The Syrian conflict was never as stagnant as it seemed

The Middle East is a region ignored at one’s peril. Just as the Palestine-Israel conflict was relegated to forgotten status by much of the international community until the horrors of October 7, 2023 happened, so was the Syrian conflict for the past four years until late November, when Syrian rebel armed groups began advancing from the northwest, taking Aleppo and continuing to push south.

The trajectory of the military developments in Syria does not bode well for Iran’s presence in the country. Iran sees itself as the main pillar that has rescued the government of Syria, and it regards the Astana agreement as having helped secure government control over most of Syria.

But the rebel advance is challenging this, causing the territorial control map of Syria to change by the day. The Astana agreement between Turkey, Russia and Iran had resulted in the de facto division of Syria into zones controlled by different sides. Two thirds of Syria was under the control of the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad, the northeast under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces, and the northwest under the control of various rebel factions mostly backed by Turkey. None of those sides was able to overwhelm the others militarily but Iran was satisfied with the status quo because it regarded itself as having guaranteed long-term influence as a reward for its support of Mr Al Assad’s government.

The perception of conflict stagnation was shared by the international community, bolstered by a decline in the intensity of the fighting in Syria over the past four years. After almost a decade of fierce battles between government forces and the rebels, the violence lessened but never stopped. Russian and Syrian air strikes on Idlib, the heartland of opposition-held areas, continued to kill sometimes up to 200 people a month, including in attacks on civilians areas. The world’s attention, however, was elsewhere.

Less attention to Syria from the international community and the media, as well as Iran’s confidence in its own position in the country, meant that the current rebel-led military campaign against government forces and Iran-backed groups inside Syria took Iran and the international community by surprise. But this campaign was not planned overnight.

Rebel groups were seeing Iran-backed militants make increasing gains in Syria. For example, one of the key weapons production sites in Aleppo, called the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Centre, came into the service of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which used it to manufacture weapons to strengthen its arsenal. With the majority of Syrian rebel groups being Sunni, they saw Iran’s and its proxies’ deepening presence in Syria as an effort to increase Shiite influence and revolutionary ideology. This was not a scenario the rebel groups considered acceptable in the long term.

Iran’s perception of the status quo in Syria was also indirectly influenced by the US’s, UN’s and others’ proscribing of a number of rebel groups in the northwest like Hayat Tahrir Al Sham as terrorists. This excluded these groups from the diplomatic talks on political transition in Syria, namely the UN-led peace process. Iran assumed this curtailed these groups’ political influence indefinitely. The current rebel military campaign aims to push the international community to reconsider the proscriptions and to carve out space for those groups at the table in context of negotiations over political transition in Syria.

This is not a new goal for these rebels. Although some of the groups began life as extremist religious militants, they evolved to have greater political ambition at the national level.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham has transformed from an affiliate of Al Qaeda engaged in competition with ISIS over who is the true representative of the path of Osama bin Laden into a group embracing much political and military pragmatism. HTS came to form a de facto authority that rules Idlib, called the Salvation Government. Although none of this succeeded in shifting the international community’s skepticism about the legitimacy of HTS as one of the political representatives of the Syrian people, the group has not given up on its goal of pursuing international recognition.

Regional shifts over the past year, in which Iran’s influence in the Middle East has come to be weakened due to the confrontation with Israel, created an opportunity for the Syrian rebels to try to shift the balance of power in Syria to their benefit. Their military gains have been partly the result of Iran and Hezbollah’s reduced capacity to send reinforcements into Syria.

All this reminds us the Syrian conflict was never as stagnant as it may have appeared to outside observers and to Iran. It also illustrates how the stalling of the UN-led peace process, which Iran had seen as beneficial because it meant continuation of Mr Al Assad’s rule, ended up creating an opportunity for the rebels to strengthen their military capacity. Coupled with the Syrian army’s degraded fighting capacity, domestic and regional factors are not going in Iran’s favour.

The current developments in Syria show that no status quo can be taken for granted as indefinite for as long as there is an underlying unresolved conflict within it. While Iran will not give up on its influence in Syria easily, it will eventually be faced with a changed reality on the ground that Tehran itself played a role in creating.