When one door closes, another one opens. Just as the yearlong war between Israel and Hezbollah came to a close when the two sides reached a ceasefire agreement last week, a new front in the Middle East conflict opened up in Syria. The two events are connected.
The dormant, 13-year-old Syrian civil war was reignited when antigovernment fighters opposed to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime launched a surprise offensive on Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo.
Syrian army forces loyal to the government, which had been in control of most of the country’s territory since 2017-18 thanks to Iranian and Russian support, were routed, while Iran and Russia were caught off-guard and failed to offer resistance to the rebel advance.
Led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (aka HTS), a Sunni Islamist group with Al-Qaeda ties occasionally backed by Turkey, the insurgents swept through the northwest of the country, forcing Assad’s troops to retreat from Aleppo in a matter of days before advancing south into Hama province, roughly 200km from the capital of Damascus.
The most significant territorial change in nearly a decade, Aleppo’s capture is a blow not just to Assad’s regime but also to Iran and Russia’s positions in Syria. Even if government forces manage to halt the rebel advance, they will need substantial external support to retake the lost territory.
Aleppo itself — with all its significance as Syria’s biggest pre-war city and commercial centre, a major Iranian military and economic hub, and a symbol of Russia’s influence in the country — looks set to remain outside the government’s grip for the foreseeable future.
While HTS had reportedly been planning this operation for months on account of local dynamics, shifting global geopolitics made this an especially opportune time for Syria’s opposition to strike.
Israel’s destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon and its degradation of Iran’s proxy network in Syria and elsewhere over the last few months had weakened Assad and drained his ally Tehran of resources.
Support from Assad’s other patron, Russia, had been strained not only by the three-year-long war in Ukraine but now also by the frantic effort to take as much land as possible before US President-elect Donald Trump tries to force a ceasefire after January 20.
In hindsight, it should have come as no surprise that the rebels chose this moment to pounce, taking advantage of Assad’s backers’ distraction and exhaustion and — by extension — the regime’s unique vulnerability.
But as weak as the Syrian strongman is, the fighting is unlikely to topple his regime. Assad is too important an ally for Iran and Russia to let him fall.
Though the resources it can devote to Syria are limited by Western sanctions and the prospect of having to rebuild Hezbollah, Tehran wants to avoid another major loss of an Axis of Resistance member and will ramp up support to prop up Assad.
Look to Iran to intervene with personnel, as it has already done by deploying Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp-aligned militia fighters from Iraq.
For its part, Moscow is keen to maintain its access to military bases in the country and avoid a humiliating foreign policy failure, so despite being stretched in Ukraine, it will continue to back Assad’s forces with increased air strikes and new military hardware.
In fact, no major regional actor — including those that benefit from a weaker Assad — wants to see the Syrian strongman violently ousted at this point. Israel, for instance, is happy to see another Iranian ally pummeled and Hezbollah’s supply lines in Syria disrupted.
However, it is wary of a vacuum of power along its borders that would threaten its own safety. A controlled rebel advance that forces Tehran to divert its attention and resources to Syria but stops short of overthrowing Assad and threatening Israeli national security seems like the optimal outcome.
Continued fighting in Syria would also help preserve the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon, as neither Iran nor Hezbollah will want to reopen that front as long as their ally is on the ropes.
Even Turkey, which has often supported HTS and other antigovernment militias, is uninterested in a regime collapse. Though Ankara stands to gain regional influence from both the current fighting and the void left by Iran’s diminished presence in the Levant, Assad’s downfall would destabilise its neighbourhood, ignite another refugee crisis, and risk direct military confrontation between Turkey and Russia.
For President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the happy medium is a controlled offensive that gives him the upper hand in dictating the terms of Ankara-Damascus normalisation as well as any ultimate settlement in Syria.
Assad defied the odds when former US president Barack Obama said that he “must go” nine years ago, and he is likely to do so again now.
But the renewal of fighting in Syria should serve as a stark reminder that at a time when the world’s leadership vacuum — what I call the “geopolitical recession” — is only growing, events in oft-forgotten places like Ukraine and Gaza can echo far beyond their borders and into the future.
• Bremmer ( @ianbremmer) is president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media.
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