.

But Israel learned a bitter lesson in 1982 in Lebanon about meddling in its neighbors’ domestic affairs. The Netanyahu government will hopefully now apply this lesson to Syria. Meanwhile, with its prominent Druze minority, Israel is concerned for the fate of fellow Druze in and around Al-Suwayda on the Syria-Jordan border.

Q. Bottom line?

A. An incredible and totally unanticipated chain of events has just transpired in the heart of the Middle East. Looked at through the (admittedly simplistic) lens of chaos theory, the beating of the butterfly’s wings that set this off was Netanyahu’s ‘judicial reform’ initiative of January 2023. The angry response of leading sectors of the Israeli public, who saw this as an attempt to dismantle Israeli democracy, and Netanyahu’s persistence, were seen by Israel’s Iran-led Islamist enemies as a sign of historic weakness of the Zionist enterprise. They attacked.

The IDF, caught on October 7, 2023 with its guard down, recovered, fought back and, in recent months, defeated the Islamists--particularly the Iranians and Iran-led Shiites in Lebanon who had been the mainstay of the Assad regime in Syria. Iran was now weak; so, incidentally, was Russia thanks to its Ukraine adventure. Together with Iran, Russia had sustained the Assad regime and rescued it from its ‘Arab Spring’ revolution. Now Assad’s Sunni Islamist enemies, led by a remnant of al-Qaeda and egged on by the Erdogan-led Islamist government in neighboring Turkey, sensed Assad’s isolation and attacked. Iranian and Russian support forces disappeared. The Assad regime and its army collapsed.

Israel may well have exchanged its Shiite Islamist enemies (Iran, Hezbollah, proxies in Yemen and Iraq) for Sunni Islamist enemies--the remnant of al-Qaeda that led a hodge-podge of anti-regime forces against Assad in Syria and that now sits on Israel’s Golan border. How the new Syrian regime will behave is impossible to say. Syria is full of dissident minorities, some of which could conceivably make common cause with Israel or with factions in Lebanon and all of which will now have to be either ‘managed’ or subdued by the new regime.

The IDF has provided humanitarian aid to warring Syrian factions in the past. This may again become advantageous in the future.

Q. Are there any state winners and losers here?

A. Turkiye appears to be a winner. It has installed a friendly regime in Damascus, one that presumably will now confront and weaken the Kurds who have developed autonomy along the Syrian border with Turkiye and tend to incite Turkiye’s large Kurdish minority. Still, it is not known whether Hayat Tahrir and Turkiye share the same end-goal for Syria. It is very possible that Erdogan simply wanted to set in motion a process that allows him to clear his eastern border with Syria of Kurdish dissidents and to return millions of Syrian refugees to Syrian soil.

Iran is clearly a loser, a development over which few in the region, Israel included, are shedding tears. Iran’s proxy, Lebanese Hezbollah, has now lost not only in Lebanon; its own expeditionary force helping Assad in Syria has fled. The vaunted ‘Shiite Crescent’ Iran created, linking Tehran via Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut--for years the focus of Israel’s ‘Campaign between Wars’--is, thankfully, in tatters.

The United States, incidentally, must tentatively be listed in the loser column. Its small but strategically-located forces stationed in Tanf near Syria’s borders with Iraq and Jordan and in eastern Syria, supporting Kurdish and other non-Islamist anti-Assad forces, will now be challenged by Syria’s new Islamist regime. Recall: Syria’s new rulers are a reemerging remnant of al-Qaeda and ISIS, the sworn enemies of the United States, which a US-led coalition once defeated. ISIS prisoners are still held by the Kurds and others in the eastern Syrian desert.

US forces have already bombed residual ISIS forces in eastern Syria to keep them from joining the victorious rebels. But the Biden administration has also reached out to the prospective new regime to test its declared moderation. In contrast, President-elect Trump professes to evince indifference to Syria’s fate right now. He should beware lest the new Syria ends up challenging American interests.

Russia has ‘lost’ Syria, its Middle East stronghold and a warm-water port. Will the new regime in Damascus now expel Moscow from its bases on the Syrian Mediterranean coast? Or will it seek accommodation?

Israel, tentatively, is a winner. The Iranian and Iranian-proxy threat has been significantly weakened. Al-Qaeda redux along the border is not nearly as bad. Meanwhile, there still is no resolution of Israel’s conflict in Gaza and, despite intensive US, Egyptian and Qatari efforts, no hostage release. Hamas may bear much of the blame, but the very same counter-functional Netanyahu government that indirectly helped launch the chaos in Syria is also a primary cause.

Sunni Islamist Hamas could now conceivably draw encouragement from the Sunni Islamist victory in Syria. Then too, events in Syria pose the prospect of new grand-strategic regional developments that could divert Israel’s immediate attention. Still, it is most likely that Hamas now feels more isolated than ever, hence more inclined to do a hostage-for-ceasefire deal with Israel.