The Rift Between Iran and Syria

 
The Rift Between Iran and Syria

There is a desire shared by many to get Tehran out of Damascus.

Syrian President Bashar Assad has reason to distance himself from his erstwhile ally Iran. It’s true that Iran helped stabilize the government in Damascus and was instrumental in putting down a rebel uprising, but its continued presence on Syrian territory is a threat to Assad – not least because it invites occasional strikes from Israel. Assad sees Israeli pressure as an opportunity to get rid of Iran for good, and to that end he has signaled an interest in meeting with the United States, which sees ousting Iran as a necessary step in rehabilitating the Syrian regime. Given the escalation between Iran and Israel, it is unlikely that Assad would have made such signals if he were not sincere in his desire to draw closer to the U.S. and further from Iran.

A Worn-Out Welcome

Although Iran still has significant influence in Damascus, Assad’s government is no puppet state. Like all Syrian rulers before him, Assad wants political autonomy, giving priority to the preservation of his regime. He admits that Iran and Hezbollah helped his government survive, but he had hoped they would withdraw after defeating the rebels. Instead, Iran has intensified its military and intelligence presence without Assad’s consent and against his plans to retake parts of the country controlled by radical Islamic movements. Iran’s strategic project is to consolidate its presence in Syria regardless of who occupies the presidency. After taking control of so much Syrian territory, Assad no longer needs Iran, and he has no problem getting rid of it. Assad understands that Iran’s presence will discourage Western countries from contributing to Syria’s reconstruction, and their absence will allow Tehran to retrieve the vast resources that it expended to shore up the regime. Assad knows that Iran is ready to abandon him and work with his successor if it reaches an agreement with Washington to achieve its ambitions in the Middle East.

In truth, Syrian-Iranian relations have been deteriorating for some time. Trust and common purpose have been replaced by disagreements and suspicion, especially over Iran’s propensity to dictate terms of Syrian policy concerning the Gulf Cooperation Council. Then there is the simple matter of resentment. Even before Hezbollah opened a new front against Israel, the Syrian theater was responsible for a significant amount of Iranian attrition. Hezbollah lost some of its most able commanders in Syria – in part to rebels, in part to Israel, and in part to Syrian forces themselves, with whom they repeatedly clashed over suspicious deals with the president’s brother, proceeds from illicit smuggling and general distrust. With Israel’s liquidation of many senior Iranian officers who fought in defense of the Syrian regime and Assad’s dismissal of ranking Syrian security and military personnel who appreciated what Iran did for their country, the Syrian-Iranian relationship began to deteriorate.

Arab states, and particularly Arab Gulf states, also want to see Iran leave Syria. They have even made demands to that end, and given that they will be the ones to finance Syria’s reconstruction, it’s not a demand Assad can ignore. Over the past year, Damascus has thus resumed diplomatic relations with several Arab countries, especially the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and regained its seat in the Arab League. Assad also participated in the Arab summit in Jeddah for the first time since the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011. Notably, Assad exchanged congratulatory messages with many Arab heads of state on the advent of Ramadan, while Syrian and Iranian media were unusually quiet about similar exchanges between Assad and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.

Iran suspects that the Syrian government is ready to make a deal with the West. After the Israeli airstrike that destroyed its consulate, Iran decided to move the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the suburbs of Damascus to areas near Lebanon – a move made out of concern that Assad was not interested in ensuring the safety of Iranian officers. Over the past year, Iranian officials have visited Syria more than ever because no Syrian personnel reporting directly to Tehran remain in positions of influence. These structural changes confirm that Assad began moving long ago to eliminate Iranian influence gradually.

In September 2020, for example, Assad moved to expel Arab fighters from the National Defense Forces, an Iranian-controlled group of militias formed in 2013 that included fighters from Egypt, Tunisia and other Arab countries. Despite Iranian penetration into the Syrian army, Assad has recently worked to limit Tehran’s influence, especially regarding its use of militias to create parallel security structures not affiliated with his regime. As a first step, Assad authorized military intelligence to deal directly with Iranian-backed militias, Hezbollah and the notorious auxiliary forces. Assad wanted to organize combat forces on the ground under the supervision of military intelligence to limit Iran’s control.

The Politics of Distrust

The rapport of the past years between Damascus and Tehran has disappeared and been overshadowed by mounting disagreements and suspicion, especially with Iran’s increasing pressure on the Syrian government out of its desire to impose restrictions on Assad’s regime to prevent it from engaging the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Even before Hezbollah’s decision to open a secondary front against Israel last October, Hezbollah was suffering from a shortage of well-trained field commanders. Those of them who received advanced training from the IRGC are no longer around, systematically eliminated by the rebels or members of other regime militias. Hezbollah lost in Syria its most able commanders, who gained great military experience during its wars with Israel. However, its involvement in the war mafias and suspicious deals with the president’s brother eliminated most of these officers. The lack of trust between the Syrian regime and its Hezbollah-led Shiite allies caused violent confrontations between them due to recurring disputes over the sharing of drug smuggling proceeds. With Israel’s liquidation of many senior Iranian officers who fought in defense of the Syrian regime and Assad’s dismissal of ranking Syrian security and military personnel who cooperated with Iran, the strength of the Syrian-Iranian relationship began to fade.

Russia, another Syrian ally, is on board with ousting a potential competitor like Iran too. Maher Assad, the commander of the Fourth Division, which is the strongest in the regime’s army and whose mission is to protect Damascus, deliberately got rid of Hezbollah fighters in collaboration with a certain Russian unit that monitored the movements of Hezbollah’s personnel and informed the Fourth Division of their whereabouts. Sometimes, the Fourth Division provided the rebel forces with classified information about Hezbollah’s commanders to ambush them.

Iran is concerned that Russia, which intervened on Assad’s side with decisive air power in 2015, may compete with it for postwar reconstruction contracts. These concerns escalated in 2016, when Damascus agreed to give Russia priority in reconstruction contracts, and in 2019, when Assad granted Russia exclusive rights to operate Syria’s hydrocarbon fields. Recent bilateral agreements between Syria and Russia have further heightened Iran’s concerns about its interests in postwar Syria. Assad’s extending such privilege to Moscow has alarmed Tehran, which believes, given its financial and economic contributions to Damascus and direct participation in the war, that it deserves commensurate compensation without competing with Moscow. For Assad, Moscow’s influence counters Tehran’s desire to make Syria a client state. In the long term, Iran poses a threat to Russia’s military and political intentions in Syria. While Moscow prefers Syria to be a secular, federal state capable of maintaining its coastal military bases, Tehran is interested in expanding its regional influence through a fragmented and sectarian Syria.

Regardless of Assad’s preference to get rid of Iran’s influence, replacing it with Russia might not be more appealing since Arab countries that worked with Soviet leaders in the 1950s and 1960s had difficulty communicating with them or getting them to honor mutual agreements. Even before the 2011 Syrian uprising, Iran was actively laying the ground for permanently positioning itself in the country. Even though Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been working on rehabilitating Assad’s regime in the Arab region, he still has doubts about them. In a speech delivered in 2006, Assad described the GCC rulers as “half men,” viewing them as “indentured slaves” of the United States.

It’s unclear how the U.S., for its part, feels about a possible rapprochement with Syria. It would relish any opportunity to isolate Iran, but it is also leading the charge in opposing normalization between Syria and the Arab world. Still, the war in Gaza has accentuated some of the differences between Iran and Syria such that Damascus believes there is now an opportunity to make its move.

Syria is an improbable country, severely divided along sectarian, ethnic and regional lines. In the 1950s, it was an arena for regional power competition. Bashar’s father, Hafez Assad, used excessive repression to control and transform it into a modest regional power. The Assads are minority rulers, and many see Bashar as paranoid and conspiracist. Even so, Bashar allowed Iranian influence in the country after he pulled out the Syrian army from Lebanon in 2005. Despite the rift between the Assad regime and Iran, the odds are that postwar Syria will reemerge into a weak state dominated by other countries, including Iran, which will be one of several states meddling in its domestic affairs.

Hilal Khashan