Syed Ata Hasnain | Will Syrian implosion spur a fresh Iran Mideast drive?

For a fairly long time, the world appeared to be fixated on the understanding that Iran and Syria acted as almost one nation in the pursuit of strategic security and foreign policy. As one of the main supporters of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the ayatollahs of Iran secured considerable strategic advantage through the territory of the Levant under Syria’s control. Russian President Vladmir Putin’s support to Iran and Syria added to their comfort and the Russian military presence in Syria, despite the demands of the Ukrainian battlefield, only reflected how serious Mr Putin was about his foothold in the Middle East and the relationship with the Iran-Syria combine. The progressive hollowing out of the Bashir Assad administration and the corruption and lack of professionalism in the Syrian Army over the years perhaps never occurred to Russia due to the complete focus of attention on the Ukraine front. Even Iran was so totally obsessed with the successful run of strengthening Hezbollah that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s master of proxy war strategy, failed to detect that its hold over Syria through the Syrian Army had been largely diluted. Was the emaciation of the Syrian civil and military capability a deliberate non-military strategy followed by an external power is yet not known, but the advantage which now accrues is not to any one side but to several forces. Among those are the United States, Turkey, Israel and the radical Sunni elements that have vied for space in the Levant. Except for the US and Israel, none of the others have a joint interest. The ones at the greatest disadvantage from the run of recent events are Iran and Russia. The Jerusalem Post wrote: “Iran’s loss is staggering. Assad’s fall toppled the crown jewel of the arc of resistance that Iran spent over 35 years constructing as a counter-balance to Israel and American influence in the region. The removal of this cornerstone has effectively dismantled the arc”. It is said that when a revolution occurs and takes the world by surprise, you should always be prepared for a counter-revolution. So, is there a possibility of a counter-revolution in the making? The factors at play and the strategic environment both do not indicate this and for several reasons this reading should be assumed correct. Hamas’ actions in Gaza triggered a chain of events which Iran misread as an opportunity. It activated its proxy strategy by ratcheting up the degree of engagement of Israel, but in the bargain, 15 months later, stands only to count its staggering losses. The entire leaderships of Hamas and Hezbollah were wiped out, and that of the IRGC itself dented. The complete supply chain for moving of military resources and wherewithal to the main proxy — Hezbollah — is now completely disrupted. The fall of Bashar Assad and the neutralisation of Syria’s Army is also a result of several factors, with the final nail being the chain reactions set after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Clearly, Mr Putin did not accord high enough priority to the Middle East in the run of the ongoing two major wars in the world — Ukraine and Gaza-Lebanon. That ensured that the strategic advantage Russia gained by the support to Iran, Syria and Bashir Assad was never prioritised. However, Mr Putin, never prone to sentimentality, is attempting to regain lost ground. He first described the HTS as “terrorists”, but shortly thereafter the Russian foreign ministry was referring to HTS as the armed Syrian opposition; a clear overture to the new ruling authority in Syria, one of the reasons why he refused to meet Assad and only granted him asylum. For how long is this asylum too is anybody’s guess. This is the quasi-counter revolution in the making, if at all; the overturning of the US-Israel advantage gained as a result of the Syrian meltdown.