What next in Syria’s geopolitical game of chicken?

Matein Khalid

The late summer and autumn of 2024 may well go down in history as the Berlin Wall moment for the Middle East as the collapse of the nightmarish Assad dynastic dictatorship will have a seismic geopolitical fall out across the region. Iran has lost its land bridge/weapon supply conduit to its proxy militia Hezbollah, itself decapitated and militarily degraded by the IDF in Lebanon. Baathist Syria was Iran’s oldest ally in the Arab world, a relationship forged by Hafez al-Assad with Ayatollah Khomeini in a bid to end his diplomatic isolation after Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel and his ideological archrival Saddam Hussein launched a bloody war of attrition in a failed attempt to crush the Iranian revolution in 1980.

Syria, with its 70% Sunni majority has reverted to its Ottoman historical DNA as a de facto Turkish province, though the HTS militia has done its best to reassure minorities like the Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Christians and Ismailis that their rule will not target Assad regime allies. Since HTS is led by a former Al Qaeda emir with the nom de guerre of Abu Mohammad Al Jolani and is a US/EU/UN designated terrorist organization, it is naive to expect Syria to morph into a secular, liberal, Jeffersonian democracy that protects the rights of women and political dissidents. HTS’s track record in Idlib was marked by documented cases of torture, arbitrary arrests and mid-night executions, though their slaughter of opponents is nowhere near the scale of the murderous to Assad dictators.

I wonder why the moral outrage of the Ivy League human rights activists was not triggered even though Assad butchered 600,000 human beings in the Syrian civil war and created 12 million refugees in a country of 24 million people.

Iran is unquestionably the biggest loser in the Levant’s geopolitical game of chicken, with Russia also weakened since it failed to preserve an Arab state that had been its ally since the Brezhnev era in the USSR of the early 1970’s.

The biggest winner in the events of last week is President Erdogan, who has replaced Iran as the new imperial power broker of Syria. This is a perilous moment for the Syrian Kurds whose statelet of Rojava in Northeast Syria faces an existential threat from a resurgent Turkish power play.

Russia may well lose its naval bases in Tartus and Latakia, and thus the last vestige of the Tsarist imperial dream for warm water ports on the Mediterranean. Iran has lost its proxy militia empire in the Arab world and the mullah regime must now confront its domestic enemies with its political legitimacy torn to shreds. Israel has taken advantage of the geopolitical convulsions in Syria to increase its buffer zone on the other side of Mount Hermon, a strategic prize beyond the occupied Golan Heights.

The fate of Syria now depends not only on the management of power equations among its various rebel militias and ethno-religious minorities but also the calculus of realpolitik between Israel, Turkey, US, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan and Qatar.

The death rattle of the Ottoman Empire and the restless ghosts of Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot now haunt the Syria they once awarded to the Quai d’Orsay as a League of Nations mandate more than 100 years ago. The merciless Great Game in Bilad-al-Sham continues!