The Assad Regime Is Now in Real Trouble

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, December 05, 2024

 

Less than one week ago, the Turkish-backed Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) exploded out from its positions in Northwestern Syria and captured the city of Aleppo. But that rebel group has not halted its advance. Now in control of the entire Idlib province, HTS has set its sights on Hama, a city in the west-central part of the country. It was there that Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its allies would mount a determinative defense.

 

Regime forces mobilized in and around Hama and engaged in running battles with HTS forces. Assad’s Iranian backers spirited weapons into the airports that had not yet fallen to rebel forces, and assets aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rushed to join the fight. Moscow’s forces in the region launched airstrikes and missile attacks on insurgent positions in an effort to forestall the collapse of the regime’s lines. It didn’t work.

 

On Thursday, the Assad regime ceded Hama to the rebels, and HTS entered Hama in triumph. “The insurgents’ next target is likely to be the central city of Homs, the country’s third largest,” the Associated Press reported. “Homs, which is about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Hama, is the gate to the capital Damascus, Assad’s seat of power and the coastal region that is a base of support for him.”

 

With the fall of Hama, the Assad regime is now in real peril. “Homs is Syria’s most important transport hub, controlling not only the north-south highway between Damascus and Aleppo and the road linking the capital and the coast but also several pipelines and parts of the electric power infrastructure,” the Carnegie Endowment for Peace reported a decade ago, the last time Homs was in danger of falling to rebel advances. But the regime and its foreign benefactors are far weaker today than they were in 2014.

 

This spasm of dynamism in the Syrian civil war after what had been, for the better part of the last decade, a low-intensity conflict is attributable to many factors. Among them, the degradation of Russian forces on Ukraine’s battlefields, the decimation of Iran’s terrorist proxies in the region by Israel, and the Assad regime’s exhausted legitimacy. The speed with which one regime position after another has collapsed raises the specter of total regime implosion in a way that has not been conceivable for years.

 

Neither Iran nor Russia can absorb the collapse of the Assad regime painlessly. Iran’s IRGC and its affiliates maintain multiple outposts in Syria, and Tehran relies on Syria as a corridor through which it transmits men and materiel to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The so-called “Axis of Resistance” surrounding Israel that Iran commands risks coming apart if the “ring of fire” is broken in Syria.

 

Likewise, what Russia regards as its vital presence at the naval port of Tartus and the Khmeimim Air Base are threatened by HTS’s advance — indeed, Moscow is already relocating naval and air assets from its positions near the city of Latakia. But protecting those assets from collapse was the rationale that led to the Kremlin’s military intervention in Syria on Assad’s behalf in the first place. Neither Tehran nor Moscow will let Assad go without a fight. The only question is just how much of a fight either can manage to muster at this point.

 

From the West’s perspective, the Syrian civil war can no longer end in a way that produces optimal outcomes. Barack Obama’s cravenness and dithering saw to that. And if Assad were to fall (still a big “if”), it would result in a failed state in one of the most strategically vital regions on Earth. The refugee crisis that overturned the European political consensus in the last decade would likely pale in comparison to the crisis that would result from Syria succumbing fully to failed state status.

 

And yet, it would take a heart of stone not to look upon the anti-American axis’s struggles in Syria with anything other than delight. Every skeptic of the American-led world order has become deeply invested in the Assad regime’s survival, and their agony over the mortal danger in which it now finds itself is a satisfying spectacle.