As armed rebels have advanced at lightning speed in recent days from the north of Syria toward the capital, Damascus, footage online showed statues of the Assad dynasty — which has kept the country in its authoritarian grip for over 50 years — crashing to the ground.
But as the figures of President Bashar al-Assad’s deceased father and brother fell to cries of “God is Great!” the question looming over the astonishingly rapid resurrection of the torpid civil war into a five-alarm fire is whether the rebels might topple the president himself.
The commander of the rebel alliance, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who depicts himself as a reformed zealot from Al Qaeda, has bluntly made that point.
“Our goal is to liberate Syria from this oppressive regime,” he said in a video interview with The New York Times.
Whether the rebels succeed or not, experts believe that an expected brutal fight to control Damascus, and by extension Syria, would constitute the most important confrontation yet in the struggle to remake the region, one ignited on Oct. 7, 2023, with the Hamas-led attack on Israel.
The main regional players — Israel, Iran and Turkey — all have a stake in the outcome, which means that the ripples will affect not just the Middle East, but also global powers like the United States and Russia.
If the war in Gaza is the worst manifestation yet of the seemingly intractable Israel-Palestinian dispute, which drew in the armed Lebanese group Hezbollah, analysts call the fight for Syria a far more important struggle to dominate a regional crossroads that influences the entire Middle East.
“Syria is the barometer for how power dynamics in the region are changing,” said Mona Yacoubian, head of the Middle East and North Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. “It is in for a period of chaos in a region that is already on fire.”
Israel’s strategists refer to Syria as the “hub of hubs,” which has served as a supply conduit for men and arms to places like southern Lebanon. There, Hezbollah, Iran’s main regional ally, held sway before Israel decimated the group’s ranks by assassinating its longtime leader and much of his top echelon. Israel also launched direct attacks on strategic air defenses in Iran.
Israel is determined to prevent Iran, which has propped up the Assad regime, from re-establishing those supply lines. It is also not clear how Israel would react to an Islamic-style government in Syria should Mr. al-Assad’s regime fall, especially a government beholden to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been a harsh critic because of the Gaza war.
Iran knows that if it loses Mr. al-Assad and its sway over Damascus, it is game over for its attempt to fortify a crescent of Shiite Muslim proxy forces from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen that can threaten Israel. Nonetheless on Friday, Iran, after more than a decade of staunch support for Mr. al-Assad, began evacuating top military commanders of its powerful Quds Forces and other personnel from Syria, according to Iranian and regional officials.
In Russia, which had made bolstering Mr. al-Assad a cornerstone of its Middle East policy for almost a decade, President Vladimir V. Putin faces a dilemma: beef up his country’s forces there to aid Syria and risk shortchanging his troops in Ukraine, where he needs every hand to prosecute the war.
In a telling sign of diminishing confidence, Russia announced on Friday that its citizens should leave Syria.
The U.S. State Department also encouraged Americans to leave. Washington has not known quite what to do about Syria for more than a decade, basically letting its policy drift after Russia moved in 2015 to intervene there militarily, analysts said. Now, Washington faces a moment of transition between two administrations, with the incoming president, Donald J. Trump, having once referred to Syria as “sand and death.”
It is unclear how much time all these governments have to act, given the volatile situation on the ground. In little over a week, the Syrian rebels have captured two of the country’s most important cities along the north-south corridor that forms the country’s main spine.
No comments:
Post a Comment