The regime in Iran is scrambling to explain why it was unable to protect its client Bashar Assad in Syria from being overthrown by a lightning-fast jihadi offensive that accomplished in less than two weeks what a decade of civil war could not.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Sunday that Assad frantically reached out to Iran for help after the rebels began capturing cities and making a beeline for Damascus, only to be told that Tehran’s help would be “limited in nature, if it came at all.”
According to the WSJ’s sources, Iran wrote Assad off very quickly and briskly informed the dictator that he stood alone — after ostensibly winning the Syrian civil war with Iranian and Russian help:
Iranian officials blamed Assad for not preparing for the rebel assault and said they weren’t able to send military reinforcements because of Israel, Syrian officials said. An Iranian plane heading for Syria earlier this week made a U-turn because of the threat of Israeli airstrikes, the officials said.
Rather than lend aid, Iran ordered its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its affiliated militias to stay out of the fight, according to Syrian officials. Iran then coordinated a safe exit for its personnel and cut a deal for its fighters to peacefully hand territory over to the rebels.
Iran moved quickly to get its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces out of Syria, apparently seeing the handwriting on the wall as soon as the rebels captured Aleppo, their first big conquest of the 11-day conflict. Iran’s proxy forces in Iraq seemed ready to help Assad, but in the end, they sent only a few hundred fighters across the border, and those forces did not seem to accomplish much on Syrian soil.
Even the rebels seemed taken aback to discover they could seize the city in only four days, after Syrian military units began melting away. Rebel forces immediately hopped into a convoy of pickup trucks and hit the road for Homs, their next conquest.
Russia apparently came to similar conclusions with comparable speed. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, respectively, left Russia and Iran with few resources to commit to Syria, and when they saw how quickly Syrian Army units were fleeing from the rebel advance, they decided not to gamble what little strength they could have brought to bear.
“The toppling of Assad’s regime, ending 50 years of his family’s rule, revealed how badly Syria’s army had been hollowed out by years of corruption, defections to the rebellion and the country’s economic crisis. Recruitment had declined, and Syrian men dodged conscription,” the WSJ noted.
Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, said in a televised interview on Sunday that the fall of Damascus was inevitable. He praised Assad and the Syrian military for deciding to “transfer power peacefully” to “prevent further bloodshed and destruction.”
“My colleagues stayed in Damascus until 11 PM [on Saturday night] and then left the embassy, with some possibly crossing the border by dawn. The Iranian embassy was attacked and damaged on Sunday, which is against international law,” Akbari complained.
Akbari wistfully hoped that Israel might come to regret its victory over Iran and its proxy forces.
“The Zionist regime is now happy about eliminating one of its enemies, with Netanyahu viewing it as a personal achievement. However, they are also worried that the new forces’ establishment in Syria could pose an additional threat to them,” he said.
Assad might have been genuinely surprised at how weak Iran’s position in Syria was, since Tehran has striven to conceal how much damage Israel inflicted on Hezbollah and IRGC networks operating in Syria. Russia managed a few ineffective airstrikes against the rebels, but even those tapered off quickly.
Bashar Assad evidently did not wait for long to make his escape after Iran and Russia told him he was on his own. After the al-Qaeda-linked rebels took Homs, a number of other dormant insurgent groups smelled blood in the water and began advancing on Damascus from the opposite direction. Assad simply vanished on Saturday evening, failing to deliver a scheduled address to the nation.
Losing Syria was a bitter pill for the Iranians to swallow. Like Russia, they expected rewards for stepping in to save Assad during the civil war. Not only are Iran’s investments in the Assad dynasty gone, but its entire “Axis of Resistance” has been shattered.
The loss of Syria will cut Hezbollah off from Iran’s pipeline of weapons, depriving Tehran of its proxy military presence on Israel’s border. Other Iranian proxies, like the Houthi insurgents of Yemen, will now face enemies who wonder if they might collapse just as quickly as the Syrian army did. For that matter, the Iranian theocracy might look more weak and vulnerable to its unhappy subjects than at any time since the 1979 revolution that brought it to power.
Concerned regional analysts told the Associated Press (AP) on Sunday that Iran’s panicked rulers might go into a defensive crouch – which could mean ramping up their illegal nuclear weapons program, to give themselves a veneer of strength in a region that despises weakness.
The Iranian regime knows this, which could be one reason why it suddenly stopped referring to the Syrian rebels as “terrorists” on Saturday night and started calling them “legitimate opposition groups” who should ring up Tehran at their earliest opportunity to discuss a “far-sighted” approach to Iran-Syria relations.
“Iran finds itself in an unprecedented position of weakness – its security perimeter is now restricted to its actual borders. The Iranian regime will have to rethink its security,” Iran specialist Jonathan Piron of the Etopia research center in Brussels told France24 on Monday.
Israel’s envoy to India, Reuven Azar, told NDTV on Monday that Iran made a “huge miscalculation” by committing Hezbollah to fight Israel and losing the strength they needed to prop Assad up.
“When you look at the picture today, you see that these tentacles of the Iranian regime have all been cut. And now, rebel forces in the region, which have been following all that, and seeing the debilitation of the Iran axis, took full advantage of it. And that is how you see the change in Syria,” Azar said.
