The above image shows some of the Syrian navy vessels destroyed by Israel this week.
Over the past 17 days, the system of (Baath Party + military) governance that the Asad family had maintained over Syria for 53 years underwent a catastrophic and complete collapse. This collapse had been many years in the making; and now, it has numerous implications for the regional balance in West Asia– not least for the serious blow it has delivered to “Axis of resistance”, the previously hardy alliance of regional forces working together to resist the cruel, expansionist assaults of the Israeli military. Asadist Syria had not been an active participant in those efforts, but it provided a key land bridge for interactions between the resistance forces in Iran/Iraq and those in Lebanon.
The severing of this land bridge will have significant, though almost certainly not fatal, effects on the capabilities of Hizbullah and its resistance allies in Lebanon. (We discussed some of these effects in the discussion I was part of in the Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday.)
A potentially much more serious effect on the anti-Israeli resistance may well turn out to be the re-emergence throughout West Asia of the same kind of harshly anti-Shi-ite sectarianism that has been publicly displayed by leaders (and rank-and-filers) of the victorious, al-Qaeda-style Hai’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement that rode into glory in Damascus on Sunday and Monday. (We discussed that, too, in the livestream. An imperfectly edited version of the transcript of our convo can be downloaded here.)
But even far beyond West Asia, the collapse of Asadist Syria, and indeed of the Syrian state itself in any recognizable form, and the manner in which that collapse transpired, will have stark– and as of now, only dimly predictable– repercussions on a global balance that has anyway been in an increasing degree of flux over recent years.
At the regional level, the most evident features of the collapse were:
- The speed and breadth of the collapse itself, as nearly all arms of the state including crucially its once-feared military seemed to fall apart simultaneously, often long before the HTS fighting units even made contact with them. (Alastair Crooke referred to some of the causes of this in this December 10 discussion with Chris Hedges.)
- The strong forward role that Turkey had played in working with HTS, to whose governance of the northwest Syrian province of Idlib it had long given support. Turkey gave HTS many of the capabilities it needed, in order to advance east and south through Aleppo and other cities and finally to Damascus. (Leading Turkish military/intel functionaries have been visiting HTS-ruled Damascus in recent days.)
- The decision the leaders of Iran evidently took NOT to invest military assets in trying to prop up the Asad government. (You can download an English translation. of the comments that Iranian Supreme Guide Ali Khamene’i made on December 11 about the Syrian collapse, here.)
- … And of course, crucially, there is the record of many years of the Israeli-US project to overthrow the Asad government, which included: numerous Israeli air attacks against Syria prior to the past 17 days; the concerted US-Israeli assaults against Lebanon over the past 14-plus months; Washington’s continued use of its military and allied bases in northeastern Syria to deny vital resources to the Damascus government and to prevent it from exercising sovereignty in that region; and Washington’s decades-long campaign to starve Syrian society into submission through ever-tighter economic sanctions…
All of the anti-Syrian efforts sustained by successive Israeli governments over the decades then culminated in the extensive and destructive assault that Israel’s air force undertook over the past five days to destroy the entirety of the defensive capabilities of the Syrian state– any Syrian state, including the one that HTS now presumably wants to establish.
Israel’s air assault had been long in the planning, as this Washington Post report noted. Evidently, when it was launched last Sunday, that happened with the clear prior knowledge (and therefore permission– and possibly also active collusion) of the militaries of Turkey, the United States, and Russia, all of which command significant military assets within Syria’s territory.
I do not have time today to delve into most the geopolitical ramifications of what has been happening in and to Syria over the past 17 days. I will just note that the ability the Israeli military demonstrated to be able to collapse the whole of the Syrian state’s military infrastructure through, essentially, the first 24 hours of its bombing campaign is a development of equal or possibly even greater geopolitical impact than the ability the Israeli military showed in June 1967 to be able, within a similarly short time-span, to collapse the air forces of Syria and Egypt– though in the 1967 assault, the two states thereby targeted still retained considerable ground-force, command-and-control, and territorial defense capabilities, which now do not exist at all in today’s Syria.
The whole of Syria, except for the portions where Turkish or American forces hold sway, or the tiny enclave around Tartous to which the Russians were allowed– by apparent agreement with HTS– to withdraw their military units previous stationed in a couple of other places in Syria… Well apart from those areas, the whole of Syria is now totally at the mercy of Israel and has zero capability to defend itself from Israel’s air force– or from further, possibly large-scale, ground incursions of the sort we have already seem undertaken from Israeli-occupied Golan and taking over broad swathes of land in the Hauran and even including the summit and many of the slopes of Jebel al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon) that directly overlook Damascus.
It is worth underlining (though this should not be necessary?) that those Israeli ground advances undertaken in recent days punched right through the United Nations force UNDOF, that was established to monitor the disengagement agreement negotiated between Israel and Syria in 1974 at the end of the 1973 war between them. Just as, over preceding weeks, the Israeli military had entered Lebanon in clear violation of numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions, and had punched effortlessly through the U.N.’s UNIFIL force there, without any repercussions. And similarly, all those Israeli air attacks against both Syria and Lebanon have been in clear violation of every aspect of international law.
We can see Israel’s actions against Syria and Lebanon as a clear continuation of the scofflawry with which it has repeatedly and with complete impunity violated international humanitarian law and challenged or worked aggressively to undermine or dismantle U.N. institutions working in occupied Palestine. Its military and political leaders have been given free rein– most especially by their supporters, allies, and co-conspirators in Washington– to act however they want.
There remains a massive question over why, precisely, the Russian government has been acting as it has in re Syria. Various explanations have been offered. Here are three, operating at various levels, that are worthy of consideration:
ONE: That Pres. Putin decided he could not save the Asad government if it could not save itself.
This explanation has some prima-facie plausibility, though one might ask whether the Russians could have done more to help the Asad government be in a better position to help itself? On the other hand, to be effective, such efforts would need to have been sustained for a number of years prior to 2024. And Pres. Putin has been fairly busy elsewhere over the past three years…
TWO: That the decision to, in effect, sell Asad (and the concept of Syrian state sovereignty that he represented) down the drain was made as a clearly understood tradeoff for Russia getting what it feels it needs in Ukraine.
There is quite a lot of evidence for this explanation, though it remains generally indirect and circumstantial. What is clear is that (a) there were extensive negotiations/discussion between Moscow and Ankara, and Moscow and Tehran prior to the Russian– and Iranian– decision to stand aside from confronting the Turkish-backed HTS advance in Syria; (b) the HTS fighting units have clearly allowed the Russian forces stationed in places other than Tartous to retreat in good order, and apparently taking a lot of their gear with them, to the Russian naval base in that city.
Also relevant is this context are the many reports that some Ukrainian special-force units have been in northwest Syria for some weeks, working to upgrade the HTS military’s drone warfare capabilities.
John Helmer, a veteran Moscow-based commentator who has excellent sources within Russian state organs, has published an intriguing assessment of how the decision-making went in Moscow. He reports that while the Russian military wanted to do a lot more to support/defend Asad in Syria, they were over-ruled by Putin himself who informed them that the emphasis needs to remain on Ukraine. Helmer also notes there may be Russian plans to retreat from Tartous itself and to establish a new Mediterranean base for the Russian navy in Tobruk, in eastern Libya, instead.
THREE: That Putin’s decision was part of a policy of retrenchment/re-positioning, on a broader, more global scale.
This is mainly my conjecture. But I will note that Putin’s decisions on Syria– and including some of the reasoning for them that well-informed people like Helmer have reported– seem to have had the effect of stabbing in the back the whole active Axis of Resistance to Israel, the strong current global movement for Palestinian rights, and perhaps even the whole global push for a multi-polar world order. Let us see…
These developments will continue to unfold in a world in which, of course, Donald Trump is poised to become president of the United States and in which Israel has suddenly gained effective hegemony over massive new swathes of Arab land in West Asia.
This may not turn out well for either Israel, the United States, or Turkey, within Syria. And almost certainly not for Syria’s people themselves. We should all recall how the much-touted (in the West) “euphoria” over the overthrowing of the Afghan Taliban, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and then Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi ended up bringing social collapse, intense insecurity, and broad immiseration to those countries’ peoples…
And now, with the Israeli military having knocked out Syria, both the Trumpists and the Israeli military are now reportedly weighing going after their biggest target of all, Iran. God help us all.
