The Assad regime was able to stay in power over the last two years by playing countries against eachother and balancing itself between powerful countries such as Turkey, Iran, Israel and Russia. This is a complex story and it is worth understanding it because the new Syrian government will be put at the center of the same crossroads of countries.
A recent report at Israel’s Yediot Ahronoth indicated that Israel had maintained secret contacts with the Syrian regime. Israel interest in Syria was in trying to pry the Assad regime away from Iran. The recent reports say that this culminated in 2019.
It is worth understanding this in the context of the Campaign Between the Wars, Israel’s airstrikes on Iranian assets in Syria that were designed to prevent weapons transfers to Hezbollah and reduce Iranian entrenchment. Alongside the Campaign Between the Wars there was the general trajectory of Assad regime successes.
It was able to turn the tide in 2015 with the help of Russia’s intervention. By 2018 the regime had returned to the Golan area and removed Syrian rebels from southern Syria.
Assad's regime
Let’s try to understand the Assad regime’s ability to navigate between Israel, Russia and Iran. The regime did this for decades. Let’s go back to the first decade of this century.
The regime had floated the idea of reform and liberalization in the early 2000s. It did a lot of outreach to the West, including to US officials and former American officials such as Jimmy Carter. Assad hosted John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi in Damascus.
The Syrian regime did something else in the early 2000s. It appears to have been floating this idea of leaving its alliance with Iran for many years, since perhaps 2005 or thereabouts. Syria believed it could dangle this concept in front of Israel over the years, especially prior to the Arab Spring, when Damascus believed Israel might be flexible on the issue of the Golan. It’s worth considering that Syria’s regime also sought to have these talks with Turkey.
Syria tried to present itself as friend of the West and a part of the solution in the region. This happened in the same period of 2005-2009 when Syria was also enabling extremists to enter Iraq via the Euphrates river valley. Some details on this are drawn from US diplomatic cables that were revealed many years ago on Wikileaks. Other details about this come from other sources.
In one diplomatic cable from 2006 a US official notes that terrorist and foreign fighter “networks converge on Syria, a key staging and training hub. Crossing into Iraq (often with support from border tribes and traditional smuggling networks), T/FFs [terrorist and foreign fighters] move up the Euphrates River Valley (ERV) and other routes toward operational areas in central Iraq. Other T/FFs enter Iraq from terrorist safehavens in northwestern Iran.”
Stopping the flow of extremists
How to stop this flow of extremists? The suggestions was to talk to other countries that had ties with Damascus. Here again the Assad regime was able to position itself as both the fire starter and fire department. It was portraying itself as willing to change and work with the West, but it was also funneling extremists to fight the US in Iraq. It was destabilizing the region and also pretending to want to reform.
Syria kept up this balancing act through the Arab Spring. At that point it had to stop balancing because Syria itself became a battleground. Having played with fire too long, the regime was now being burned down. Iran’s IRGC Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani encouraged Russia to intervene. Russia obliged.
However, not just Russia intervened in Syria. The US was also backing Kurdish forces in eastern Syria to fight ISIS. Soon those groups grew into the Syrian Democratic Forces. Turkey also began operating in Syria and expanded those operations between 2015 and 2019, taking over parts of northern Syria.
The Assad regime, despite appearing weakened by the involvement of so many countries in Syria, continued to try to play them off against each other. This came to a head in early December 2024 when Assad found that his hollow regime no longer had support. He was no longer “useful” to any of the countries he had tried to balance.
The rapid removal of the regime doesn’t change the fact that Iran, Russia, the US, Israel, Turkey and many countries have interests in Syria today. In fact, the Israeli bombing campaign to prevent Syrian regime weapons falling into the wrong hands, is an example of the concerns about what might come next in Syria. The US is also carrying out strikes on ISIS and reports say France carried out a strike on ISIS as well in Syria.
Meanwhile Turkey and Qatar are rushing to work closely with the new authorities in Damascus. Iran appears now at odds with the new Syrian leadership. Israel is skeptical of what may come next.
The US is open to working with Syria but is also expressing concerns. A lot of wheels are in motion. The question now is whether the new Syrian government will seek to try to play countries against each other or work to be a unifying and stabilizing force in the region.