What’s Next for Syria, and America’s Middle East Role, after Bashar al-Assad’s Fall?
“A lot of turbulence and uncertainty,” says Shamiran Mako, BU scholar on the region’s politics
The defeat of Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad—celebrated as a broken bust is stepped on by a victorious rebel fighter—opens a period of turmoil in the Middle East, BU’s Shamiran Mako predicts. Photo by AP/Hussein Malla
What’s Next for Syria, and America’s Middle East Role, after Bashar al-Assad’s Fall?
“A lot of turbulence and uncertainty,” says Shamiran Mako, a BU scholar on the region’s politics
After fending off rebels for 13 years, defying then-President Barack Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons, and continuing a half century of ironfisted rule of Syria with help from allies in Moscow and Tehran, Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed Sunday amid a lightning offensive by anti-government forces.
Assad has taken refuge in Russia, leaving analysts puzzling over what comes next in Syria and the Middle East. More than 507,000 Syrians perished during the civil war; in a rare agreement, President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump attributed Assad’s defeat to his debilitated allies’ inability to help him any longer. Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, “chose to launch a multifront war against Israel,” Biden said. “That was a historic mistake on Iran’s part.”
Trump meanwhile posted on Truth Social, “Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success.” For Russian President Vladimir Putin, already bogged down in his war on Ukraine, Assad’s fall marked “one of the biggest geopolitical setbacks of his quarter-century in power,” the New York Times wrote.
BU Today spoke about the fast-moving situation with Shamiran Mako, an assistant professor of international relations at BU’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and a scholar of the politics of Middle East state formation, authoritarianism, and civil wars. She also has an appointment at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q&A
with Shamiran Mako
BU Today: Were you surprised by the fall of a regime that once seemed impregnable?
Mako: On the one hand, it’s surprising how quickly the Syrian forces retreated. Some defected. Even [among] local police forces, there are reports that folks abandoned their posts. On the other hand, I’m not surprised that the regime has collapsed.
We underestimated how much the regime had been dealt a blow over the past 13 years and how much of Syria had come to be decimated. We’re talking about infrastructure. We’re talking about pockets of the country to the northeast and northwest where the regime had not gotten hold of those areas. You had rebel factions on the northwestern side that had their own de facto rule. On the northeastern side, you have Kurdish forces who control, with American backing, large swaths of territory in the Jazira region. You had pockets of regime stability throughout the rest of the country. So you have internal fragmentation that enabled the regime to hang on, but in a really fragile way.
The regime’s biggest backers, Iran and Russia, are preoccupied with their own quagmires. In my book, After the Arab Uprisings, and in an article I came out with, I argue that the reason the Assad regime has survived is because it had external backers and patrons that were willing to do the fighting for it. In the absence of Russian and Iranian efforts to prop up the regime, the regime collapses.
BU Today: With the defeat of Assad, who are the dominant powers now in the Middle East? Do you see broader, regional peace as more or less likely?
Mako: Turkey—a US ally, NATO member—has for the past decade been involved in the Syrian civil war. Turkey has occupied a chunk of that northeastern frontier as part of what it sees as its own security buffer to push away Kurdish forces, which it sees as being allied with the PKK inside Turkey—a Kurdish insurgent group that the country, along with the US and the EU, deems to be a terrorist organization.
We’re seeing Iran retreating because its reach and capabilities have been degraded in Lebanon [where Israel pummelled Iran’s Hezbollah proxies] and in Iran [which Israel struck in October]. Netanyahu made a decision to stop abiding by the 1974 armistice agreement Israel signed with the Syrian government after it annexed the Golan Heights, and has moved into Syrian territory in an attempt to expand on the preexisting buffer zone. Israel has consistently also struck targets inside Syria, most recently attacking Syrian military assets after Assad’s ouster.
The Gulf states normalized relations with Syria earlier this year, allowing Syria back into the Arab League. I think we’re going to key Arab states play a role in the transition to carve their own interests and spheres of influence, mostly to contain potential Islamist threats from emerging. That’s good and bad, because the regional interests of the states don’t align. Egypt and the Gulf states don’t want to see radical factions at the helm of the Syrian government; there is fear that these Islamist groups will pose a threat to their own security and stability.
I think there’s going to be a lot of turbulence and uncertainty.
BU Today: Assad was a brutal dictator. Can we expect better from a regime that includes Islamists?
We’re in for a period of uncertainty. It all depends on how much internal cohesion there is amongst HTS [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham]. That group essentially emerged as an amalgamation of radical Sunni Islamist factions. On the other side, you have Kurdish factions who don’t see eye to eye with these Islamist groups. Then you have elements of the Free Syrian Army [an anti-Assad rebel coalition] that are perhaps more secular and inclined to engage in a peaceful kind of power-sharing agreement.
Over the next few weeks, one of the things I’m paying attention to is, are these groups going to have enough of a common goal to govern Syria for them to come together and agree to a cohesive transitional government, potential power-sharing, [and] free and fair elections, which is going to be crucial.
President-elect Trump has already come out and said we want to have nothing to do with what happens in Syria, it’s not our problem. Assad was a brutal, brutal dictator, and he and his father had ruled Syria with an iron fist. There’s a lot to celebrate for many Syrians, but at the same time, given the fragmented opposition inside of Syria, I think there’s going to be a lot of turbulence and uncertainty. The question is, how much of an effort will regional states actually contribute to stabilizing Syria?
BU Today: US analysts include both those who think we should reduce our military commitment in the Middle East and those who want to maintain it. What’s your view, given the Syrian situation?
We are entering into an administration that seems, in terms of its signaling, to have a more isolationist or retractive role in the Middle East, minus [withdrawing] support for Israel. The US presence in Syria is support for Kurdish democratic forces in the northeast, where the US has about 900 troops stationed. That’s a low-cost mission. I suspect that the American military is going to continue that mission, at least until they see where Syria is headed. There is a lot of uncertainty about where American support for the Kurdish forces, known as the YPG, is headed, given that Turkey, a NATO member and US ally, has been at odds with American support of the Kurdish forces.
On the other hand, we are probably going to see a diminished role of the US in the Syrian transition. The US presence in the region has not necessarily led to peaceful transitions in other places. The most prominent case is Iraq. Realistically, I do not think that the US is going to ever leave the Middle East, for a number of reasons. One, to contain threats that are still emerging from the region. And the US still has deep interests in Middle Eastern oil.
What we are going to see is maybe a recalibration to a lower-level footprint. But a complete retreat—I have a hard time thinking that that’s actually going to happen.
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