AP Photo/Richard Drew
To riff off of Benjamin Netanyahu's speech at the UN earlier this year, a crucial part of The Curse got lifted last night from the Middle East. Iran has spent more than 40 years constructing the "Shiite Crescent" in the region in an attempt at encirclement of Israel and the Sunni Arab states in the region, with Hamas and Hezbollah as its proxy armies and Syria as its puppet state and main lines of communication.
Those plans are in utter ruin today. The collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus has cut Iran off from its proxy armies and likely ended any influence Tehran will ever have in the region. Hezbollah has spent the last couple of days attempting to salvage its own operations, and now that has apparently turned into a bug-out:
Lebanese armed group Hezbollah says it has withdrawn all of its forces from Syria, two Lebanese security sources have told Reuters news agency.
The group pulled back its troops as rebel factions approached the capital of Damascus.
One source said that supervising forces that Hezbollah had deployed to Syria overnight between Thursday and Friday had been sent to oversee the pullback.
Israel attacked at least one column of retreating armor from Syria along a well-known heavy-arms smuggling route. The cease-fire only applies in Lebanon, and the Israelis had good reason to take advantage of Hezbollah's retreat, but the heavy-arms smuggling is now over for a long while. Assad's regime created those opportunities for Iran to supply its main proxy in exchange for Hezbollah's help in maintaining power in Syria.
That brings us to a couple of points. First, as I remarked last night on Twitter, Iran's miscalculations in the wake of the October 7 massacres are nothing short of astounding. They knew that Assad had only managed an uneasy stalemate in the Syrian civil war and only had firm control over a fraction of his country -- and only Hezbollah and the Russians made that much possible. With Russia distracted and drained by its attempted conquest in Ukraine, the mullahs should have maintained the status quo rather than provoke a war with Israel. Perhaps they thought that the US would contain Israel to the kind of tit-for-tat responses of the past, but if so, they vastly underestimated the impact of October 7 on the Israelis. By having Hezbollah join the war Hamas started, they forced the Israelis to deal directly and decisively with the threat from the north for the first time in a generation.
If Iran was gambling, they came up snake eyes. Israel vastly outclassed and overpowered the Hezbollah terrorist/drug gang on which Iran had placed its entire regional strategy. The fall of Assad is a direct consequence of that decision. And now that Assad has fallen, Iran has not just lost its lines of communication to its proxy armies -- it has also lost its intelligence and warning systems aimed at deterring Israel from direct war on their regime. The mullahs got a taste of that a few weeks ago while Assad and Hezbollah still controlled some parts of Syria, and now the Iranians are completely naked.
At the moment, the Israelis are more concerned with border security, of course. They moved to recapture the demilitarized zone in the Golan overnight and began striking regime targets in Syria to ensure that they could not be reused by any radical-Islamist factions still in the southern regions:
The IDF, on Sunday afternoon, took over the Syrian side of the Mount Hermon mountain range to expand a demilitarized buffer zone along the border with Syria and also at several other points of significance for defense.
The Hermon range has always been thought of as providing a strategic advantage because it provides high ground for the entire area, enabling Israel to anticipate any potential invading force further in advance. ...
Earlier Tuesday, the IDF struck a chemical weapons factory belonging to the regime of former Syrian president Bashar Assad to prevent the rebels from seizing it, Arab media first reported on Sunday, and The Jerusalem Post later independently confirmed.
In addition, IDF sources responded about whether the air force had attacked Syrian chemical weapons, saying that the military follows developments that could endanger Israel and takes the necessary steps to attack any such dangerous threats.
Speaking of Netanyahu, he made an appearance at Golan today. He took credit for the collapse of the Assad regime by Israel's defeat of Hezbollah and offered "the hand of peace" to the rebels in Syria. Netanyahu also emphasized that Israel will defend its borders no matter what they decide.
According to Reuters, Netanyahu is already making good on the vow to deal with security threats. The IDF targeted Iranian-linked facilities near Damascus overnight:
Israel conducted three airstrikes against a major security complex in the Kafr Sousa district of the Syrian capital along with a research center where it had previously said Iranian scientists developed missiles, two regional security sources tell Reuters.
Is Netanyahu coordinating these actions with the rebels in Damascus? One would hope so, and the rebels may see any degradation of Iranian facilities as a symbol of their grip on power. However, at some point the new government will likely want to make use of the legitimate arms and facilities of the national military. Israel probably can't afford to let these kinds of facilities remain functional to just hope that the new regime is friendlier than the last, however. Netanyahu certainly understands the nature of the factions that control this rebellion and has to prepare for the worst while hoping for the, er ... least worst.
The last question is the obvious one: Whither Assad? Conflicting reports had him either leaving Damascus on a flight that fell off the radar screen around Homs, or else leaving Latakia and going north-ish. That hypothesis would have likely involved the Russians, whose air base at Khmemim is near Latakia. That would explain Russia's claim that Assad apparently arranged the end of his regime, and suggests that any destination would not have been to the southeast toward Homs:
The Russian foreign ministry said on Sunday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had left office and departed the country after giving orders there be a peaceful handover of power.
In a statement, the ministry did not say where Assad was now and said Russia has not taken part in the talks around his departure. Earlier reports suggested that Assad may have been killed in a plane crash as he attempted to flee the country.
The Kan public broadcaster reported that shortly before the Russian statement was released, a transport plane lifted off from the Russian base in the Syrian city of Latakia, hinting at Assad’s potential presence on the aircraft.
Assuming the Russians are telling the truth (always a risk), Assad would have fled Syria entirely. The only reason to relocate to another Syrian location would have been to try to hold onto power, either with loyal military forces or with Iranian or Russian forces propping him up. Hezbollah was already heading for the exits at this point and the Russians are more or less trapped now in Syria, and besides, the Russians are announcing the abdication. Assad most definitely would have fled the country rather than risk capture, and his plane would almost certainly have aimed for the Mediterranean rather than the interior of Syrian airspace. I'd bet he got out, and his current hosts probably aren't too anxious to announce his presence.
So is this good news in the long run? As the Zen master says, we'll see, but it's a catastrophe for the Iranian mullahs' regime. It's bad enough that it might provoke the Iranian people again in Tehran to demand an end to their regime, especially now that the mullahs look so weak and incompetent. At the very least, their regional ambitions and more than 40 years of machinations are utter dust. The Houthis had better prepare for what's coming next.
Update: Guess who else is getting the message?
Sources within various Palestinian terror groups in Gaza said Sunday that Hamas has told them to compile information on the hostages they hold in preparation for a potential ceasefire and hostage deal with Israel.
Hamas has told factions including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front and the Popular Resistance Committees to prepare information such as whether their hostages are alive or dead, the sources told AFP.
Qatar’s prime minister said on Saturday that there was renewed “momentum” for a ceasefire and hostage release deal following the election of Donald Trump in the United States.
Hamas is insisting that the Israelis stop offensive operations so that it can get information on the hostages, but they have apparently dropped the demand for a full end to the war and a withdrawal of the IDF as the prerequisite for returning hostages. For now, anyway, Hamas seems to have read the writing on the wall, and it's in Hebrew rather than Persian.
Update: The most likely outcome for the Assads' flight has been confirmed by Tass:
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Post on X
Yashar Ali 🐘@yashar
BREAKING
The Russian government state media agency Tass reports that Bashar Al-Assad and his family are in Moscow and have been granted political asylum.
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As late as two days ago, regime mouthpieces insisted that Assad was in Damascus, but it's more likely that he moved to Latakia when Aleppo and Hama fell. The Russians would have provided protection there, and that explains why Hezbollah first began to fall back to the north coast rather than Lebanon. When Damascus fell and Assad's military refused to fight for him, the Russians got him out as was likely planned all along. That's when Hezbollah began to fall back to Lebanon, too. The Russians will likely be forced to evacuate from the Khmemim base near Latakia soon as well.
Update: One more point on that sequence: When dictators fall because their military refuses to fight for them, the usual result is a palace coup in which the military seizes the dictator. I'd bet that Assad has been in Latakia under Russian protection for a while simply to prevent the Syrian military from assassinating Assad. That may be the only reason he's still alive.
