Is Syria A Sign Turkey Is Coming Into Its Own As A Middle Eastern Power?
Power Is Shifting In The Middle East.
Over the weekend, the shape of Middle Eastern geopolitics shifted with the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian regime—shifted dramatically and probably permanently. Old alliances and relationships have unraveled, and it is still unclear what the new relationships will be.
This has definitely been two weeks when decades have happened!
Moments like these are an embarrasment of riches for those who dabble in geopolitical analysis (like me!). Certainly every “expert” will have his or her opinion about why the Assad regime fell and what it signifies for the Middle East and for the wider world.
As with all geopolitical events, the full ramifications and ripple effects of Assad’s ouster will be months and years unfolding. We can be certain that some consequences are not yet even imagined. We can also be certain that all of the “experts” full of certainty about those consequences do not know what they are talking about.
We do not know for certain that Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham will impose a Taliban-like jihadist regime. It is possible, and perhaps even probable, but we do not know.
We do not know that Syria will be partitioned among a number of competing factions. That is possible, and perhaps even preferable, especially if the alternative is a collapse into anarchy and continued civil war.
We do not know that the Islamic Republic regime in Tehran will collapse as a consequence of Assad’s fall. It may happen, but we cannot predict that it definitely will happen as a result of events in Syria.
We do not know if there will be a fresh flood of refugees streaming into Europe. It may happen—and the nations of Europe would be well advised to plan ahead in case it does happen—but we cannot be certain that it will happen.
Those are but a few of the things we do not know. That begs the question: “what do we know?”
We know that Assad is alive. While there had been some early speculation that Assad himself might have perished in a plane crash while escaping from Damascus, reports from TASS indicate that Assad and his family were able to get to Moscow, where Russia granted them asylum “based on humanitarian reasons.”
We know also that the main rebel faction, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is led by one Ahmed Al Sharaa, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Sharaa is notable for being a wanted terrorist as well as a rebel leader.
Sharaa was the founder of Jabhat Al Nusra, an offshoot of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq that became ISIS. Sharaa was sent to Syria by ISIS' founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi specifically to establish a terrorist milita there. Al Nusra would be designated as a terrorist organization by the US in 2012.
We know that Sharaa publicly split from Bahdadi and ISIS in 2016, when he changed the group’s name to Jabhat Fath al-Sham, and later adopting its current name Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. From that point forward, Sharaa seemingly evolved from radical Islamist and jihadist to a more typical “mainstream” rebel and revolutionary. He distanced the group from ISIS, set up a government administration of sorts in the Idlib Governorate, where al-Nusra/al-Sham was based.
We know that despite the evolution of Al Nusra into Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Sharaa still has a $10 million bounty on his head via the US Government’s “Rewards For Justice” program.
We know that Turkey has publicly expressed interest in seeing an “inclusive” government formed in Syria. Speaking at Qatar’s Doha Forum over the weekend, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan laid out Turkey’s starting diplomatic position.
“The new government body should be inclusive of all parties,” he said, speaking at Qatar’s Doha Forum conference. “Opposition groups should be united now.”
Given that Turkey has been the principal backer of HTS as well as the affliated Syrian National Army group, it is not unreasonable to view this as a bit of flexing by Turkey on how it wants to see the new government in Syria take shape.
We know that Israel took advantage of the sudden retreat of Syrian forces in the Golan Heights to occupy the buffer zone that had been established in the Golan after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, while also seizing the Syrian side of Mount Hermon, the strategic high ground in the region. At the same time, Israel has been conduction air strikes against reported arms depots and chemical weapons production plants.
We know that Russia’s two major military bases in Syria, Hmeimim and Tartus, are of uncertain status. Although they are currently operating normally, there has been no word from HTS if Russia will be allowed to continue operating the bases. That is an important consideration, because as Russia had been supporting Assad since the civil war began, there is no reason to assume that HTS—or whatever successor government takes shape in Syria—will be okay with a former adversary maintaining a military presence in Syria. Certainly Russia’s military blogger community was articulating concern about the bases during the rebel offensive, indicating that HTS was no friend of the Russian military.
These are the highlights of what we know about Syria for the time being. Looking these known facts and data points, it is clear that there is no reliable extrapolation which can be made in any direction. Because of what we know, it is increasingly clear what we do not know—and what we do not know about the situation in Syria far exceeds what we do know.
In addition to what we know however, there are a few key inferences that we may make about Syria.
In particular, we may plausibly infer that neither Russia nor Iran—Syria’s principal backers—had both the resources and the will to assist Assad as the rebels first took Aleppo and then becan moving rapidly towards Damascus. We may make this inference from the fact that neither country provided meaningful military support for Assad since the rebel offensive began on November 27.
Taking Russia’s failure to respond first, there are some intriguing possibilities that present themselves arising from that failure.
Perhaps the most obvious one is that Russia’s military resources are depleted and may even be running out.
Russia has been supporting the Assad regime militarily since 2016, and that support has been a major aspect of Vladimir Putin’s presentation of Russia to the world as a global military power as deserving of Great Power status as the US or China. Not only is Syria a key logistics link in Russia’s activities in Africa, but it is a key public relations prize as well. It is difficult to imagine that Putin would not invest even a few thousand troops into preserving that prize if he had them to spare.
Nor is this the first indication that Russia’s military resources were being stretched thin. Recall that, during the Azerbaijani annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh last fall, Russia’s peacekeeping forces were largely just brushed aside by the Azerbaijani forces, who simply moved in and effectively kicked the ethnic Armenians out.
Additionally, in the immediate wake of the October 7, 2023 genocidal attacks on Israel by Hamas, a particularly tense and agitated mob stormed the airport in Dagestan, looking for Jewish travelers on a plane arrived from Tel Aviv.
While last year’s incidents were only curiosities, and at the time could at most be interpreted as a decision by the Kremlin not to commit military resources into the Caucasus in order to have adequate reserve strength for the war in Ukraine, unless the general assessment of the geopolitical importance of Syria to Russia has been greatly overestimated, simply being cautious about reserves is not a plausible explanation now.
At the very least, we must entertain the possibility that Russia did not have the reserves to spare.
If Russia does not have reserves to spare for Syria, how many reserves does Russia have left for Ukraine? Basic laws of physics tell us that troops deployed to one theater of operations cannot be simultaneously deployed to another theater of operations.
However, that same logic also presents the possibility that, if Russia does not have any reserves that can be sent to Syria, it does not have reserves, or is running out of reserves, to send to Ukraine.
This is not even the first time there has been reason to ask that question.
In the summer of 2023, western corporate media was rife with speculation that Russia was amassing a major force near Kharkiv, presumably in preparation for a major offensive in that portion of the front line. That offensive never happened, and the amassed reserves—if they truly existed—simply melted away.
While the offensive operation that never was merely invites speculation about Russia’s possible lack of resource depth, the failure to come to Assad’s aid is a far stronger signal that Russia is getting down to the bottom of the reserves barrel.
If that is the case, then Russia is quite possibly running out of resources for Ukraine as well.
The depreciation of the ruble in forex markets over the past few months, along with the return of inflation to the Russian economy, serves up yet an additional potential confirming signal that Russia’s running out of resources for its war machine.
Viewed against a backdrop of events in Syria, interpreting the presence of some 10,000 North Korean troops in Ukraine as a further sign of arguably military reserve depletion by Russia acquires considerably more credibility.
No less stunning than Russia’s failure to support Assad has been Iran’s failure to support Assad.
That failure is stunning in part because, like Russia, Iran initially pledged to support Assad—only that support never materialized in any impactful way.
That failure is stunning also because, like Russia, Iran has invested significant resources in backing the Assad regime throughout the civil war.
Iran has always had its own motives for supporting the Assad regime, not the least of which has been its ongoing support of the Hezbollah terrorist militia in Lebanon, the resupply of which is highly dependent upon supply routes traversing southern Syria.
One sign that Iran’s priorities in Syria were imperiled in the latter stages of the rebel offensive was the appearance of the Free Houran Gathering in southern Syria near Daraa.
Losing control of this territory would mean losing control of the supply routes needed to support Hezbollah.
Before the 2020 ceasefire agreement, Iran had conducted as many as 700 drone attacks in Syria in support of the Assad regime.
"Our bomber drones have carried out 700 military operations using smart bombs against IS," said Brig. Gen. Amirali Hajizadeh.
"They were used in eliminating tanks, personnel carriers, cars used for suicide attacks and 23-millimeter cannons – these were targets prized by IS and we significantly turned the tide of battle," he added.
The guard most recently used military drones against IS targets in Syria earlier this month, in retaliation for a deadly attack in September on a military parade in Iran's southwest claimed by the militant group.
Iran quite clearly had ideas on how to effectively utilize drone warfare in Syria. Yet for some unknown reason, its drone attacks during the rebel offensive were not impactful and failed to halt rebel advances on key Syrian cities.
Similarly, despite having deployed significant contingents of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps in Syria, there were no reports of major engagements between the IRGC and the HTS rebel militias or their allies during this latest offensive operation.
Given the levels of economic support that Iran has provided Assad over the years, it is difficult to conclude that Iran has simply lost interest in supporting the regime. However, given that Iran had last year begun to cut back on some of that support suggests that Iran, again like Russia, might be reaching a resource constraint on the amounts and types of support it can offer.
We should also note that there have been a few small cracks appearing in the relationship between Tehran and Damascus, as earlier in the summer when Syria voted against an Iranian territorial claim involving the United Arab Emirates. The degree to which that vote was politically necessary for Assad to continue to be “normalized” within the Arab League is inherently a matter of speculation, but despite such microfissures appearing in the relationship, Iran has outwardly at least remained committed to supporting Assad.
Yet Iran’s failure to provide meaningful support to Assad durng this rebel offensive dovetails curiously well with the largely non-impactful “retaliation” strikes against Israel earlier this fall, which some have viewed as being more about providing the appearance of retaliation rather than doing any great damage on Israel. Once again, Iran has been extravagant with the rhetoric but not with the results.
This naturally invites the question as to whether or not Iran still possesses the military resources needed to successfully project power in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East. Two mostly non-impactful retaliations against Israel and now little if any effective support for Assad at the moment when it was most necessary are curious events for a country that presumably still has dreams of regional hegemony.
If Iran wants to pull Arab nations into its political orbit it needs to be able to make credible projections of strength and power in the region. Within just the past few months, Iran has now had three moments where a demonstration of power was called for, and has failed to deliver the necessary impactful demonstration every time.
Failures such as these project weakness, not strength. Has Iran been exposed as a paper tiger?
As with Russia, we cannot dismiss the possibility, and we must even consider that to be a probability.
What conclusions can we draw from these events?
While we cannot from events in Syria conclude that Russia is on the verge of economic or military collapse, we can reasonably conclude that Russia’s resources for war are not unlimited. We can also conclude that, just as with the failure to provide adequate force protection in Nagorno-Karabakh, the lack of effective Russian response to the Hay’at Tahir al-Sham offensive towards Hama and Homs (Aleppo fell sufficiently quickly that Russa can be forgiven for not having responded in time) indicates Russia simply does not have resources to spare for Syria. We can also conclude that there is a very strong possibility that Russia may be close to running out of resources to commit to the war in Ukraine.
Putin’s failure to support Assad may have reverberations that reach all the way to Ukraine. Putin’s failure to support Assad may likewise be the result of events in Ukraine, which would make Assad’s regime in Syria an unexpected casualty of the war in Ukraine.
Potentially, this strenghtens Donald Trump’s hand once he takes office and presses for a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. If Putin is indeed running out of reserves and running out of resources, a negotiated off-ramp to the war may be just what he desires most of all at this juncture.
Similarly, although we cannot conclude that Iran is also on the verge of economic collapse, we can conclude that Iran’s resources for supporting other regimes are not unlimited, and that Iran may be starting to run out of those resources.
If the rebels seizing control over southern Syria do have the consequence of disrupting supply lines for Hezbollah, then Iran’s inability to support Assad puts Hezbollah in a very dicey situation.
While neither Russia nor Iran are on the verge of either economic or military defeat, that we may plausibly view Assad’s ouster as confirmations that neither country has the strength it wants other nations to believe suggests events in Syria are likely to have impacts that reach well beyond the Middle East.
A lack of Russian strength to support Syria at a pivotal moment opens up possibilities for power shifts in the Caucasus and Central Asia which did not previously exist. Countries such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan might find their situations vis-a-vis Russia greatly improved.
A lack of Iranian strength to support Syria at a pivotal moment leaves Hezbollah, as well the other terrorist militia groups Iran uses to project power throughout the Middle East, in a very uncertain position. Without Iranian support, Hezbollah is a greatly reduced force even without considering the major defeats Israel has inflicted on Hezbollah in recent months. Without Iranian support, the capacity of Hezbollah and even Hamas to rebuild, re-arm, and reconstitute a significant security threat to Israel is greatly reduced.
Lack of strength on the part of both Russia and Iran would leave Turkey as the dominant outside actor in Syria. While we may not yet know how Hay’at Tahir al-Sham and its rebel allies will proceed with establishing a new government for Syria, there seems little present in Syria to prevent that government from being organized along lines largely in keeping with Turkey’s strategic interests in the region, rather than Iran’s or Russia’s.
Perhaps the one thing that does seem most certain to emerge from the events of the past few weeks is that Turkey is succeeding at crafting a hegemonic role for itself within Middle Eastern geopolitics. Power in the Middle East appears to have shifted dramatically away from Tehran and towards Ankara, with Ankara absorbing much of Moscow’s influence in the region.
Until the world has a chance to see how well Ankara plays the role of regional hegemon that it seems on the verge of claiming, predictions and forecasts of what the future holds for Syria or indeed the rest of that troubled region are ultimately futile.
We may safely say that we know Turkey has greatly advanced its status in the Middle East, and that it has done so at the expense of Russia and Iran. We should not presume to know yet how that will change the course of events in the Middle East.
A sobering assessment, Peter Nayland Kusk. Yet, it is surprising how much we do know. The weeks ahead will prove to be very valuable indeed.
Ukraine may be the biggest part yet.
Kudos to you, Peter, for probably one of the best assessments on this topic. Factual, grounded, and as the kids say these days, “based”.
Two factors that are likely to play a role, yet are almost impossible to quantify: the ancient animosity between the Arab world and the Turks, and Syria’s drug trafficking. Assad reportedly was involved in drug trafficking, so what happens to those streams of income? The new people in charge now have power and they are likely to e tempted by wealth to enjoy it. In other words, the soap-opera shenanigans are just beginning!