SYRIA AND THE ISRAEL-IRAN WAR / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

Syria and the Israel-Iran War

The fate of Assad’s precarious regime will decide the outcome of the Israel-Iran conflict.

By: Kamran Bokhari

As the conflict between Israel and Iran continues to heat up, Syria is the strategic tract of land caught in the middle. 

For Iran, Syria is the geographic center of its strategy to maintain influence in the Arab world. 

Conversely, Israel views Syria as the key to securing the Israeli northern flank. 

The outcome of the Israel-Iran struggle thus hinges on what happens to the Assad regime.

The Israeli military has cleared landmines, dug new fortifications and moved a fence separating the Golan Heights and a demilitarized zone closer to Syrian territory, Reuters reported Oct. 15. 

The maneuvers, which Syrian and Lebanese sources said have accelerated recently, would enable the Israeli armed forces to keep a close eye on Hezbollah and better secure the area from potential infiltration by the Iran-backed armed group. 

In addition, as an anonymous Lebanese security source noted in the Reuters report, the demining operations might portend an Israeli attack from the east to “encircle” Hezbollah.

Early in 2011, before the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, Iran was riding high. 

A few weeks earlier, Iraq had finally broken an eight-month post-election logjam and established a Shiite-led government sympathetic to Iranian interests. 

The U.S. military was preparing to withdraw its forces from Iraq, clearing the way for the Iranians to consolidate their hold over the country. 

Elsewhere, Arab states were in meltdown. 

In January, just two days before protesters in Tunisia toppled their president (the first scalp claimed by the Arab Spring), Hezbollah engineered the collapse of a Lebanese government led by its rivals. 

When Lebanon’s next government came together, Hezbollah had the whip hand. 

With these two moves, Tehran’s dream of a contiguous arc of influence along its western flank became reality.

 

However, it soon became clear that the uprisings ripping through the Arab world were beyond anyone’s control. 

In February 2011, they spread to Bahrain, a Shiite-majority country off the east coast of Saudi Arabia. 

Before the Iranians could put a plan into action to exploit the situation, on March 15, major protests erupted in Syria against the Assad regime, threatening to sever the Iranian regime’s physical connection with Hezbollah. 

Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah had endured since the 1980s, when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Syrian intelligence helped the group get started, and through the crisis of 2005, when Lebanese protesters, outraged by the assassination of their anti-Syrian prime minister, booted the Syrian military out of their country.

For decades, the Assad family had ruled over a population that was approximately 60 percent Sunni, despite the fact that they themselves hailed from the minority Alawite community. 

If the apparent revolutionary tide sweeping the region managed to bring down Bashar Assad, Iran feared, it might hearten Sunnis – who comprised majorities of the population in western Iraq and eastern Syria – to rise up. 

The loss of Syria would complicate Iran’s ability to get aid to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Not only that, it could even destabilize the incipient Shiite-dominated government in Iraq. 

Tehran’s national security strategy had long been premised on neutralizing Baathist Iraq, the largest obstacle to the extension of Iranian power from Persia through Mesopotamia and to the Levant. 

Having fought its own disastrous war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq throughout most of the 1980s, Iran was elated when the U.S. military stormed into Baghdad and toppled the Saddam regime. 

The Iranians were not going to let all this slip away without a fight.

Iran mobilized tens of thousands of Shiite foreign fighters and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of material to rescue the Assad regime. 

Syria was devastated and Assad was severely weakened, but Iran succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. 

Because of its extreme dependence on Iranian support, Syria was reduced to a vassal state. 

Instead of losing its bridge to the Eastern Mediterranean, Iran established a significant military presence in the country, whence it can supply Hezbollah with advanced weapons, support Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and potentially infiltrate the West Bank via Jordan.

The major drawback of Iran’s breakthrough was that it exposed Tehran to greater contact with Israel. 

The Israelis had been watching closely as Iran leveraged the Arab Spring to its advantage. 

Where Iran saw strategic success, Israel saw an intolerable security threat. 

In 2017, in a bid to throw the Iranians off balance and disrupt their superhighway through the northern rim of the Middle East, Israel conducted the first of what would become hundreds of airstrikes in Syria and Lebanon.

A direct confrontation between Israel and Iran was only a matter of time, and the time came when Hamas raided southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, followed shortly thereafter by Hezbollah’s decision to support its Palestinian ally with a series of rocket and artillery attacks against northern Israel. 

At this point, Israel decided that its strategy of periodic airstrikes to disrupt Iranian shipments of weapons and aid to Israel’s enemies was no longer adequate. 

Since the spring, the Israelis have switched to massively targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah, inflicting significant losses.

Consequently, Syria’s future and its role in Iran's regional security architecture are again in question. 

The Assad regime remains fragile, and Iran and Hezbollah are incapable of providing the same level of support as before. 

Assad has few viable options and wants to avoid the Israel-Iran conflict further weakening his precarious position. 

His fate will decide not only the Israel-Iran war but also Iran’s strategic standing in the region.