With the loss of Syria, Russia’s carefully cultivated image as a great power and reliable backer is now severely damaged.
LONDON: The speed of events was simply breath-taking. For more than 50 years the Assad dynasty ruthlessly ruled over Syria with the help of a formidable security apparatus and the use of brutal force. Then, in the blink of an eye it was gone, shattering its supposed impregnable hold over the country. It had taken less than two weeks for rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an anti-Assad Islamist group which evolved from Al Qaeda, to take control of Damascus from their base in Idlib, 200 miles away. HTS’s timing was perfect. Syria’s backers, Russia and Iran are heavily involved with their own self-inflicted problems in Ukraine and Israel and were unable, or unwilling, to support the Assad regime.
The origins of HTS go back to the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 with peaceful protests by Syrian citizens. As the war grew more violent it drew in extremist groups and quickly became internationalised, with outside powers such as Iran, Russia, Turkey, the Gulf States and the United States shipping weapons and funds to their preferred military groups. The Syrian regime’s most committed allies turned out to be Iran and Russia, and with the help of Iran’s proxy militias (especially Hezbollah from Lebanon) and Russia’s fighter jets, entire Syrian cities were annihilated killing at least half a million innocent civilians. Some 14 million Syrians, half the population, were displaced and more than a million became refugees in Europe.
To most observers, by 2018 the Syrian civil war had been managed and largely contained and the country’s President, Bashir al-Assad, crowned victorious by his allies, Russia and Iran. The war had been a major coup for Moscow, which used its successful 2015 intervention to not only prop up the Assad regime, but at the same time expand its own military and diplomatic influence in the region. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Moscow was engaging in a major conflict outside its “near abroad.” The intervention also gave Russia warm water access to the Mediterranean in the use of the naval base in Tartus, as well as control over a neighbouring Syrian airbase in Latakia. It was from this time that China’s alliance with Russia grew as they jointly supported Syria at the United Nations Security Council against attempts by the US to charge Damascus with human rights violations.
Iran used Syria to build its proxies into an “axis of resistance” around Israel, “a ring of fire” that would not only defend the Shia Muslim world and Iran’s dominance within it, but would one day consume Israel, a country that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed to destroy by 2040. The proxies, coupled with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, made Iran arguably the most powerful Muslim state in the Middle East, strong enough to be feared by both Israel and the Sunni Arab countries in the Gulf. Yet the proxy strategy was always a risky one. It allowed Iran to project power well beyond its borders, to make mischief and wage war at arm’s length, all with the luxury of deniability however implausible. Syria was a vital land-bridge in this strategy that allowed Iran to resupply Hezbollah, its most powerful proxy, in its battle with Israel.
Suddenly, Iran’s long-held ambition of establishing a “Shia Crescent” from Teheran to Beirut lies in tatters. Teheran’s ability to sustain is terrorist operations in Syria and Lebanon has evaporated, having spent billions of dollars propping up the Assad regime and deploying its Revolutionary Guards to keep its ally in power. Iran will no longer be able to use Damascus airport to transport weapons and supplies to Hezbollah, the terrorist organisation which is deeply resented in Lebanon for provoking the recent hostilities with Israel.
Israel is clearly a big winner in the fall of the Assad regime and already its warplanes have been busy targeting the remnants of the regime’s various facilities dedicated to the production of weapons of mass destruction, especially those chemical weapons sites that were used to such deadly effect during Syria’s civil war. The Israelis will want to make sure that such weapons will not be accessible to the country’s next generation of leaders, whoever they might be. On Monday and Tuesday, Israel continued to strike dozens of other Syrian military targets and claimed to have destroyed Syria’s navy. The Israeli military also positioned its troops near five Syrian villages within the demilitarised zone just to the east of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights which it seized from Syria in 1967. Illegal in international law, the aim, according to the Israeli government, is to create a larger buffer zone to protect its citizens as the new Syrian government takes shape.
Turkey is perhaps the biggest winner in Assad’s defenestration. Out of all the region’s major players, Ankara has the strongest channels of communication and history of working with HTS and its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the Damascus medical school dropout who has reverted to using his real name, Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a. Turkish President RecepErdogan anticipates a great opportunity in a post-Assad future, having worked with the Islamist group now in charge in Damascus. In recent years, Turkey’s military presence in the north-western Syrian town of Idlib largely shielded the group from attacks by Syrian government forces, allowing it to run the province undisturbed. Trade across the Turkish border supported the HTS and Istanbul also managed the flow of international aid into HTS-run areas, increasing the group’s legitimacy among locals. Now that Assad is out of the picture, Erdogan is getting ready to cash in on his years-long investment as the balance of power shifts in his favour.
Along with Iran, Russia is a big loser in the region as the sudden loss of Assad will undermine the confidence of allies and potential allies in Russian guarantees. Since its military intervention in 2015, Moscow’s propaganda machine has been positioning the country as a guarantor of stability and protector of (usually dictatorial) regimes from external pressures and internal threats. With the loss of Syria, Russia’s carefully cultivated image as a great power and reliable backer is now severely damaged. Moscow officials are currently carrying out urgent negotiations with HTS in order to retain control of its Syrian bases, on which the Kremlin allegedly spent $20 billion to develop. Without them, Russia will face difficulties in projecting power in Libya, the Central African Republic and other countries where its semi-official mercenary forces are deployed. This is a major headache for the Kremlin, just as the fall of the Assad regime is a bitter blow to President Putin’s prestige. Some commentators describe it as Putin’s most serious defeat in foreign policy in modern times.
Russian state-run TV has downplayed the collapse of the Kremlin’s sole Middle Eastern protégé. The official line deployed on all main state outlets is not to give it prominent coverage, but if mentioning the topic to stick with the usual practice of blaming the US as the mastermind behind the events. Foreign Minister Lavrov was notably quick to blame the US and its NATO allies for a “global hegemonic plot” in Syria. Russian state actors and pro-Kremlin outlets across all available language platforms tried to cover up Putin’s embarrassing failure in Syria by blaming not only the US and Israel, but also Ukraine for allegedly training and fighting with the jihadists. This is a ludicrous assertion, as Ukraine is fully engaged in defending itself from the Russian invasion and has neither the resources nor the desire to assist HTS.
Nevertheless, the Kremlin hasn’t escaped criticism in the Russian press. In an unusual intervention on Wednesday a political scientist told NezavisimayaGazeta, a Russian daily newspaper, “we need to say it straight, Russia and Iran suffered a major defeat in Syria”, adding that “Turkey, on the other hand, scored a big victory”. Another Russian publication, MoscovskyKomsomolets, reported “the whole system of Russia’s presence in the Middle East, constructed over the last ten years and into which very considerable resources have been invested, has, in the blink of an eye, turned into a bygone political age. This is a lamentable, upsetting, agonising fact that cannot be denied or understated.” Military bloggers in Russia are reportedly furious at what they see as the country’s humiliation, regarding it as a serious failure.
As is usual when there is a crisis with potential negative PR, Vladimir Putin is nowhere to be seen. This is in contrast to earlier times when he was eager to take credit for saving Assad. But then, he might be wary about drawing attention to Assad’s demise, as it unfolded so quickly—evidence that an autocrat who seems firmly entrenched one day might be swept from power the next. As Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and now Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have so clearly shown, a despot is in power until suddenly he’s not.
* John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.