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In Fight for Syria, a Battle for Domination of the Entire Middle East
In a region “already on fire,” analysts say, rebels’ advance toward Damascus is a barometer of the shifting power dynamics that also affect nations like Iran, Turkey, Russia and the United States.
As armed rebels have advanced at lightning speed in recent days from the north of Syria toward the capital, Damascus, footage online showed statues of the Assad dynasty — which has kept the country in its authoritarian grip for over 50 years — crashing to the ground.
But as the figures of President Bashar al-Assad’s deceased father and brother fell to cries of “God is Great!” the question looming over the astonishingly rapid resurrection of the torpid civil war into a five-alarm fire is whether the rebels might topple the president himself.
The commander of the rebel alliance, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who depicts himself as a reformed zealot from Al Qaeda, has bluntly made that point.
“Our goal is to liberate Syria from this oppressive regime,” he said in a video interview with The New York Times.
Whether the rebels succeed or not, experts believe that an expected brutal fight to control Damascus, and by extension Syria, would constitute the most important confrontation yet in the struggle to remake the region, one ignited on Oct. 7, 2023, with the Hamas-led attack on Israel.
The main regional players — Israel, Iran and Turkey — all have a stake in the outcome, which means that the ripples will affect not just the Middle East, but also global powers like the United States and Russia.
If the war in Gaza is the worst manifestation yet of the seemingly intractable Israel-Palestinian dispute, which drew in the armed Lebanese group Hezbollah, analysts call the fight for Syria a far more important struggle to dominate a regional crossroads that influences the entire Middle East.
“Syria is the barometer for how power dynamics in the region are changing,” said Mona Yacoubian, head of the Middle East and North Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. “It is in for a period of chaos in a region that is already on fire.”
Israel’s strategists refer to Syria as the “hub of hubs,” which has served as a supply conduit for men and arms to places like southern Lebanon. There, Hezbollah, Iran’s main regional ally, held sway before Israel decimated the group’s ranks by assassinating its longtime leader and much of his top echelon. Israel also launched direct attacks on strategic air defenses in Iran.
Israel is determined to prevent Iran, which has propped up the Assad regime, from re-establishing those supply lines. It is also not clear how Israel would react to an Islamic-style government in Syria should Mr. al-Assad’s regime fall, especially a government beholden to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been a harsh critic because of the Gaza war.
Iran knows that if it loses Mr. al-Assad and its sway over Damascus, it is game over for its attempt to fortify a crescent of Shiite Muslim proxy forces from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen that can threaten Israel. Nonetheless on Friday, Iran, after more than a decade of staunch support for Mr. al-Assad, began evacuating top military commanders of its powerful Quds Forces and other personnel from Syria, according to Iranian and regional officials.
Some analysts see the hand of Mr. Erdogan in the sweeping advance of the main Syrian rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant. Turkey seized an opportunity to increase its influence at a time when Iran was beleaguered, analysts said, and it wants the three million Syrian refugees who fled to its territory because of the civil war to return home.
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Damascus is the target, Mr. Erdogan told reporters after Friday prayers in Istanbul. “The opposition’s march continues,” he said. “Our wish is that this march in Syria continues without incident.”
In Russia, which had made bolstering Mr. al-Assad a cornerstone of its Middle East policy for almost a decade, President Vladimir V. Putin faces a dilemma: beef up his country’s forces there to aid Syria and risk shortchanging his troops in Ukraine, where he needs every hand to prosecute the war.
In a telling sign of diminishing confidence, Russia announced on Friday that its citizens should leave Syria.
Russia and Iran are not the only nations ordering evacuations.
The U.S. State Department also encouraged Americans to leave. Washington has not known quite what to do about Syria for more than a decade, basically letting its policy drift after Russia moved in 2015 to intervene there militarily, analysts said. Now, Washington faces a moment of transition between two administrations, with the incoming president, Donald J. Trump, having once referred to Syria as “sand and death.”
It is unclear how much time all these governments have to act, given the volatile situation on the ground. In little over a week, the Syrian rebels have captured two of the country’s most important cities along the north-south corridor that forms the country’s main spine.
The rebels have been preparing for this offensive for more than a year, said Ibrahim Hamidi, the Syrian editor of Al-Majalla, an online current affairs magazine based in London. On the surface, the war might resemble the period around 2014, when Mr. al-Assad was on the ropes, and Iran and Russia intervened. That was then.
“The whole equation is different now,” said Mr. Hamidi.
Iran and Hezbollah, the main forces buttressing the regime, have been seriously weakened from their fight with Israel. And Russia, whose air force used to carpet-bomb Syrian rebel strongholds, is preoccupied by its war in Ukraine. While Russia has resumed aerial bombardments in Syria, it is on a far smaller scale.
First to fall was the city of Aleppo, the economic capital, and then Hama, the breadbasket. The rebel forces are now putting pressure on Homs, which is a little over 100 miles north of Damascus and the strategic hinge linking the country’s heartland to the Mediterranean Sea and the coastal center of the Alawites, a minority Shiite Muslim sect that dominates the regime.
Civilians began to flee Homs in earnest on Friday.
Syria has relied heavily on Iranian militias for ground troops. But Israeli missile attacks on Syria have thinned the ranks of senior Iranian militia commanders, as well as supply lines.
And on Friday, Kurdish forces in northeast Syria, who have long been buttressed by a contingent of about 900 U.S. troops, reportedly took control of the main border crossing that Iranian forces used to enter Syria from Iraq.
As for Hezbollah, in 2013, its forces poured over the border from Lebanon to smash the armed opposition at Qusayr. And some of its men have now deployed to defend Homs, said a Hezbollah official in Damascus, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
But after months of fighting Israel in Lebanon, it is unclear how many forces Hezbollah has left to deploy to Syria.
When it comes to the Syrian Army, some of the strongest units, the Fourth Armored Division and the Republican Guards, have long been stationed around Damascus with the idea of making it coup-proof. But lack of training and low salaries have taken their toll, with regular troops melting away rather than confronting the rebels.
“You need loyal, reliable troops to hold territory, and they are not there,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former U.S. government official on security issues.
Many analysts consider the central Syrian state a hollow shell. “The Assad regime is unbelievably rickety,” Mr. Tabler said. “It is like an old car put together with spare parts by unknown mechanics.”
Since the Obama administration, Washington has been fearful of what was called “catastrophic success”: having Mr. al-Assad fall, only to be replaced by a jihadist regime. That fear remains, although Mr. Jolani, who has held authoritarian control of northwestern Idlib Province for years, attempted through outreach to minorities and other moderate steps to recalibrate his reputation as a religious nationalist rather than a jihadist.
The alliance, which broke ties with Al Qaeda in 2016 but remains labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and the United Nations, has become a broader coalition that includes more moderate factions.
Yet, memories of the disasters that accompanied the effort to glue together a coalition Iraqi government are still fresh.
“This is all about the balance of power between these regional players in the Levant, where Syria sits at the heart,” said Firas Maksad, a senior fellow and Syria expert at the Middle East Institute based in Washington.
Raja Abdulrahim, Hwaida Saad and Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States. More about Neil MacFarquhar
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