The collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime means the end of the sphere of influence that Iran has built since the beginning of the ayatollahs' rule. It is another blow to the so-called "axis of resistance" after the defeat of Hezbollah and Hamas. On the other hand, Russia is left without its oldest (and currently only) Arab ally. For the time being, Syria remains divided, and there is no guarantee that the armed factions will not start fighting each other, or that a destructive new war will not spread to neighbouring countries, as it did a decade ago.
Bashar al-Assad's Syria was a key player in the so-called "Iranian Crescent", a sphere of influence Iran had built in the Middle East over decades. Its foundations were laid in the early 1980s, with the emergence of Hezbollah and the Badr Organization, an Iraqi Shiite group that fought alongside Iran in its war with Saddam Hussein. The ayatollahs in Tehran were then seeking to export their revolution to the region, and these political-militant groups were their first instruments, drawing into the alliance some previously established ones, such as the Dawa party in Iraq.
The "Iranian Crescent" began to take shape after the US-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, when Tehran began training, financing and coordinating a range of Shiite militias in Iraq and extending its influence to other countries in the region. Within a decade, Iran's sphere of influence has expanded through Iraqi Shiite militias, Bashar al-Assad's Syria and Lebanon's Hezbollah, to which was added a proxy in the Palestinian territories, Islamic Jihad, and as far as on the Red Sea coasts, the Yemeni Houthi militia.
Syria's importance in the Iranian system was given by its proximity to Israel and Lebanon (a country that was even partially, for almost three decades, under Syrian occupation), which allowed its use both as a base for preparing anti-Israeli attacks and as a logistical corridor for supporting Hezbollah. And indeed, a significant part of Hezbollah's impressive arsenal has reached the Shiite militia via Syria.
Bashar al-Assad's regime was a declared a secular one, based on the ideology of the Baath Party, which is normally incompatible with Tehran's Islamism. The Assad clan is indeed part of the Alawite community, which is associated with Shiite Muslims, but there are significant differences between their type of Shiism and the Shiism practiced by Iranians and Lebanese or Iraqi Shiites. Syria's strategic position, but also common interests, led Tehran to overcome ideological differences with Damascus and intervene decisively in the Syrian civil war. Then,
Iran sent thousands of its own troops, particularly from the "Quds Force", to Syria and mobilized Iraqi Shiite militias and Hezbollah to support Bashar al-Assad. This effort was enough to help Damascus stop the rebel advance in the early years of the war.
Success in Syria privileged pro-Iranian forces, build on the reputation they had in Lebanon, fighting Israel, and in Iraq, where they had clashed with the United States and largely controlled it after the American withdrawal. More victories followed: in Iraq, Shiite militias and their Iranian advisers played a key role in the war against the Islamic State and the liberation of the vast territory the jihadist group had conquered. In Yemen, the Houthi militia captured most of Yemen and managed to stand firmly for years against a coalition led by Saudi Arabia.
The "axis of resistance" had suffered a series of blows and the most severe was the killing in Baghdad, in January 2020, of its main architect and coordinator, Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, in a US airstrike, along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a key figure in Iraqi Shiite militias. Israel had also launched numerous airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria, in an attempt to prevent Tehran from consolidating its presence near its borders and to stop the flow of weapons to Hezbollah.
The beginning of the end for the "axis of resistance" was October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its terrorist attack on Israel. Israel responded with force, managing to eliminate the terrorist group's leadership and a large part of its. While fighting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Israel also intensified its air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria. This was followed by a devastating campaign against Hezbollah, which lost its leadership, thousands of fighters, and a significant part of its arsenal. Iran was also directly told that it could suffer even harder blows over strategic targets on its territory in response to its ballistic missile attacks.
As a result of these confrontations with Israel, Hezbollah and Iran have largely lost their ability and desire to intervene in support of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, as they did at the beginning of the war. Trump’s imminent arrival in the White House also has the potential to dampen the
Iranians’ momentum, as the future leader in the White House has a close partnership with Tehran’s number one enemy, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was himself on the verge of ordering air strikes against Iran, and was even the target of an Iranian assassination plot during his last election campaign. It is therefore to be assumed that Trump will be ready to respond harshly to the first Iranian provocation.
The signal that Bashar al-Assad would not stand up to the unexpected rebel offensive was given by the extremely weak response from Iran and its allies; only a few hundred fighters from the region's Shiite militias crossed into Syria this time. Also, when it was learned that Tehran had begun withdrawing its military advisers, it became clear that it was a matter of days until the regime collapsed.
Besides Iran, the second state that helped Bashar al-Assad stay in power and regain control of a significant part of Syria was Russia. The alliance between Moscow and Damascus dates back to the Arab-Israeli wars, when the USSR armed several Arab countries with socialist-inspired regimes. The initial success of the Syrian and Egyptian forces in the 1973 war was largely due to the USSR military equipment. But starting the 1970s, Middle Eastern countries began to reorient themselves, one by one, towards partnerships with the West. Nevertheless, Syria remained an ally of Moscow throughout all these years, which received, in exchange, its only naval base in the Mediterranean, namely in the Tartus harbor. After the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2014, Russia protected Syria in the Security Council, and in 2015, Vladimir Putin decided to intervene militarily in support of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. But after three years of war in Ukraine, Moscow no longer had the capacity or willingness to intervene forcefully in Syria, even its planes carried out some limited bombing. Moreover, the Russians seem to have withdrawn their ships from Tartus and that would be the most significant blow they have suffered in both the Orient and the Mediterranean in the more than four decades that have passed since Egypt chose to become a partner with the United States.
The future of Syria and the entire region therefore remains unclear. The only certainty is that Iran and Russia have suffered a major defeat with the collapse of the bloodiest and longest-running dictatorial regime in the Middle East, which both brutally supported for years, but ultimately abandoned.