As the Syrian civil war reaches its denouement with the imminent fall of the Idlib enclave—the last stronghold of forces fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime—Iran’s presence in Syria has reached the top of the American agenda for the Middle East. When US National Security Advisor John Bolton met with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, on 23 August in Geneva, he demanded that Russia persuade Iran, with which it has been collaborating in Syria in defence of the Assad regime, to remove its forces from Syria. Patrushev made it clear that, while Russia wasn’t necessarily opposed to the idea of Iranian troops withdrawing from Syria, it couldn’t force them to leave.
In fact, the pressure mounted by the US (and Israel) has had the unintended effect of solidifying the Iran–Syria alliance. Syria and Iran signed a fresh military cooperation agreement on 27 August at a meeting between their defence ministers at which they reiterated the need for Iranian forces to stay in Syria.
What makes the Iranian presence in Syria hard for the US to swallow is that, unlike the Russian presence, it threatens Israel’s self-defined security interests. But Washington must understand that Iran’s commitment to the Assad regime is qualitatively different from Russia’s. A couple of years ago, before the military tide turned decisively in favour of the regime, Moscow seemed willing to countenance Assad’s removal in order to forge a settlement between the regime and opposition forces.
Iran’s alliance with the House of Assad, on the other hand, is much more firm. It goes back to 1980 when Syria under Hafez al-Assad was the only Arab country that stood by Iran when Saddam Hussein, fearing the effect of the Iranian revolution on Iraq’s Shia majority, launched a bloody war against Iran that was bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms to the tune of US$20 billion. It lasted eight years and left a million Iranians dead.
More importantly, several realpolitik calculations determined Iran’s stance once the Assad regime was challenged—including the support extended by Iran’s nemesis Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies to insurgent factions and the initial US determination to expedite regime change in Damascus because of Assad’s close relations with Iran. The increasingly Sunni Islamist and virulently anti-Shia colour of the Syrian insurgency further influenced Iranian decision-making.
Read the article by Mohammed Ayoob in The Strategist.