The fall of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, with the president, in power since 2000, fleeing to Moscow, took international chancelleries by surprise. The conflict had appeared frozen since 2020, the year of the last Russian-Turkish agreements, which marked a de facto partition of spheres of influence and territorial control in the country. Since 2023, a normalisation of relations between Damascus and the Arab capitals had been underway, to the point that just a few days before the offensive, unleashed by Islamist rebel militias supported by Turkey and Qatar, the Syrian presidency had been a guest at an. Arab League conference in Riyadh.
The “death knell” of Doha
The astonishment of analysts and commentators at the sudden collapse of the regime was accompanied by widespread disquiet, summed up in the formula of “catastrophic success” evoked by David Ignatius, columnist of The Washington Post and close to American intelligence circles. As soon as Islamist militias, with links to both Al-Qaeda and ISIS, entered the conflict, Washington, which had supported and armed various factions of the Syrian opposition (on par with Paris and London), feared that Damascus would fall into the hands of fundamentalist forces.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, “Organisation for the Liberation of Syria”) the main militia that led the offensive, barely countered by the Syrian armed forces — derives from the Al-Nusra group, active in Syria since 2012 and, until 2016, linked to Al-Qaeda. Since 2018, HTS has been among the Sunni formations controlling the Idlib region in the north-west of the country, where the Assad regime, backed by Russian air forces and pro-Iranian militias, had repelled and “cantonised” rebel forces. As various reports imply, the limited resistance encountered by the Islamist offensive was favoured by preventive agreements with sections of the armed forces, local communities, fractions of the Sunni bourgeoisie, and those of other minorities, including the Alawites from which the Assad dynasty emerged.
It is also an effect of the country’s exhaustion after thirteen years of bloody civil war, in which numerous regional and world powers participated, either directly or by proxy. Nevertheless, as both Avvenire and Le Figaro noted, the decisive factor was “the death knell” for the regime “sounded at the Doha conference”, an emergency meeting held on December 7th between Turkey, Russia, and Iran. The trilateral assembly, hosted by Qatar, the fourth de facto invitee, was held in parallel with a summit conference of the Arab countries in the region. We may read in the latter a way for the Arab powers to influence the revision of the “Astana agreements” that since 2016 had defined the modus vivendi of the three non-Arab countries engaged in the Syrian power game.
Turkish guarantees and the Syrian “poisoned cup”
According to Ghassan Charbel, editor of the Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat, which is close to the monarchy, Ankara might, by offering guarantees, have persuaded both Moscow and Tehran to renounce their military support to Assad and resign themselves to drinking the “poisoned cup” of his fall. This is a figure of speech with significant resonance in the region, especially when referring to Tehran. Imam Khomeini used it to give his assent to the end of the ten-year conflict with Iraq [1980-88], which cost the lives of almost a million victims, about two-thirds of whom were Iranians. This was a painful but realistic decision in the face of the military stalemate. Indeed, the beginning of the close ties between Iran and Assad’s Syria dates back to the conflict between Tehran and Baghdad, which since the late 1960s has been the second traditional adversary of Damascus, after Israel, on the regional chessboard. Today, the expansion of the war in Gaza to Lebanon and even to Syrian territory, involving direct missile exchanges between Tel Aviv and Tehran, could have weakened the ability of the Hezbollah militias to provide military support to Damascus. Hezbollah was decisive in turning the tide of the conflict in 2015-16, particularly in the battle for Aleppo, in combination with Moscow’s air force and missile arsenal. The latter is said to be now absorbed by the
Ukrainian conflict, For Charbel, Ankara might have assumed the role of guarantor for the security of Russian military personnel in Syria. According to Le Monde, the complex and intertwined. relationship between Moscow and Ankara is a dynamic of rivalry and convergence of interests. Russian diplomacy, for its part, is said to have worked to foster “a peaceful transition of powers” in Damascus, in which Assad resigned from office and transferred powers to his prime minister, who in turn transferred them to HTS members.
For some observers, Moscow intervened in Syria in September 2015 after reaching a confidential agreement with Ankara, defined in August between Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [Fabrice Balanche, Les leçons de la crise syrienne, 2024]. Russia’s intervention was also based on the military treaty signed between the USSR and Syria in 1971, with the concession of the Tartus naval base. For both Ankara and Moscow, it seems important to avoid a Syrian repeat of the 2003 Iraqi scenario, when the State apparatus collapsed after the American occupation. This concern also seemed to be close to the heart of the Islamist militias, which deployed forces to protect the Central Bank of Damascus and other institutional sites.
Maher Marwan, appointed governor of Damascus by HTS, emphasised that the new Syrian regime is also seeking “good relations with Russia, which was our enemy for a while”.
Iranian checkmate in Beirut and Damascus
It is still unclear what guarantees Ankara could have offered to Tehran, whose influence in the Levant is currently far more undermined than Moscow’s. Russia used the Syrian war to reenter the regional game at a relatively low cost. The conflict, on the other hand, had allowed Tehran to consolidate the “Shiite corridor” from the Gulf to Beirut and strengthen the “belt of fire”, made up of militias and missiles, as an instrument of deterrence against Israel. This instrument has been weakened in recent months by Tel Aviv’s air offensive against Hezbollah and the elimination of its main leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
It is not implausible that Ankara offered guarantees on protecting the Shia population in Syria, as well as on ensuring that the new government in Damascus will not support the local Sunni minorities in Iraq, a recruitment pool and source of funding for ISIS militias still present in the East of Syria. Tehran may also have chosen to retreat after considering its own overextension. The pro-dialogue positions of the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian presidency and some of the conservative currents may also have weighed in. It remains to be seen if Iranian diplomacy will continue to alternate between negotiation and “warlike gestures”.
Rehearsal for an Islamic-nationalist turn?
At present, assessing winners and losers in the Syrian situation seems a premature exercise, as Michel Duclos, former French ambassador to Syria, shrewdly points out. At the level of local actors, Kurdish militias are among the main losers: in Syria’s political earthquake, they find themselves directly exposed to Turkey’s willingness to fragment their territorial presence and even to place them under protection from a position of strength.
Among regional and international actors, Iran emerges weakened. However, for Duclos, the crisis that followed the war in Gaza has had “the paradoxical result” of making, also thanks to Chinese mediations, “the Saudis and Emiratis [Tehran’s] new friends, more useful in reality than a cumbersome bloodthirsty dictator, unpopular among Iranian people”. For Putin, the events in Syria may represent “a major symbolic defeat”, but “a cost-benefit evaluation” seems to have prevailed in Moscow, and it is likely that Russia “will be able to negotiate with the newcomers in Damascus”. Turkey scores several points, but its Islamist ally in Damascus, Muhammad al-Golani, now that he is putting on “the mantle of a national leader”, may prove to be “less than docile”. Israel seizes an “important symbolic victory”, but also sees the “inoffensive” power of Assad supplanted by “a potentially radical Islamist power”. For Duclos, Tel Aviv’s preventive measures — the destruction of part of the Syrian army’s military arsenal and the occupation of the buffer zone that has existed on the Golan Heights since 1974 — risk translating into a “self-fulfilling prophecy”, perpetuating the Syrian-Israeli conflict even with the new regime.
Al-Golani (literally “the one from the Golan”) has swapped his jihadist attire for military uniform, or even the less formal businessman’s grisaille suit, and reverted to using his civilian name, Ahmed al-Shaara. For Duclos, the choice of this name is perhaps a reference to his belonging to a large Sunni clan in the Deera region, even though al-Golani was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. For Syrian affairs expert Fabrice Balanche, as leader of HTS, al-Golani allegedly rejected in 2014 the subordination of his organisation to the ISIS caliphate of al-Baghdadi, requesting the mediation of Osama Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was killed by the US in Afghanistan in 2022.
The latter had supported al-Golani’s line, directed against the Assad regime, of making Syria a “priority” for the jihad. Since 2016, the conflict between the two organisations has assumed the dimension of a military clash and, later, involved the co-opting of the remainders of ISIS in the canton of Idlib.
The Turkish press uses the term “socialisation” for the adoption of the Turkish model in Idlib, operated in connection with Ankara’s services and, most likely, with funds from Doha. There is also speculation that Turkish influence may be at the basis of an Islamic-nationalist turn of HTS, whose personnel includes several figures who emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood strand. Among them is the head of the interim government, Mohammad al-Bashir, born in Idlib and presented as a “technocrat”, due to his training as an engineer in Aleppo. An Islamic-nationalist orientation also appears to be the preferred option for the other powers, which are flocking to Damascus to establish contacts with the new Syrian regime. According to Le Figaro, this would be a masterstroke for the “big Muslim brother” Erdoğan, who has spent more than a decade promoting the model of Turkish political Islam in the region. This potential outcome is producing anxiety in the petro-monarchies, which are advised by the Financial Times to exploit their “financial firepower” to manage the new balance in Damascus and the role assumed by Turkey.
The political and symbolic value of Damascus should not be forgotten, due to the central role it played in the long history of Arab empires and in the regional nationalism of the last century. As Charbel commented, “seeing a man in his 40s give a victory speech in the Umayyad mosque” in Damascus is a manifestation of the magnitude of the “Syrian earthquake” for the region — especially if, behind the “reformed jihadist”, to use a French expression, lie Ankara and Doha.
Lotta Comunista, December 2024