No study, no analysis of international developments could have predicted what is happening these days in the Middle East, fourteen months after Hamas's surprise attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
It is not just the Assad regime that has collapsed in Syria, it is the entire so-called “axis of resistance” that is showing progressive signs of disintegration.
The new map of the Middle East
For over a decade, Syria has been in a terrible, bloody civil war. President Assad committed genocide - a real one, as opposed to various blood conspiracies - against his own people. It had everything: torture cellars, forced population transfer, concentration and death camps, nerve gas attacks against civilians, and even a crematorium where the bodies of murdered prisoners were burned.
The Syrian dictator is responsible for around 90% of the dead and murdered in the civil war that has claimed more than 500.000 lives. And nobody in the world cares. Syria did not cause demonstrations and protests. No one boycotted Russia because of its support for a brutal dictator and his massacres, and no campuses occupied buildings or took to the streets to protest human rights abuses in Syria. But I forgot… Syria is not a powerful country! Nor is it a country with a Jewish majority! Not even the only democracy in the Middle East! So why should people protest?
More than a third of Syrians fled or were expelled from the country, half of them lost their homes, and tens of thousands of ethnic cleansing took place. The West was only shaken when the refugee crisis upset Europe, Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal writes in an article. The problem was solved in consultation with the Turks to prevent the Syrians from flooding the European Union.
14 months after October 7, -23, the Shiite axis designed to strangle Israel is collapsing before our eyes. Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Qassem Soleimani's vision of the "Ring of Fire," designed to allow Iran to advance its nuclear program and endanger Israel's existence, is being buried like its mastermind. Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei lost first the gifted commander of the Revolutionary Guards, then his beloved ally Hassan Nasrallah, and now the Assad regime has fallen.
This history is important to understanding how we arrived at the current dramatic moment. Assad's fall is not just the fall of a weak and failed dictator in the Middle East, but because of what he symbolizes. Hezbollah was badly beaten by Israel, and the Iranians were also beaten - and feared a humiliating defeat in Syria. It would be better for them to say no than to intervene and lose, especially when Assad's troops are being decimated en masse after being unable to deal with the rebel forces.
Iran saw Syria as an area of strategic depth and maintaining the regime was vital to the survival of the entire "axis of resistance". Without Damascus, Iran's most important base in the Middle East, the terrorist organization Hezbollah would have remained isolated and suffocated since heavy weapons, equipment and training could not be transferred to it.
However, in the face of what is happening in Syria, Israel is significantly strengthening its defenses on the Golan Heights border – and is focused on countering the possibility that Islamic State terrorists take control of the border line with Israel. Turkish President Erdogan is the most influential leader of the Syrian opposition - and a shared border with him is not the best for Israel's defense
The new situation brings a series of issues to Israel's doorstep, which cause neither complacency nor panic. On the one hand, the fall of Assad means, as mentioned, another heavy blow to the Iranian project and the cutting off of Hezbollah's Iranian oxygen pipeline. On the other hand, not everything is rosy in the new reality that is taking shape. Jihadist rebels are now closer to Israel's borders than ever before, with the risk of using the Assad regime's stockpiles of strategic weapons, including chemical weapons, against it. One of the ideas is to create a demilitarized zone in the Syrian part of the Golan Heights as a security zone that will be controlled from the ground and from the air by Israel.
The dismantling of the Iranian axis of "evil" is at hand, but so are the forces of the violent Sunni Jihadists. In three words: New Middle East.
SOURCE: ATHENS VOICE, 9.12.2024