The Big Happening

Weeks where Decades Happen

There is an oft-quoted remark from Vladimir Lenin, which in its English formulation usually reads something like: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

This is one of those aphorisms which has been exercised practically to death, but there are rare occasions where it perfectly fits the chaotic tempo of world events, and few cases fit the bill better than the fall of the Syrian Arab Republic and its embattled (former) President, Bashir Al-Assad. Syria was first plunged into Civil War by an escalating insurgency in 2012, and more than a decade of grueling positional fighting and sieges, including a maddening four-year siege of Aleppo, saw the frontlines in the country coagulate into an uneasy quasi-stasis.

The Assad regime’s endurance (with timely and crucial assistance from Russia and Iran), which saw government forces claw back from the brink beginning in 2015, became something of a running joke, spawning the infamous “Assad Curse”, in reference to Assad’s proclivity to politically outlast western leaders calling for his removal. Having survived more than a decade of Civil War and successfully recapturing Syria’s crucial urban corridor from Damascus to Aleppo, few people saw what was coming next.

In this case, Lenin’s comment about “weeks where decades happen” is almost literally true. On November 27, insurgent forces led by the Tahrir al-Sham paramilitary group launched a shock offensive towards Aleppo which captured the city in only a few days. Regime forces melted away as they swept down the urban corridor, capturing Hama and then Homs. On December 8, the Syrian Arab Republic functionally ceased to exist and Assad evacuated to seek asylum in Russia amid rumors that his plane had been shot down. From November 27 to December 8: 12 days from uneasy stasis to the total collapse of Assad’s government and army. In this case, two weeks sufficed to achieve a decisive outcome which had been bloodily and indecisively contested for more than a decade.

As a brief editorial aside - I have been intending to produce both some thoughts on the remarkable collapse in Syria as well as a situation report on the Russo-Ukrainian War, where there have been important developments both in the frontlines and in the meta-strategic sphere. I had contemplated amalgamating them into a single article, but chose not to because I do not wish to contrive a unifying narrative structure. I know that it is popular to depict Syria and Ukraine as different fronts in a coherent “third world war”, but I think this is rather overwrought and needlessly induces panic. Events in Damascus and the Donbas are not as cleanly connected as people would like them to be - if there is a connection, as such, it is simply that these are frontier zones of Russian power. However, Ukraine will always matter much more to Moscow than Syria will, and for the Russians it is their western frontier that forms their most pressing strategic concern. Thus, this entry will focus on the implosion of Syria, and an update on the front in Ukraine will come shortly in a separate offering.

The Fall of Assad: Long Awaited, Unexpected

With only the space of a few weeks to consider developments in Syria, a fair bit of reservation and restraint is warranted. We have the general shape of the rebel offensive, which rolled out of Idlib into Aleppo in the opening 48 hours before beginning a sweep south down Syria’s urban corridor along the M5 arterial highway, but the broader political situation in Damascus is still in flux and extremely murky.

What deserves emphasis, however, is the totality and speed of the collapse of the Syrian Arab Army and the Assad government. There was perhaps a 24 hour window, around November 30, where it looked like the SAA was going to fight - there were reports of reserves being scrambled into Hama with local counterattacks, and the Russian Air Force began heavily bombarding Tahrir al-Sham’s stronghold around Idlib. The near instantaneous loss of Aleppo was clearly the nucleus of an emerging military catastrophe, but few could have anticipated that regime resistance would simply evaporate.

The SAA’s broader performance throughout the civil war deserves a whole host of asterisks. It is a simple matter of fact that Assad would have likely lost his grip on power many years ago in the absence of Russian and Iranian assistance, but the basic premise was never challenged that the regime and the army were willing to fight - until now. SAA defenses were systemically melting down by the first of December, never reconstituted, and that - as they say - was that.

What we witnessed in Syria was, at its heart, systemic state rot that had been concealed by a tenuous ceasefire in the north, and it is clear that during this ceasefire Assad’s government was both unwilling and unable to address the problems that plagued the SAA during the earlier phases of hot fighting. We can enumerate the basic problem as follows.

The crisis of the SAA was first and foremost a crisis of revenue, with the country decaying to bare economic subsistence. Syria is a tenuous economic entity in the best of times. It can be thought of broadly as a patchwork of four different geospatial regions: the Alawite stronghold in the coastal mountain range (with urban centers like Tartus and Latakia), the corridor of the ancient oasis cities (Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus), the Euphrates valley in the east, and the Turkish hinterlands along Syria’s northern border.

The problem, not just for the Assad regime but for any would-be ruler of Syria, is that knitting these geographic regions together is a very difficult military-political task, but one that is essential to the economic and fiscal coherence of the country. Syria’s primary grain growing regions are in the east, particularly in the Euphrates basin. The Northeast in particular is Syria’s predominant source of both cereal staples like wheat and export crops like cotton. For more than a decade now, these growing regions have been lost to Damascus and are under pseudo-autonomous Kurdish control.

Furthermore, the loss of the northeast to the Kurds (along with a de-facto American occupation around Al-Tanf) cut off the Syrian regime from its most productive oil and gas fields - although Syria has never been a major oil exporter by global standards, this dried up yet another revenue stream for the regime. When one factors in the physical damage caused by a decade of war and continual strangulation from western sanctions, the total economic hollowing of the Syrian regime was largely predestined.

With Syrian GDP at a paltry $18 billion in 2022 (a meager ~$800 per capita), it’s no surprise that the SAA had become a hollowed out, corrupt, and unmotivated force. Salaries for soldiers were abysmal, and officers become accustomed to supplementing their income by taking bribes and shaking down travelers at roadside checkpoints. It’s the classical corruption motif of armies in bankrupt states, and it bends the army towards a “paper” existence, with an ORBAT that seems adequate on paper but in reality consists largely of virtual or skeletal units led by officers who are more interested in supplementing their salaries with bribes than maintaining baseline combat effectiveness.

Thus, in almost every account of the rebel offensive from the SAA’s perspective, the same signature emerges: underpaid and unmotivated conscripts, receiving no meaningful direction from their superiors, chose to simply shed their uniforms and flee. One can hardly blame them - this was in the end an exhausted regime with few remaining who were willing to fight for it, and amid the centrifugal chaos of regime collapse men tend to begin thinking about themselves and their own fates. Hence, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Hossein Salami commenting: “Some expect us to fight in place of the Syrian army. Is it logical… to take on full responsibility while Syria’s army merely observes?”

The grand story of the Assad regime is going to be one of an over-reliance on foreign backers and an unwillingness (or inability) to grapple with the bureaucratic rot and systemic corruption in the Syrian Army. Assad proved far too willing to solicit foreign powers to fight his battles for him, and with his regime choked of revenue he allowed the SAA to languish as a skeletal, third class fighting force in its own country, and in the end it collapsed into a heap of bones as skeletons are wont to do.

To the extent that there are still staunch backers of Assad, they will point fingers in all manner of directions - blaming the crippling sanctions and the loss of Syria’s east for the economic strangulation of the regime, crying about treachery among the army’s officer corps for failing to fight, bemoaning the failure of Iran and the “axis of resistance” to come to Assad’s aid. The reality is that the Syrian regime had clearly reached the point of exhaustion: unable to adequately pay its soldiers, uproot corruption in the army, or motivate men to fight for it. This was a checkmated regime with a fictional army, and it is not surprising that Iran and Russia decided to wash their hands of it before it became an unbearable geostrategic albatross around their necks.

Syria: Shattered and Battered

It is very popular these days to accuse one’s adversaries of being a “fake”, or “illegitimate” country. One hears this very commonly in reference to Israel - the idea being that Israel is not really a country, but an illegitimate occupation of Palestinian land. Many Russian patriots similarly argue that Ukraine is a “fake” country, and an artifact of internal Soviet politics and Galician revanchism. China decries the illegitimacy of Taiwan and affirms the unity of the Chinese state as they see it.

I confess that I find this line of argumentation rather odd, largely because I have always seen states as constructs that have an objective reality based on their ability to mobilize resources for the purpose of exercising political power - that is, maintaining a political monopoly in their territory (against external and internal rivals), and projecting commensurate power outwards. Israel is very obviously a real state. It dispenses of a discrete territory, it checks rivals within that territory, and it projects force and influence outward. One does not have to like it, but it’s obviously real.

Complaining that a state is illegitimate or fake is a bit like arguing that an animal is not real, when in fact the life of an animal is an objective property derived from its ability to continuously mobilize calories from its environment and defend itself against predation. States and animals can die - they can waste away through the failure of mobilization (starved of revenue or calories as the case may be), they can be devastated by the internal parasitism of rebellion and disease, or they can be eaten up by larger, more potent predatory forms. Parasitism, mobilization of resources, predation, and death - all unceasing pressures for both the animal and the political organism. States don’t possess an abstract quality of legitimacy, but rather live or die on their own terms.

Syria is not quite a “fake” country, but it is certainly a diseased one. In particular, the question now arises of the relationship between the state and the discrete territory formerly known as the Syrian Arab Republic. The Assad regime is gone, but the immense pressures that distort and pull across the breadth of its former territories remain, and the basic question becomes whether any stable political arrangement can prevail on the territory of Syria.

We need to remember that Syria, as such, is an unwieldy union of discrete geo-economic regions - the coastal range, the corridor of ancient oasis cities (Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Damascus), and the Euphrates basin. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, a brief boom of oil exports, combined with expansive irrigation works along the Euphrates, allowed a Syrian population explosion, with the total population growing nearly threefold from some 7 million in the early 1970’s to more than 22 million by 2010. After a brief decline in the early years of the civil war, the population began to recover and once again crested 22 million by 2022.

Overpopulation and Irrigation Failure - the heart of Syrian collapse

It is not a coincidence, then, that a collapse in the Euphrates irrigation system brought on by drought in 2011 (drought conditions that still persist) was a major harbinger of civil war, nor is it a wonder that this became the key fiscal-economic problem that the Assad regime could not solve. It is not simply that Assad lacked a solution - it is doubtful whether a solution exists.

The crux of the problem is simple (and I apologize for taking so long to get to the point): Syria cannot exist as a stable entity without the unification of virtually all of the territory of the old Syrian Arab Republic, but maintaining control over that territory requires welding together an explosive amalgamation of ethnic and sectarian blocs.

The vast and bloated population of the oasis city corridor cannot survive without access to both the more productive agricultural lands in the east (and even then, remediation of the irrigation system and more favorable rainfall will be essential) and the ability to export Syria’s gas and oil resources. If the interior urban corridor remains cut off from the economic resources of Syria’s east, it will be doomed to remain an overpopulated and impoverished breeding ground for dissent and violence. It likewise requires access to the coastal range to facilitate economic access to the Mediterranean. Syria’s astonishing population increase in the latter half of the 20th Century was only possible because the Syrian Arab Republic linked the corridor of oasis cities with the the coastal range and the Euphrates basin in the east. In other words, for the population of Syria to have any viable economic future, the country must have essentially the same discrete territory that it had prewar - and even then, the deteriorating irrigation system in the east makes a stable recovery doubtful.

Yet, knitting this territory back together requires mediating a host of sectarian, ethnic, and geostrategic impasses. Some of the more pie in the sky proposals for Syria involve a partitioning of the country, with an Alawite state in the coastal range, one or several Sunni states in the interior, and an independent Kurdistan in the east - these proposals perhaps make sense on ethnic and sectarian grounds, but they would ensure the economic unviability of the entire project, and would have the effect of creating overpopulated and landlocked Sunni states, cut off from both sea access and natural resources, and doomed to impoverishment. This is not a recipe for any sort of lasting peace.

This is to say nothing, of course, of the interests of outside powers. The Russians seem to have largely washed their hands of Syria and are aiming mainly to reach an arrangement with whatever powers prevail to keep their basing rights on the Mediterranean Coast - this is probably another case of Moscow being too trusting of the latest “deal” to come down the line, but so it goes. Iran’s position in Syria is essentially shattered (more on that in a moment), and regional initiative has firmly passed to Turkey and Israel. However, Iran on the backfoot still has the potential to resort geopolitical arson.

In short, it is difficult to be optimistic about Syria’s future. The structural reality of the country is the same: an overpopulated and impoverished Sunni interior that requires connectivity to the coastal range and the straining Euphrates in order to feed itself and economically recover. The shattering of Syria’s economic coherence is precisely what bankrupted and hollowed out the Assad regime to the point where it could not pay its soldiers, feed its people, or defend itself from a final sharp blow. It was the impoverishment of the bloated Syrian population, and the failure of irrigation in the east, which set off the civil war and the heaving flows of refugees to Turkey and Europe. None of this has gone away, and knitting a coherent economic unit back together in the face of Syria’s stark sectarian and ethnic divisions will require a political touch that is either unimaginably deft or violent and forceful.

Syria may or may not be a “fake country”, in the sense that its economic coherence runs contrary to the patterns of its peopling. It is, however, a country that has steadily disintegrated - subject to both internal parasitism and external predation - and the Assad regime clearly lacked the powers of mobilization to hold the thing together, cut off as they were from the Euphrates. The new Sunni rulers of Damascus may fare better, in the sense that they (unlike Assad) are astride a demographic majority and enjoy the backing of a powerful and ascendant Turkey, but there is little doubt that more violence lies ahead before a coherent state is once again hammered out of these disparate and impoverished components.

Winners and Losers

With the chapter now closed on the Assad regime, we can consider Syria as a plaything of external powers. Syria has been a place of intense interest for at least four powerful outside states, which I am assigning winner and loser status as follows:

• Big Winner: Israel

• Small Winner: Turkey

• Small Loser: Russia

• Big Loser: Iran

We’ll consider these in order, beginning with Israel and Iran - as their situations are nearly perfect inverses.

It is difficult to over-emphasize just how completely Iran’s geopolitical position has collapsed in the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean. Iran invested significant resources in propping up the Assad regime, contributing military aid and logistical support on the order of tens of billions of dollars. Most significantly, however, Iran was central to providing manpower to prop up the flagging Syrian Arab Army over the years, with the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps training militias to support Assad’s army and leading the mobilization and coordination of foreign fighters, including from Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

For Iran, Syria and Lebanon formed a nexus of power projection that were mutually reinforcing. Syria provided a crucial land corridor that allowed Iran to funnel personnel and supplies to Lebanon, creating an essential link in the geographic connectivity of Iran’s force projection. Hezbollah served a valuable role in Iran’s coordination of militias in Syria, and Syria secured ground link between Iran and Hezbollah. For Iran, then, 2024 has been a disaster, with Hezbollah severely battered by the IDF and Syria now in a state of collapse.

Israel has, in effect, created a kinetic feedback loop which is eating away at Iran’s position in the region. Hezbollah is weakened by the 14 month war with the IDF, and its leadership and infrastructure are in disarray after a series of devastating Israeli strikes, including both the infamous exploding pager operation and an airstrike which killed Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah’s weakened state left them utterly unable to intervene to prevent the collapse of Assad’s regime, and now that same collapse means that Iran must contrive a way to rebuild Hezbollah’s operational capabilities without the vital ground-logistical link that it has long utilized.

IDF Troops near Mount Hermon

For Israel, then, 2024 brought at least a temporary neutralization of much of Hezbollah’s command apparatus, the rupture of Iran’s ground link to Lebanon, and an enlarged IDF-controlled security zone around the Golan Heights. There is a growing sense that Israel can act with near-impunity, after conducting an impressive shooting spree against high value enemy personnel, fighting a grueling and devastating ground campaign in Gaza, and exchanging air strikes against Iran itself.

The suggestion that Israel has come off very well from all this tends to incense people and solicit the usual accusations of Zionism, but the reality is fairly straight forward. Israel has killed large numbers of high ranking enemy personnel, including the highest leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah. The IDF maintained a ground presence in the Gaza Strip for months and reduced much of its urban buildup to rubble. Israel killed the chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau in Tehran itself. It has seized an expanded buffer zone in the Golan, and it has seen Iran’s ground link to Lebanon collapse. These are objective manifestations of kinetic force - exploding pagers, IDF tanks, and air strikes simply are. Any suggestion that Israel is not on a heater would be an act of willful ignorance and pointless cognitive intransigence.

Iran, of course, does have some strategic depth and options to rebuild its position. It still maintains militias in Iraq, it has the option of engaging with the SDF (the Kurdish led militias in eastern Syria), it maintains productive proxies in Yemen, and it demonstrated strike capabilities against Israel. However, it is clearly very much on the back foot and facing the prospect of painstakingly rebuilding a position in Lebanon and Syria after investing heavily in the region over the decades.

Meanwhile, Turkey has clearly supplanted Iran and Russia as the dominant external powers in Syria. A host of Turkish interests are at play in Syria, including the refoulment of Syrian refugees (nearly four million of whom are currently in Turkey and whose presence remains unwelcome to many), the rollback of Kurdish (SDF) control in eastern Syria, and the expansion of Turkish influence into the South-Caucasus, where Turkey and its Azerbaijani ally continue their press.

The unsettling ease with which Turkey managed to roll over the Assad government, as Tahrir al-Sham’s foremost foreign backer, has put Ankara in a dominant position in which it will play a central role in shaping Syria’s political future. The problem for Turkey, however, is that its interests run against the current here. Ankara would like to see a return of Syrian refugees, a stabilization of Turkey’s southern border, enduring Turkish influence in Syrian politics - and above all they want to prevent the emergence of a stable and enduring Kurdish polity in Syria’s east. All of Turkey’s interests, in other words, imply the return of Syria’s old territorial integrity under Sunni leadership.

Turkey has supplanted Russia as the most powerful external actor in Syria

In short, Turkey won this phase of the war, but it now must “win the peace”, as the expression goes. If Syria relapses into another phase of bloody civil war, Turkey will go back to square one on its strategic goals. Ankara is much like Sisyphus with his bloody rock - he’s rolled it nearly to the top of the hill, and now he has to try to keep it there.

For Russia, the main issues at play are naval basing rights on Syria’s Mediterranean coast and the loss of leverage over Ankara that was formerly derived from the Assad regime. We can consider these in turn.

Russia maintains bases in Syria’s coastal range, including airbases and naval bases near Tartus and Latakia. These bases are a valuable link in Russian power projection into the Mediterranean, and for the time being it seems clear that Moscow has decided to wash its hands of Assad and try to salvage the bases through agreements with whatever government emerges in Syria.

The bigger issue for Moscow is a loss of leverage vis a vis Turkey. While the Assad regime remained in power, Russia was functionally the arbiter of relations between Turkey and Damascus. Syria was a pressure point for Turkey that Moscow was able to utilize to influence Ankara’s decisions on other issues like Ukraine and the Black Sea. With the fall of Assad, however, the relationship is now reversed. It is now Turkish proxy that controls Damascus, rather than a Russian one, and Moscow will need to succor Ankara if it wants to keep its bases on the coast.

Summary: Syria at a Crossroads and in the Crosshairs

Ultimately, the fall of the Assad regime is owed to inherent instabilities in Syria’s construction, particularly in the absence of consolidated control over the entire former territory of the state. Without oil exports and the growing regions around the Euphrates, Syria cannot sustain itself, and the belt of oasis cities becomes doomed to an impoverished half-life. Assad’s biggest problem is also Turkey’s problem: the millions of refugees languishing in Turkey are closely connected with Assad’s underpaid and unmotivated soldiers, in that both are a manifestation of a starving and exhausted country.

The Problem of Syria, as such, is that the fiscal-economic viability of the state is tenuous at best and relies on consolidated control of the state’s former territory, but this in turn requires welding together an amalgamation of ethnic and sectarian groups, combustible in the best circumstances, at the same time that foreign powers are trying to set them alight. The ethnic logic and the economic logic of Syria border on total incompatibility, and have historically been held together by repression and violence.

Furthermore, Syria lies almost literally at a geostrategic crossroads, as an estuary of greater outside powers. In particular, Syria forms a collision zone of Iranian and Turkish power. Whichever of these powers finds itself on the back foot in the region has recourse to strategic arson - the intentional inflammation of a trashcanistan to create a noxious hazard to the rival. While the Assad Regime held power, thanks to the generous support of Moscow and Tehran, it was Ankara who provided powerful - and eventually successful backing. For Turkey to consolidate its victory, it must successfully establish stable governance in Syria, mitigate Kurdish autonomy, and reverse the flow of refugees. But with Iran now in retreat, turnabout is fair play, and Syria - with its wobbly economic basis and host of sectarian divisions - is a land full of kindling for a geostrategic arsonist.