21 hours Ago By Daniel DePetris
If you didn’t know any better, you might have thought Syria’s 13-year-old civil war was largely over. The conflict, sparked by a peaceful rebellion against dictator Bashar Assad in 2011, only to descend into factional infighting and intervention from numerous foreign powers, was arguably the Middle East’s deadliest since Lebanon’s own civil war in the 1970s and ’80s, which carved up that small Arab state into competing fiefdoms. Assad, whose family has ruled Syria since the early 1970s, came out on top thanks to sheer brutality and the valuable assistance of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, his biggest backers.
Last week, however, the civil war everybody thought was over reignited in the blink of an eye. The remaining rebel battalions in the northwest, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTC), a former al-Qaida affiliate, shocked Assad’s government with a blitzkrieg offensive the Syrian army wasn’t prepared for. HTC, with the aid of several Turkish-backed Syrian factions, made a beeline toward Aleppo, the city Assad recaptured in 2016 after four years of intense airstrikes and ground combat.
Yet the rebels retook the city in days. The Syrian army and pro-government forces melted away like a chocolate bar in the dog days of summer. The entire episode seemed like a dream.
“As I entered Aleppo, I kept telling myself this is impossible. How did this happen?” one Syrian who fled Aleppo eight years earlier asked. It’s the same question Assad was probably asking as he reportedly fled Syria for Russia.
The answer, though, is relatively easy to find. The Syrian government’s main foreign backers, who saved Assad from exile or worse when his position looked even wobblier than it does today, are busy dealing with their own problems. And the corrupt, rapacious, dictatorial kleptocracy they’ve bailed out for well over a decade was thought to be stronger than it really was.
Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, otherwise known as Assad’s lifelines, have bigger fish to fry at the moment. Although the Russian military retains a presence in several Syrian air bases along the Mediterranean coast, the vast bulk of Russia’s combat power is tied up in Ukraine, where Russian troops are inching forward in the Donbas at considerable cost. Western intelligence services assess that Russia has lost somewhere between 600,000 to 700,000 men to death or injury since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022; last month, the U.
K. alleged that 1,500 Russian troops are being taken off the battlefield every day. Thousands of pieces of Russian military equipment, from fighter jets and tanks to artillery pieces and armored personnel carriers, have been destroyed.
Russia, that big military machine that Western military analysts thought could take the Baltics in days , is instead a clunky old mess that is preoccupied with throwing more soldiers into the meat-grinder for the sake of a few more meters of Ukrainian land. Hezbollah, which signed a cease-fire deal with Israel last week, is licking its wounds from the last several months of ferocious Israeli bombing. While Hezbollah is still one of the world’s biggest non-state actors, its military capability has been significantly diminished.
Southern Lebanon, the group’s main support base, is effectively razed. Its senior leadership is wiped out, its leader Hassan Nasrallah is dead, and if Israeli military calculations are anything to go by, only 20% of its rocket and missile arsenal is left standing. Hezbollah will need time to regroup and restock its supplies, which bodes terribly for Assad, who relied on the Lebanese militia to serve as shock troops to reinforce his dilapidated Syrian army.
Indeed, if it weren’t for Hezbollah, it’s unlikely that Assad would have regained as much ground in the past. Iran, meanwhile, isn’t exactly enthralled with expending more resources on Assad’s behalf at this particular time. The last thing the Iranians needed was another challenge to its regional strategy, which has gone up in smoke over the last year courtesy of Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon as well as Israeli airstrikes on Iranian military targets in April and October.
Assad’s Syria has proven to be a reliable weapons corridor to Hezbollah, so the Iranians will no doubt aid the Syrian government in the days and weeks ahead. How much aid Iran will offer is another question; this is a country, after all, now looking down the barrel of another Trump presidency. Another Iranian bailout of Assad wouldn’t jive well with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s attempts to explore a diplomatic rapprochement with Washington.
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When she was secretary of state, Hillary Clinton confidently boasted that Assad’s days were numbered . The State Department reiterated the same projection two years later, despite Assad having strengthened his position. Yet time and again, the strongman has defied expectations.
Through a combination of stubbornness and inhumanity, Assad has outlasted two (soon to be three) U.S. presidents.
His strategy: bomb and starve your armed opposition into submission, jail and kill anybody who dares oppose you, refuse any political compromise and wait for your foreign backers to ride to the rescue. This is precisely what is occurring now, as Russian jets accelerate airstrikes against Assad’s jihadist foes and Iranian-backed Shia militias begin deploying into Syria. Assad’s forces are picking their spots, solidifying defensive lines in cities south of Aleppo before preparing what will surely be a counteroffensive as indiscriminate as it was when Syrian forces re-captured the northern city eight years ago.
For the United States, there isn’t much to do other than monitor how it all plays out. Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.
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