Why Iran Is Abandoning al-Assad
The Russian Federation Is Pulling Up Stakes and Leaving Syria
The strategic situation in Syria is dire for the Baathist government of Bashar al-Assad. Typically in military history, if an invader takes the capital of the other country, it secures its victory.
Damascus is the prize.
Damascus has an Achilles heel. It is landlocked, deep in the south of the country, and far from the port of Latakia that supplies it.
The other nearby port, Beirut in Lebanon, is a shadow of its former self, and the Lebanese government has closed the borders with Syria. You could get some things in from Iraq by truck, but the Kurdish-led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have taken all of Deir al-Zor province and the checkpoint of Al-Bukamal on the Syrian side of the Syria-Iraq border has fallen to the SDF.
Food, weapons and ammunition have to come from Latakia. The truck route from Latakia down to Damascus passes through Homs.
The fundamentalist Sunni Arab militia, the HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or the Levant Liberation Council), led by a former al-Qaeda affiliate, had Idlib. In the past week it has taken Aleppo and then moved south to take Hama. (These territories are green in the below map from “X”.)
Homs is next. If the Tahrir al-Sham takes Homs, it can cut Damascus off from resupply.
Game over.
In 2012-2013, when the fundamentalist Sunni rebels, including al-Qaeda, had taken Homs, they were pushed back out by the intervention of Iran and the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia alongside the remnants of the Syrian Arab Army. The fundamentalist hopes of cutting off Damascus were dashed.
In 2015, the Sunni fundamentalists in Idlib in the north of Syria tried out a Plan B, which was simply to take Latakia itself. That would also cut off Damascus from resupply.
Iran and Hezbollah could not muster the sheer manpower to stop this from happening. The Sunni fundamentalists were getting backing from Turkey and the Gulf, and the Syrian Arab Army had seen two-thirds of its troops (mostly themselves Sunni) desert. Hezbollah probably only really has 25,000 fighters despite exaggerated claims, and they were spread thin in Syria and in Lebanon itself. (Lebanon is a small country of maybe 4.5 million citizens, and only a third or so are Shiites, and only half of Shiites support Hezbollah. So it just isn’t that large an organization).
So it is alleged that in the summer of 2015, the head of Iran’s Qods Force, the special operations unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, flew to Moscow and informed Russian President Vladimir Putin that Iran had done all it could. If Russia did not want to see Syria fall to the Sunni fundamentalists led by al-Qaeda—with all its implications for nearby Russian Muslim-majority areas such as Chechnya—then Putin would have to intervene.
On 30 September 2015, Russia started flying air support missions in Syria for the Syrian Arab Army, Hezbollah, and Iraqi Shiite militias, against the Sunni fundamentalists. This combination of ground forces and Russian air support succeeded in defeating the rebels and bottling them up in Idlib in the north.
Therefore, in some ways the fate of the al-Assad government was sealed when President Putin invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The Russian Aerospace Forces became bogged down in the Ukraine War and were simply not available in the same way for deployment in Syria.
The Russian Federation is pulling up stakes and leaving Syria. The embassy in Damascus said on Telegram Friday that owing to the “difficult” military and political situation in Syria, Russian citizens living in the Syrian Arab Republic were encouraged to take the next commercial flight out of the country. (H/t BBC Monitoring). BBC Monitoring also reports that Russian military bloggers had warned this week that if Homs fell, Russia would lose its military bases in Syria.
Homs fell.
Now veteran Iran correspondent Farnaz Fassihi reports for the New York Times that Iran is withdrawing from Syria.
I suggest that Tehran has no choice but to leave Syria. Without Russian air support, the couple thousand Revolutionary Guards and the remnants of the Hezbollah forces in the country, along with the tattered Syrian Arab Army, cannot hope to defeat the rebels now any more than they could in 2015. The situation is even worse than in in the summer of 2015, since Hezbollah’s forces have been devastated by the recent war with Israel, which saw their commanders blinded or crippled by Israeli booby traps and many of their tactical personnel killed or wounded in battle. Moreover, if Hezbollah attempted to deploy in a big way in Syria now, without Russian air support, Israel would hit them. Russia had offered them their only air defense umbrella, and then only as long as they were doing Russian bidding in targeting the Sunni fundamentalists.
Russian air power made the difference then. Without it, the Syrian government and its few allies are doomed.
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