Why did Syria fall?

Intervening in the blame game

The primary responsibility for the disastrous situation in Syria is Turkey’s decision to invade with its proxy force HTS, which was trained, armed, gathered, and launched from Turkey-controlled Idlib. The strategists, trainers, armers, and financiers include the US and Israel, who with Turkey are reaping the benefits of Syria’s downfall.

The responsibility for the crime lies with the US, Israel, and Turkey. Nonetheless, anti-imperialists are looking for lessons to learn and what went wrong. Because Syria, throughout the civil war period 2011-2024, had been held up by an alliance of Lebanese Hizbollah, Iran, and Russia (who entered the conflict in that chronological order) analysts who are sympathetic to each of these groups are presenting slightly different explanations of what went wrong for the alliance.

Russia-focused analysts: I have seen analysts focused on Russia emphasize the following points: Russia offered in 2018 to rebuild Assad’s army from its rotten foundations up, but Assad refused. In the 2024 campaign to defend Syria, Russia’s air force quickly went to work when the Turkish / HTS invasion began but couldn’t defend the country if the SAA would not fight. By the Arab League (which had recently let him back in) and the Emirates specifically, Assad had been promised normalization with the West and the lifting of sanctions if he broke out of his alliance with Iran and Yemen and exited the axis. He began to do just this, and Russia reached a point where they could do nothing more for him. I’ve also seen analysts pointing to an orientalist argument about Why Arabs Lose Wars. The same analysts cited admiringly an article about Russia’s intervention in Syria and how it was effective because it was based on a careful reading by Russia of the history and politics of the region. In fact, Russia’s reading was the reason the intervention failed, why in 2024 Syria is in the exact situation it would have been in 2015 had Russia never intervened.

The gap Russia-focused analysts presentation - the Israel loophole: Russia gave the coalition to destroy Syria an Israel loophole. Russia’s explicit position was that they would protect Syria from Islamic State-type invaders from Idlib but not from Israel’s bombing campaign. A decade of unanswered bombing from Israel attritted Syria’s capacities. Israel’s freedom of action in Syria also helped them to decapitate Hizbollah in September 2024, as they developed intelligence assets on the Hizbollah leadership by following the latter’s activities in Syria. Russia told Syria that they would support them against one enemy but not the other. Knowing that is the case, the offer to rebuild the Syrian army in 2018 cannot have fully been believed. A rebuilt Syrian army would not be acceptable to Israel any more than Russia helping Syria defend itself from Israeli bombing would be. Russia’s receptivity to Israel guaranteed Syria’s degradation over time. There may have been good reasons for Russia to make these choices, but the result was the degradation of Syria’s ability to defend itself over the entire decade of Russian support. Russia seems to believe that Israel has legitimate security interests in the region including killing its Iranian and Syrian allies. Russia’s leaders must know that Turkey, the US, and Israel are all working together in West Asia as they are in Ukraine - but for their own diplomatic reasons, they behave as if they are facing separate entities.

In 2015, Russia put a shield up over Syria, but the shield had an Israel loophole through which Israeli bombs attrited the Syrian state.

Iran-focused analysts: Iran-focused analysts emphasize Assad’s seemingly successful approach to the Arab League including the Gulf states last year. The price of this reintegration into the Arab world was that Assad distance himself from Iran and Yemen (notably asking the Yemeni ambassador to leave at the request of the Saudis). Iran and its allies, including Hizbollah and Iraqi resistance groups, were ready to defend Syria, but Assad didn’t want them. Iran also recognized that for them to defend Assad was playing into anti-Shia sentiment in Syria, giving the impression that Syria’s was a sectarian conflict, an impression neither Assad nor Iran wanted to give.

The gap in the Iran-focused analysts presentation: Since the assassination of president Raisi in a helicopter crash in May 2024, Iran has presented political divisions about their approach to the West. The new president, Pezeshkian, has said publicly that his priority is to convince the West that Iran doesn’t want war. The chronology shows that Assad was moving away from Iran for a long time, but Assad must also have considered in light of Pezeshkian’s statements whether asking Iran to come to his aid in another round of bloody civil war might provoke further divisions inside Iran and further difficulties for that country, strengthening the arguments of the faction that wanted to wash its hands of any conflicts with the West.

Hizbollah-focused analysts: Hizbollah focused analysts look to several key moments of the war as lost opportunities. In 2020, when the military architect of the Axis of Resistance concept, Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, was assassinated in Iraq by Trump’s order, then Secretary-General of Hizbollah (and the strategic and charismatic leader of the Axis of Resistance) said that the only appropriate revenge for Soleimani’s death would be the removal of all US presence from the region including bases in Iraq and Jordan and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In an interview with Rania Khalek yesterday, Elijah Magnier said that Hizbollah had placed a substantial amount of its missile force in Syria around the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, hoping that Israel would refrain from bombing civilian sites if they placed their missile forces away from them (Israel didn’t).

When Nasrallah ordered the opening of the support front in October 2023, these missile forces were disallowed from engaging Israel by order of Assad, who feared Israeli retaliation. Also - knowing he didn’t have Russian support - Assad refused to retaliate for Israel’s weekly bombings of Damascus, airports and roads, granting Israel impunity to degrade Syria over time. When Hizbollah, along with Iraqi, Iranian and Syrian forces were ready to end the war by destroying HTS and taking back Idlib in 2019, Russia came up with the Astana formula to “freeze” the conflict and leave Idlib to Turkey. That diplomacy culminated in Turkey’s return to war in 2024 and the final disaster yesterday.

Gap in Hizbollah-focused analysis: The Hizbollah-focused analysts I have seen emphasized that armed struggle alone offers a deterrent. Diplomacy with the West (and Turkey) is pointless. Watching Israel destroy Syria’s military arsenal in total and occupy its lands now that Syria has a pro-Israel regime, it is hard to argue that they’re wrong. But the ability to take the offensive is resource-dependent. Russia’s choice of diplomacy instead of finishing off HTS could well have been motivated by wanting to maintain good relations with Turkey, but it could also have been based on a sober assessment of whether the Syria-Iran-Russia-Hizbollah alliance could actually win the war if Turkey and the US had intervened directly on behalf of HTS (which they threatened to do at the time). Perhaps the war would come anyway, but on less favorable terms - which seems to have been what happened. So maybe there’s not much to impeach in the Hizbollah-focused analysis.

Does this provide much in the way of lessons?

Russia: Don’t give Israel a loophole. Don’t freeze a conflict if you can avoid it.

Syria: You can never make Israel feel so secure that it won’t attack its neighbors. Not retaliating gives Israel impunity to more depravity, and when Israel feels secure, it attacks.

Iran: The West will betray all agreements.

Everybody: Blame the sanctioners and the occupiers, not the sanctioned and occupied.

[On that note, in my next article Joe Emersberger and I will assess Assad’s human rights record and argue against the idea that Assad’s human rights record is the root cause of Syria’s downfall.]

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I’ll conclude by addressing some questions about Assad that I have seen arise: Was it cowardly for Assad to order the SAA to stand down or for Assad to go into quiet exile without even a statement? What difference would a statement have made at this point? Would giving the West another lynching of another Arab leader to broadcast around the world, giving Hillary Clinton another cackle about a murder, have been less cowardly?

Should Assad have met with Erdogan instead of snubbing him? The notion that Erdogan did all this because he felt snubbed implies, at the very least, that Erdogan was not someone with whom a meeting would have been productive.

Did Assad do enough to alleviate the suffering of his people? An hour a day of electricity, soaring prices, unpaid soldiers, all made the situation in Syria intolerable and the state fragile. But were these the outcomes of Assad’s decisions? The US occupies all of Syria’s oil and wheat fields: Syria is cut off from its own food and energy. The Turks dismantled Aleppo’s factories and trucked them off, whole, to Turkey at the beginning of the war: Syria’s industrial base was literally stolen. The US imposed the worst sanctions regime since the others on Syria, the Caesar sanctions, preventing Syria from being able to rebuild its economy.

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Two days before Syria fell, I wrote that “Syria and its allies will attempt to reorganize and turn the tide.” The tide wasn’t turned. Syria is destroyed. The stronger side triumphed over the weaker. The geographical hub that made the Axis of Resistance possible as we knew it, is gone, like the main leaders who built it (Nasrallah and Soleimani). Israel will keep genociding, Palestinians will keep resisting, the victorious imperialists will keep marching on, with Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, and indeed Russia in their crosshairs.

So, perhaps there’s not too much to be learned from all this. But do take this away from the above: the criminals are to blame, not those who tried to stop them.

Syria’s new government’s soldiers focusing on the most urgent security task while Israel destroys Syria’s arsenal and occupies its lands: burning Hafez al-Assad’s tomb.