The fall of Damascus: Iran loses its strategic depth, but Israel may still be walking cautiously

On October 7, 2023, the day Israel saw one of the worst terror attacks in its history, if Tel Aviv was told that in the next 15 months, Hamas would be almost decimated, Hezbollah would be decapitated, and, more importantly, Syria would see the end of Bashar al-Assad’s 24-year regime, it would have refused to believe it, calling it a product of an imagination gone wild. But then, as fate would have it, that’s exactly what has happened in the last one year.

Dictators mostly go away as suddenly as they appear on the political horizon of a country. In fact, the bigger the dictator is, the more sudden and steep his fall. On Sunday, December 8, 2024, Bashar joined this long list of dictators gone too suddenly. Assad reportedly fled Damascus earlier in the day, with reports suggesting he had taken asylum in Russia. Rebel forces, led by Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), now in control of the capital, faced no visible resistance from government forces as they entered the city, ending the Assad family’s 50-year grip on power in Syria.

Being the second son of Syria’s long-serving dictator, Hafez al-Assad, Bashar was not “destined for the leadership”, as author Con Coughlin writes in Assad: The Triumph of Tyranny. Shy and diffident, he wanted to become a doctor when destiny pushed him towards dictatorship. “Tall and lanky, with a tendency to lisp when nervous, he was a poor substitute for his more dashing elder brother Bassel, who had been carefully groomed to succeed his father as president. But Bassel’s untimely death in a car accident in 1994 had unexpectedly thrust Bashar into the limelight, and, almost overnight, he had emerged as the family’s new heir apparent.”

Interestingly, the shy and diffident Bashar, soon after assuming power, took to power the way a fish takes to water. Coughlin records this transformation when he writes, “Gone was the diffident medical student; instead, foreign dignitaries paying their respects to the Assad family were surprised at Bashar’s composure.” In fact, when one of his friends asked the young president-in-waiting if he had “done everything that needs to be done to make sure the regime transition takes place”, Bashar answered with confidence never seen before in him. “You see these hands,” Bashar replied, raising both his palms. “When people look at my hands, they think they are soft, as though I am wearing velvet gloves. But they are very mistaken. For, if I take them off, you will see an iron fist.”

It is this ruthless streak that Bashar showed when West Asia, hit by the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, was turning into a graveyard for dictators. The movement consumed, among others, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen. Bashar is the latest to join the list. Interestingly, when the Arab Spring began, one least expected the Assads to be a victim of it. But then protests broke out in the city of Daraa on March 6, 2011.

Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Sam Dagher, in his book Assad Or We Burn The Country, reveals how in the spring of 2011, Bashar turned to his trusted general, Manaf Tlass, for advice about how to deal with Arab Spring protests. Tlass advised him to take a conciliatory path, but Assad decided to crush the movement—a move that has led to the killing of at least half a million people, with more than half the Syrian population displaced internally or forced to take refuge in neighbouring countries.

Assad could survive the worst in the past but not this time, thanks largely to the Ukraine and Gaza-Lebanon wars. In 2015, Bashar was bailed out by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But this time, Putin has been caught in the never-ending war in Ukraine, and Khamenei has suffered massive strategic reverses in Gaza and Beirut. The two have their own wars to fight where things have not gone as per expectations. In contrast, the rebels had the backing of countries such as the US, Arab nations, and Turkey.

The Assads may have lost a country, but it is Iran that is the biggest loser in the region, already licking its wounds over the Hamas and Hezbollah setbacks in the last few months. Till a few months back, Tehran had unfettered access and influence in Damascus, Beirut, Gaza, and Sanaa. Bashar’s Syria, Hamas’ Gaza, and Hezbollah’s Lebanon provided Iran with strategic depth in the region in its war against Israel and also for the Islamic leadership against the Sunni bloc led by Saudi Arabia. Syria, in fact, had been a central pillar in Iran’s strategy to contain, if not destroy, Israel. With Assad’s fall, this strategy has received a major blow.

Tehran, in fact, if a recent New York Times report is to be believed, has started preparing for the post-Assad phase. According to an internal memo from a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, cited by the NYT, the situation in Syria was “unbelievable and strange”. The report, quoting the memo, adds that Iran has “accepted the fall of Assad and has lost the will to resist”. More interestingly, the Iranian media has already changed its tune with regard to the Sunni rebels, who are now referred to as “armed groups” and not “infidel terrorists”.

West Asia is a complex zone. In any given scenario, there cannot be an absolute winner—and loser. So, while Israel must be relieved with Bashar’s fall, the composition of the rebel forces, comprising Sunni jihadis of different hues, is not an alliance that Tel Aviv would be comfortable with either. The prospect of Muhammad al-Jawlani, once branded a terrorist by the United States and whose anti-Israeli stand is too obvious to ignore, becoming the head of Syria won’t be a comforting scenario for Tel Aviv. So is the fact that some of these Islamist outfits have the backing of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, a sworn enemy of Israel.

Bashar, no doubt, was a ruthless dictator. Some quarters, thus, are already busy celebrating the fall of his government as a victory for democracy and freedom. What must worry Israel and the rest of the democratic world, including India, is that in West Asia, a hard-nosed dictator is invariably replaced by a dispensation led by a motley group of hard-core Islamist terrorists. With the fall of Damascus, Iran has lost its strategic depth, but Israel may still be walking cautiously—relieved and yet a bit concerned. Now, that’s West Asia for you!

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.