The Middle East as a Tool for the United States: Turkey, Syria, and the Middle East for the Construction and Defense of a New Government

More than 3 million Syrian refugees need to head home, according to the Turkish leader. Some have already begun doing so. Turkish construction companies are well placed to rebuild Syria, which has been ravaged by more than a decade of war.

Turkey can become the kingmaker. “Turkey will stand to benefit both domestically and regionally from a new and, potentially, a very friendly government in Damascus.”

There are still many developments to come. The upheaval may have implications for a number of countries with interests in Syria.

The U.S. military carried out an unusually large airstrike Sunday on Islamic State bases in central Syria. The U.S. says this was done because a group of Islamic State fighters gathered to train, perhaps hoping to take advantage of the turmoil in Syria. The U.S. hit some targets with a variety of aircraft.

President Biden said the U.S. would maintain its military presence. He called Assad’s ouster both a moment of risk and opportunity, adding that the U.S. would work with Syrians as they try to put together a new government.

President-elect Trump is going in a different direction. Over the weekend he took to social media and said that the United States should not get involved in Syria, and instead let the events play out.

U.S. forces have supplied humanitarian assistance to displaced people in Syria’s southern border, according to an American aid group.

“If you asked the Syrians about the relationship they had with the US military, they would love it, they are very fond of it,” he said.

For Iran, losing Assad as an ally has further eroded its influence — especially after Israel’s war against its regional proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Hezbollah helped keep Assad in power, and the militant group has for years used Syria as a conduit to transfer weapons into Lebanon.

Iran was critical to Assad as he battled to stay in power during the country’s civil war that erupted in 2011. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards withdrew from Syria last week just ahead of rebel advances. Iran used Syria as a transportation route to send weapons to Hezbollah.

Hezbollah and Hamas have suffered because of their war with Israel, and now that Assad is gone, they are even more weakened.

“Losing Syria will deal a huge blow to Iran and its proxies in the region. And that’s why I think right now the leaders in Tehran must be feeling quite anxious,” said Gonul Tol, with the Middle East Institute in Washington. Iran’s regional strategy has been dealt a major blow, at a time when the regime in Tehran is being questioned by millions of Iranians.

Mr. Putin has given the younger Mr. al-Assad substantial military assistance in the years since. By 2015 Mr. al-Assad’s forces controlled barely 20 percent of Syria’s territory and Russia launched a military operation to save him. In 2017 Russia helped negotiate temporary cease-fires in parts of Syria, then enabled regime forces to gobble up many of those places. Its military presence eventually morphed into a smaller force suitable to managing low-level conflict, but Russia never withdrew from Syria even after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine eclipsed all other foreign policy priorities. By that point, maintaining a presence there, including the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base, was also critical to Russia’s military operations in Libya, the Central African Republic and the Sahel — a new frontier for Russian power projection.

Moscow, in particular, is concerned about losing key military installations that its sees as a counterweight to NATO in the region — a naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean coast and the Hmeimim air base in Syria’s Latakia province. According to a report, the new leaders of Syria agreed to guarantee the safety of Russian bases.

The Transitional Period in Syria: Hezbollah’s Coalition with the Residual Al-Al-Sham of the Al-Qaeda Front

Israel was always against Assad, but believed him to be the devil. Assad kept the frontier with Israel largely calm, even if the wider region was ablaze.

Israel will face a Syria that has a lot ofunpredictability and where Islamist groups could play a major role. One of the groups Israel has battled in the last year is Hamas in Gaza and the other is Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel is wary of a similar group in Syria.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed the strategic territory. Israel’s continued hold on the Golan Heights is certain to remain a major point of friction, regardless of who emerges in power in Damascus.

The Islamist rebels’ swift takeover of Syria on the weekend ushered in an exciting new era for the troubled country and promised to change the region’s fraught geopolitics.

The ousting of Assad, who ruled Syria for a quarter century after assuming power from his father, leaves a dangerous political vacuum. At least nominally, the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is Ahmed al-Shara, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. He and his group are at the helm of a fractious rebel alliance that fought Assad over more than 13 years of civil war. Formerly known as the al-Nusra Front, HTS was once affiliated with al-Qaida. Although Shara claims to have broken ties with al-Qaida, HTS remains on a U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations.

In the hours before the rebels took control of Damascus, Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi Jalali stood by his post. “We are working so that the transitional period is quick and smooth,” Jalali told Sky News Arabia TV on Monday, according to The Associated Press.

Having Assad’s prime minister stay on was “clearly an arrangement” with the rebels, says Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist at the University of Oklahoma. “They’ve worked it out, which seems to be a peaceful handover of power.”

Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the London-based think tank Chatham House, says it is too early to signal any outcome. She says we have to give people some time to figure it out.

Vakil says that the ousting of Assad could be positive for Jordan if there is better parliamentary democracy in Syria. If you see a Taliban-like scenario, that is not going to be very positive for a country like Jordan that has its own Muslim Brotherhood.

The diversity of ethnic and religious stakeholders in Syria paints a complicated picture: Assad’s powerbase was drawn from Shia Muslims, and the small but influential Alawite religious minority that he belongs to, combined with other groups make up about 13% of the population. Sunni Muslims, by contrast, account for roughly three-quarters of Syria.

The Alawite minority has found itself out of power and could now be more vulnerable. Landis says there’s “considerable tension” between the two main Muslim groups in Syria. He says there are no signs of reprisals by the new leaders. Everyone is trying to figure out “whether there’s going to be revenge killings or real disturbances in the Alawite territories,” Landis says.

Vakil says there’s concern that Syria could descend into a strict fundamentalist Islamic state similar to Taliban-led Afghanistan, although the country’s new leaders have made pronouncements that seek to dispel that fear.

U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen: “Contradictory messages” of the post-Assad regime

The rebels, for instance, issued a statement on social media Monday instructing their fighters that it is “strictly forbidden to interfere with women’s dress or impose any request related to their clothing or appearance, including requests for modesty.”

But U.N. Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen, speaking in Qatar, on Sunday, sounded a word of caution, saying he was hearing “contradictory messages” coming from the new leadership. “This is now my key message to all – avoid bloodshed, make sure that it is inclusive, that all communities in Syria are included, and that the nervousness that some are facing, are fearing, that we can address this, and move forward to peace and stability,” he said.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, stated on Monday thatSyria is at a crossroads, between peace and war, stability, lawlessness, reconstruction or further ruin.

“Many of them are going to want to go home, but most will take a wait and see stance,” says Landis, saying that he thinks most will take a wait and see stance.

Daniel Mouton, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, writes that “Millions of Syrian refugees will want to return home and are more likely to do so in an environment of good governance and active reconstruction.”

Even so, President Biden, in a televised address on Sunday, expressed concern about the post-Assad government in Syria: “Make no mistake, some of the rebel groups who took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human rights abuses,” Biden said. “We’ve taken note of the statements by the leaders of these rebel groups in recent days and they’re saying the right things now. But as they take on more responsibility, we will assess not just their words, but their actions.”

About 900 U.S. troops are stationed in Syria, mostly in oil-rich areas controlled by Kurdish militia forces. The Assad regime has been denied access to the oil fields due to the presence of the U.S. troops.

The United States will be in a re-evaluation mode over the next six months. “If it wanted good relations with this new state, it could not punish it forever by withholding the oil.”

Russia — a staunch ally of Assad and the destination for his immediate exile after fleeing Syria over the weekend — appears to have little recourse but to accept the new reality in the country.

Source: 5 things to watch as Syria confronts a new future

Putin and al-Assad: Two Worlds Towards a Mutual Understanding in the Damascus Reconciliation Process (via Amos Hochstein)

Amos Hochstein spoke in the Persian Gulf states on Saturday as the Syrian rebels were closing in on Damascus.

“I don’t think it would be good to write Russia out.” Vakil says that he will also say the same thing about Iran. “I think both countries will be looking to maybe not immediately, but over time and rekindle whatever ties they have for different purposes.”

Russia’s military support was complemented by patient political backing. Mr. Putin and Mr. al-Assad remained as thick as thieves throughout several rounds of arduous peace conferences that attempted to negotiate a settlement to the conflict. In 2013, Mr. Putin had emerged as Mr. al-Assad’s knight in shining armor — and incidentally exposed the weakness of President Barack Obama’s “red line” in Syria — by vouching for the destruction of Mr. al-Assad’s chemical weapons within a year and heading off the prospect of American airstrikes. More than 80 Syrian civilians would be killed in a sarin attack a few years later by the United States.