Leftists denounced Ghassan Tueni’s statement, made in 1975 at the beginning of the Lebanese conflagration, that \u201cLebanon is a playground for others.\u201d Over the following decade and a half, and after the fire was contained by the extinction of the Taif Agreement\u2014now more than a third of a century old\u2014it became clear how perfectly that phrase matched the reality of Lebanon, both burning and quiescent. Tueni’s phrase appears to have applied to the Iraqi fire after 2003, then to Libya and Yemen, as well as to Syria from March 18, 2011, to December 8, 2024, and even more so to post-Bashar al-Assad Syria.<\/p>\n
During the period of Syria from March 18, 2011, to December 8, 2024, there was both (a conflict in Syria) and (a conflict over Syria), originating from an internal, blazing kindling that attracted international and regional powers and transnational organizations to wage both struggles. Neither the Syrian regime nor the opposition held a decisive weight in these conflicts. Major decisions such as (Geneva Communiqu\u00e9 I \/2012\/), Resolution 2118 \/2013\/ concerning the surrender of Syrian chemical weapons, and Resolution 2254 \/2015\/ were drafted and issued without any Syrian presence in their deliberations. Furthermore, the March 5, 2020, agreement between Putin and Erdo\u011fan, which drew the lines for establishing a ceasefire between the regime and the armed Islamist opposition in Idlib province, was cooked up and executed solely by the Russians and the Turks.<\/p>\n
The Bashar al-Assad regime was prevented from falling by an international-regional will in 2012 and 2015, even though it was on the brink in both years. Its eventual fall was due to a shift in the balance of power in the region and within Syria, driven by Russia’s preoccupation with the Ukraine war since 2022 and the defeat of Iran’s proxies in the Gaza and Lebanon wars in the post-October 7, 2023, phase. This collapse resulted from the weakening and disappearance of the strength of the regime’s Russian and Iranian protectors, along with the Tehran-affiliated militias that were the regime’s ground shield. This paved the way for the armed opposition, led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, to proceed smoothly from Idlib to Damascus between November 27, 2024, and December 8, 2024. These same protectors had been able to save the regime in 2015 against a similar offensive that also launched from Idlib. However, the protectors’ current weakness and fading power caused the dilapidated regime to collapse easily in 2024, despite being in the same precarious state of power nine years prior\u2014the strong position of the protectors was the key difference then.<\/p>\n
For all these reasons, the Syrian situation after December 8, 2024, cannot be viewed as an internal change. Instead, that momentous day and the subsequent year must be analyzed through the lens of the external factor.<\/p>\n
Here, we must first look at the motives of the main players in the process of overthrowing the Bashar al-Assad regime\u2014namely, Washington and Ankara\u2014considering the fact that the Turkish President and other officials in Ankara had, with Russian encouragement, issued several calls in the summer of 2024 for reconciliation and rapprochement with Bashar al-Assad. This must also be considered alongside the fact that US President Barack Obama, under pressure from Tel Aviv, hesitated and then refrained from toppling Bashar al-Assad in 2012, unlike his actions with Gaddafi in Libya the previous year. It was also Obama who encouraged Putin in 2015 to intervene militarily to prevent the collapse of the Assad regime, after Iran and its affiliated militias failed to protect him against the advance of the military Islamist opposition coming from Idlib and rural Damascus. This was synchronous with the trip of General Qasem Soleimani to Moscow to convince the Russian President to intervene.<\/p>\n
The key to the Syrian events of December 8, 2024, appears to have been Washington’s abandonment of Obama’s policy of withdrawal from the Middle East, coinciding with a US pivot towards focusing on confronting China. Obama’s withdrawal policy was accompanied by the nuclear agreement with Iran (July 14, 2015), which was a trade-off between imposing limits on the Iranian nuclear program and Washington turning a blind eye to Tehran’s expansion in the Middle East region. It was also accompanied by Obama’s cover for Putin’s military intervention in Syria (September 30, 2015), which was followed by a division of influence over Syrian territory between Moscow and Washington, and then Russian-Turkish coordination through which Moscow helped the Turks gain control of the Jarabulus- Al Bab- Azaz area, then the Afrin region and its city, and finally the Tel Abyad- Ras al-Ayn (Sere Kaniye) strip.<\/p>\n
Obama believed that what he offered Putin in Syria would distance Russia from China. Furthermore, his fixation on China drove him to appease Iran, viewing it as the geographical barrier to the realization of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), put forward by the Chinese in 2013 as a southern Eurasian route linking China to Europe (and the Middle East) via the Pakistani-Iranian-Turkish corridor. This should be synchronized with the US kindling of the Ukrainian fire through protests in the capital Kyiv against a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president in November 2013\u2014just two months after the launch of the Chinese project\u2014as Ukraine is the northern Eurasian corridor of the BRI between China and Europe.<\/p>\n
The key to all of this is the Sino-Russian-Iranian triple alliance that emerged during the Ukrainian war, and then in the following year, when October 7, 2023, demonstrated that Iran and its proxies are capable of destabilizing not only the Middle East and thwarting projects for European weaning from Russian energy via the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), signed four weeks before the October 7 attacks, but also of striking global stability by stirring regional turmoil through its proxies in Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen.<\/p>\n
The Ukrainian war and the post-October 7 wars brought Washington back to the Middle East, viewing it as a region to Contain Russia first, by securing alternative energy for Europeans to Russian gas and oil (for which the European Union made a final decision on December 3, 2025, to be applied in Autumn 2027), Strike and contain Iran and its proxies, Establish American control over a region that either prevents the passage of the Belt and Road or controls it, Control the region from which most of China’s oil imports originate, as China resembles India, Japan, and even Hitler’s Germany in lacking energy independence.<\/p>\n
There are three pivotal dates:<\/p>\n
These three dates are interconnected and represent major strikes against the China-Russia-Iran axis and each member individually. All of them point to what the Chinese call a “new Cold War” whose arena is the entire globe, fought between this triple axis (and those who follow, ally, or intersect with it) and the NATO-Ukraine-Japan-South Korea-Australia-New Zealand alliance, with hesitant states in between (India, Brazil, South Africa, etc.).<\/p>\n
These three dates are key to the situation in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Because of the Syrian December 8, Ankara has distanced itself from Moscow and once again thrown itself into the American fold. Here, one must recall Trump’s public praise for Erdo\u011fan’s role in the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. Then came the August 8 Azerbaijani-Armenian agreement as a reward for Erdo\u011fan from the Americans, after they forced the Armenians to relinquish a corridor in their territory that will be leased to the Americans, connecting the “Turkic World”\u2014as the Turanists see it, “extending from Chinese Turkestan to the Aegean Sea”\u2014by land. This corridor (along with Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan) separates Russia from Iran and China from Russia, and contains ethnic bombs capable of being detonated inside Russian, Chinese, and Iranian territories. Both (December 8) and (August 8) explain (December 3) and make it possible.<\/p>\n
Also, (December 8), (August 8), and (December 3) explain the Turkish efforts, initiated by the leader of the Turkish nationalist MHP party, Devlet Bah\u00e7eli, for a Turkish-Kurdish reconciliation. Without it, Turkey cannot play the role demanded by America as a capital for energy pipelines, railways, and transit. (December 8) explains the (March 10, 2025 Agreement) between the Syrian regime and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF\/QSD). The driving and pressuring forces behind the agreement are Washington, which is an ally of both parties. It is clear that Washington believes that without reconciliation between the two parties, the new Syria cannot play the role required of it by America.<\/p>\n
There remains Israel, which the facts indicate is not satisfied but is anxious about post-December 8, 2025, Syria. Israel was not worried about Hafez al-Assad and his son. Its anger at Bashar al-Assad was only due to his role in the Syrian bridge between Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and his allowing Iranian and Tehran-aligned forces into Southern Syria. It was not worried about him, unlike its anxiety about the new Syrian regime. Thus, it quickly delivered a knockout blow to the Syrian army in the days following Bashar al-Assad’s fall\u2014something it was capable of doing earlier but did not.<\/p>\n
It is also concerned about the new Turkish role in Syria, which enjoys American approval. Israel is using the card of Southern Syria to break the equation that Washington is closer to Ankara on the Syrian issue than it is to Tel Aviv. The latter is worried that the new Syria (starting with Southern Syria), together with Turkey, will become the corridor for Middle Eastern energy pipelines to Europe, instead of the Israeli coast, as planned in 2023 with the IMEC, especially after the precedent of American companies withdrawing from the 2020 project to extend an Israeli gas pipeline (signed between Israel, Cyprus, and Greece) due to the difficulty of laying the pipeline under the sea.<\/p>\n
In essence: The developments of the past year indicate that post-Bashar al-Assad Syria, in both its internal and external dimensions, cannot be explained by the internal factor, or by the nature or ideology of the new rulers in Damascus. It must be explained by the external factor, which is embodied by the new power triangle on Syrian soil: the Washington-Ankara-Tel Aviv triangle, in order of power priority. Internal Syrian developments over the past year have been shaped by the power relations within this triangle. The new Syrian regime is governed by this triangle and is also protected by its two strongest parties, Washington and Ankara, as a bulwark against the third member, who is not yet satisfied. It is most likely that the American effort is currently focused on achieving Turkish-Israeli understandings regarding post-December 8, 2024, Syria, and Israeli understandings with the new Syrian regime, in order to prepare Syria for the role required by America within the overall picture that Washington seeks to draw for the Middle East region, which General de Gaulle called \u201cthe heart of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leftists denounced Ghassan Tueni’s statement, made in 1975 at the beginning of the Lebanese conflagration, that \u201cLebanon is a playground for others.\u201d Over the following decade and a half, and after the fire was contained by the extinction of the Taif Agreement\u2014now more than a third of a century old\u2014it became clear how perfectly that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1359,"featured_media":14225,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"jnews_post_split":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,61],"tags":[1031,1007,932,593,32,40],"ppma_author":[962],"class_list":["post-14224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-slider","tag-ahmed-al-sharaa","tag-bashar-al-assad","tag-china","tag-damascus","tag-russia","tag-syria"],"authors":[{"term_id":962,"user_id":1359,"is_guest":0,"slug":"mohammad-sayed-rassas","display_name":"Mohammad Sayed Rassas","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/WhatsApp-Image-2024-10-09-at-15.30.05-e1728481060869.jpeg","url2x":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/WhatsApp-Image-2024-10-09-at-15.30.05-e1728481060869.jpeg"},"0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14226,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14224\/revisions\/14226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14224"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nlka.net\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=14224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}