The new scramble for the Middle East

In the summer of 2023, Syria and the wider Middle East seemed more stable than at any point in recent memory. It was telling that, in May of that year, the Arab League, a regional organisation of Arab states, welcomed Bashar al-Assad’s war-torn Syria back into the fold after over a decade of isolation. Four months later, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan memorably declared that the Middle East ‘is quieter today than it has been in two decades’.

Fast forward to the end of this year, and Sullivan’s judgement looks more than a little hasty. The long-standing shadow war between Israel and Iran has since erupted into open conflict, with Israel carrying out high-profile assassinations in Damascus, Tehran and Beirut, and Iran launching massive missile and drone barrages at Israel on at least two occasions. And right at the end of this year, Assad’s brutal, yet seemingly stable, Syrian regime fell to a militia headed up by an ex-member of al-Qaeda. As we head into 2025, the Middle East has rarely sounded quite as noisy as it does right now.

The conflict between Israel and Iran and the fall of Assad are directly related. On the eve of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Iran was in a position of relative strength. Through political alliances and a network of militias known as the ‘axis of resistance’ (including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and assorted Shia groups in Iraq), it exerted considerable power throughout the region. And nowhere more so than in Syria, where Iranian proxies, with help from Russia, were effectively propping up Assad’s dictatorship.

Hamas’s attack on Israel changed everything. It ignited a conflict that has ultimately destroyed the balance of power in the region. Over the past 15 months, Israel has decimated Iran’s militias. It has crushed Hamas in Gaza, crippled Hezbollah in Lebanon and carried out air strikes and assassinations in Iraq and even Iran itself. The Israeli pounding of Iran’s proxy forces has not only impacted Tehran – it has also undermined those dependent on Iranian support for their very survival, such as Assad’s Syrian regime.

Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, aided and abetted by the Russian military, had shored up Assad’s government from the 2011 popular uprisings onwards. It’s now clear that without the military force of his backers, Assad’s authority rested on very little. Russia’s decision to move some of its forces from Syria to the frontlines of the war in Ukraine undermined Assad and increased his reliance on Iran. So when Hezbollah was forced to redeploy its Syrian forces to Lebanon in October this year, it effectively gave Assad’s opponents in the north-west province of Idlib the green light to launch an offensive. Which, after a two-month delay, they finally did on 26 November.

It took this several-thousand-strong militia, headed up by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), just two weeks to take Damascus and topple Assad. In that time, these militants barely encountered any resistance from Assad’s regime as they drove their motorbikes and pick-up trucks through Syria. It’s now clear why. Without Iranian support, Assad had very little resistance to offer. HTS knew this, hence its decision to mount the insurgency after the withdrawal of Hezbollah. Israel’s pummelling of Iranian forces, proxy or otherwise, had unwittingly paved the way for an Islamist takeover of what is left of the Syrian state.

The collapse of Assad’s papier-mâché regime is largely a result, then, of the destruction of the regional balance of power that had prevailed up until 7 October 2023. In the time since, Iran has suffered a series of catastrophic blows, losing its two most valuable assets in Hezbollah and Assad. It is now in retreat. At the same time, however, other regional powers are jostling to fill the power vacuum to their advantage. The most important of these is Turkey.

Through a group of militias known as the Syrian National Army, Turkey has been intervening in the Syrian conflict since 2011. Furthermore, Turkey has developed a working relationship with HTS in Syria’s largely Turkish-occupied north, providing shelter for HTS and allowing it to consolidate its repressive rule in the governorate of Idlib. Ankara’s key regional objective is to push back and undermine Syria’s Kurdish-held north-east, which is governed by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria – a body closely related to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which is outlawed in Turkey. The retreat of Russia and, above all, the decline of Iran presents an opportunity for Turkey to cement its influence in Syria through HTS, and to ramp up its war against Syria’s Kurds.

All signs are pointing that way, with Turkish militias capturing the Kurdish stronghold of Manbij in December. By all accounts, Turkish-backed forces are now setting their sights on Kobane, which Kurdish forces seized from ISIS in 2015. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, certainly seems keen on turning Turkey into a leading power-broker in the Middle East. After HTS took Damascus, Erdoğan announced that ‘Every event in our region, and especially Syria, reminds us that Turkey is bigger than Turkey itself’, adding, ‘The Turkish nation cannot escape from its destiny’. Indeed, with Turkey already enjoying significant influence in Iraq, it is set to play a major role in the region’s future.

The Syrian crisis captures the profound instability now roiling the Middle East. It is a territory constantly being shaped and torn apart by the waxing and waning of competing external forces – invariably to the detriment of those who live there. For the past decade, Iran and Russia had held sway. But due to the Israel-Iran conflict, Turkey and others are now in the ascendancy.

The US and its Western allies continue to play a significant role in the now very unstable balance of power in the region – it emerged in December that the US still has 2,000 troops stationed in Syria alone. But the West’s influence is not what it was. Having done so much to destabilise the Middle East through catastrophic interventions in the 1990s and 2000s, Western powers now lack the capacity and, above all, the will to intervene on a wider scale. They still blithely impose impoverishing sanctions on certain states, but the days of reckless, ‘humanitarian’ interventions are long gone. And with an incoming President Trump insisting that Syria is ‘not our fight’, this is unlikely to change.

In this regard, the response of Western powers to the HTS takeover in Syria is telling. Despite HTS, a former al-Qaeda affiliate, being blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by the US, UK, EU and UN, American, British and European officials have eagerly headed over to Damascus to break bread with HTS chief Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. The US has already removed a $10million bounty from his head. This desire to believe that a man once inspired to take up arms against the West by 9/11 could be some sort of international partner is a tribute to Western powers’ wishful thinking, and a testament to their desire to be done with the tumult of the Middle East once and for all.

But the tumult shows no signs of going away. The seeming stability of the Middle East over the past decade was sustained by the force of Iran and Russia. Their retreat, in the face of wars with Israel and Ukraine respectively, has unleashed a new scramble for regional power and influence. And once again, it is likely to come at the expense of ordinary Middle Easterners.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.