Civilians gather at Asma al-Assad’s palace in Damascus, Syria, on Monday after it was looted. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)
DOHA, Qatar - The scramble for Syria is underway. Days after President Bashar al-Assad quit the country in the face of triumphant rebel forces, foreign powers are jockeying for control.
Israel has exploited the security vacuum to cross the disputed borders of the occupied Golan Heights to seize Syrian military positions. The United States, while taking a largely hands-off approach, has enabled an allied militia in Syria’s northeast to move into areas once held by Assad and Iranian-backed groups. Turkish-backed rebel forces in Syria’s northwest have pushed into territory once garrisoned by Kurdish fighters aligned with the United States. Russia, which a decade ago rushed thousands of troops into the country to save Assad, has apparently evacuated some inland bases as it tries to hold onto its pivotal Tartus naval facility on the Mediterranean.
Beyond Syria, the country most affected by Assad’s dramatic fall is Iran. The regime in Tehran long saw in Assad’s Syria not just a committed partner, but the crucial beachhead for its strategy of “forward defense” - a staging ground for Iran’s network of proxy groups locked in a sprawling shadow conflict with Israel and other regional rivals. Syria was a thoroughfare for materiel and personnel that bolstered the Lebanese Shiite organization Hezbollah’s ability to threaten Israel. Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon were also instrumental in securing Assad’s fragile victories in earlier stages of Syria’s civil war.
Israel’s punishing campaign against Hezbollah over the past year has killed thousands of people and led to sustained strikes on Iranian assets in Syria, damaging Tehran’s ability to reinforce its decimated Lebanese proxy. With Assad gone, the entire project of Iran’s “axis of resistance” - an alliance of militant proxies arrayed across the Middle East - could “just unravel,” a Western diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told my colleagues.
Assad’s ouster marks “a tectonic shift” in the region, with “consequences that are going to reverberate” well beyond the Middle East, Mehran Kamrava, a professor of government at Georgetown University’s campus in Qatar, told me. “We do not know the shape of the new Syria to come.”
But we do know that whatever emerges is unlikely to benefit Iran. A generation of Syrians brutalized under Assad will not be quick to forgive Tehran for the role it played in sustaining their repression. Even in neighboring Iraq, where Iran’s influence remains more secure, many locals, including Iraqi Shiites, resent its meddling and overreach.
The Iranian regime has “repeatedly miscalculated over the past 15 months” following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel and the conflict that has ensued, said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East program at Chatham House, a British think tank, speaking at a high-level Middle East forum in Doha, Qatar’s capital, over the weekend.
In part as a result of these “strategic misreadings,” Vakil said, Iran has seen Hamas and Hezbollah dealt devastating blows, its ally Assad toppled and its own vulnerabilities to Israeli long-range strikes and covert espionage laid bare. “Rather than deterring its foe, Iran’s direct attacks on Israel have only exposed greater weaknesses,” my colleagues wrote.
In an interview on Iranian television Sunday, the country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, expressed frustration with the Assad regime’s failure to cope with the rebels’ lightning campaign, in particular the advance of Hayat Tahrir-al Sham, the Sunni Islamist group once allied with al-Qaeda that has effectively seized control in Damascus.
“What was surprising was, first, the Syrian army’s inability to confront the situation, and second, the rapid pace of developments,” Araghchi said. He also blamed the limited impact of a three-pronged diplomatic process that Iran had carried out alongside Russia and Turkey to stabilize Syria under Assad on a Syrian government that “showed little flexibility.”
A report in Amwaj Media, a London-based online publication that’s well-sourced within the Iranian regime, suggested Tehran gave up on a hollowed-out Assad state that could do little to protect Iranian interests in Syria and seemed more focused on mending fences with erstwhile Iranian adversaries such as Saudi Arabia.
“While Syria’s geography and official state ideology made it central to the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance,’ Assad was apparently leveraging ‘non-resistance’ to rehabilitate his standing among Arab allies of the U.S.,” the publication reported. “So when HTS rolled into [the Syrian cities of] Aleppo and Hama without a fight, Iran was in no rush to come to Assad’s aid.”
The big question is what Iran will do in response to the setback. Some analysts believe a weakened Tehran could push for constructive talks with an incoming Trump administration that’s eager to show an ability to bring peace to the region. In his previous term, though, President-elect Donald Trump unilaterally scrapped the nuclear deal forged between Iran and world powers, a move that convinced many in Tehran of the futility of dealing with Washington and saw the Iranian regime restart enrichment of high-level uranium.
Iranian officials insist they do not want to pursue a nuclear weapon, but the regime might feel compelled to double down on one of its few remaining “bargaining chips,” Kamrava said. “It means that Iran is going to rely more heavily on its ballistic missile program,” he told me. “It is going to ratchet up the rhetoric of weaponization of its nuclear program, and it’s going to enrich at a higher level.”
A vicious cycle of confrontation and escalation could already be in motion. Vakil warned that there was a “short timeline to manage the Iran crisis of 2025,” with all the sanctions that had been lifted due to the 2015 nuclear deal set to “snap back” on Iran by October. If the deal’s signatories choose to deploy that mechanism, that may prod Iran to take further drastic measures, including exiting international agreements on nuclear nonproliferation.
“The Islamic republic is having to take a hard look in the mirror and decide which path it wants to take Iran,” Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told me. “It now needs to decide whether it wants to be North Korea, isolate itself by building a nuclear weapon, or China, engage with the West, as [Iran] once did when it signed the 2015 nuclear deal.”
Top observers are already concerned. “They have a nuclear program that has grown, has spawned in every possible direction,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, director of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, told the BBC over the weekend. “The Iran of 2015 has nothing to do with Iran of 2025. Iran is starting production of 60 percent [uranium] at a much higher level of production, which means they will have the amounts necessary - if they so choose - to have a nuclear device in a much faster way.”
