By Kusum Wijetilleke
The Golan Heights is a strategically important plateau in the south-west of Syria, just one of the many areas of the Levant that have been contested for several decades. The Sea of Galilee, called Lake Tiberias, in the Golan Heights, feeds the major water sources of the region including the Jordan River; the Golan also has fertile volcanic soil that supports agriculture and cattle grazing.
In the 2010s, companies began exploring the plateau for crude oil and natural gas deposits; by 2015 the subsidiary of a major American Oil and Gas company, Genie Energy had discovered significant deposits of crude oil, “billions of barrels” according to a Times of Israel report from October 2015.
The Israeli response to the Hamas attack of October 7 has, since its inception, threatened a wider conflict across the region: in Yemen, the Red Sea, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Over the past week, Sunni Islamist paramilitary organisation, Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched an operation into the centre of Syrian territory calling for the removal of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, who has ruled Syria since the year 2000.
The ousting of Assad was a stated objective of the United States and European Union ever since Assad’s brutal repression of protestors during the Syrian Civil War of 2011. Syria, as a vital ally of both Iran and Russia, was a target of regime change by the western bloc; staved off by a combination of resistance and complexities related to the many geopolitical imperatives by regional and global powers that surround Syria.
Since the capture of Damascus by HTS, Israel has moved quickly to secure the Golan Heights which it claims sovereignty over. Al Jazeera reported that Israel had moved additional forces to occupy parts of the Golan with the IDF taking control over a buffer zone established by the “Agreement on Disengagement” during the 1974 ceasefire. A few days ago, Netanyahu referred to the Assad regime as the “tyranny in Damascus” and called this a “historic day for the middle east” but that Israel would “not allow any hostile force to establish itself on our border.”
Chess Boards and World Maps
During the 1967 war, Israel annexed a portion of the Golan, an occupation that has only ever been recognized by the United States, in 2019 under the Trump Presidency. The company that won the contract from the Israeli government to explore potential oil deposits is a subsidiary of Genie Energy, which has an “Advisory Board” that has included prominent American political figures including Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director James Woolsey, and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. Other members of the advisory board have included British Financier Jacob Rothschild and Australian Media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Syria, despite not being part of mainstream news coverage more recently, has always been a major strategic imperative for numerous nations. The United States has long since battled ISIS in the region, sometimes directly, other times through proxies; operations in Syria are meant to be a limiting factor on Iranian influence in the region; the US has also supported Kurdish forces in North Eastern Syria.
The EU, while also joining counter-terrorism operations against Islamist groups, have a keen interest in managing the flow of refugees from the region; since around 2015 some 5 million Syrian refugees have crossed into other countries including at least 700,000 into European cities. Gulf States that are US allies, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have also taken part in operations to counter Iranian influence in the area.
The relationship between Syria and Russia and between Assad and Putin was not just about geo-strategic imperatives but also about prestige; seeing itself as a global power, the Kremlin has often sought influence in the Middle East. In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union established a naval and military installation near the Syrian City of Tartus, which now serves as Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean Sea.
The lease of this facility was secured in the mid-2000s when Russia wrote off over 70% of Syria’s Soviet-era debts which totalled over USD 13 Bn, Assad agreed to convert this port into a permanent Russian base in the Middle East, to service its nuclear armed warships. Assad’s ousting always had the potential to threaten Russian interests in the Mediterranean through Tartus, without which, Russian warships must return to Russian ports in the Northern Black Sea through NATO controlled so-called “choke-points” along the Turkish Straits.
The Last Castle
Reporting from the major outlets have suggested that the sudden attack by HTS took Russian forces in Syria by surprise. In the days prior to the offensive, Russian forces had been on observation missions in the Golan instead of fortifying key cities like Aleppo, the city where the HTS offensive began on the 29th of November.
In September 2018, Turkey, Russia and Iran signed the Sochi Accord, creating a de-escalation zone in the north-western Syrian city of Idlib which is just one hour or 20 miles away from Aleppo and contained the last remnants of anti-Assad rebels, indeed Idlib was labelled Syria’s “Last Rebel Strong-hold.” Idlib is also 75 miles away from Tartus and only 35 miles away from Russia’s main Airbase in Syria, Khmemimi.
Post-Sochi, in December 2019, Syrian forces under Assad launched an offensive in Idlib claiming non-compliance by HTS triggering a displacement of an estimated 900,000 civilians. This brings us to a major Turkish imperative: Erdogan fears a further influx of Syrian refugees, already numbering in the millions within the borders of Turkey.
Turkey’s long and controversial history with its large Kurdish minority and their concentration in the region next to its south-eastern borders, part of so-called “Kurdistan”, creates a major imperative for Erdogan: to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous region near its border. Losing Idlib to Assad’s forces significantly reduces Turkey’s leverage in that area. Erdogan was also part of the Astana Peace Process of 2017 that brought Turkey together with Iran and Russia to de-escalate the war and balance US power in Syria.
Minority Rule and the Kurdish Spring
The Kurds are an Iranian ethnic group, due to linguistic and cultural roots; Turkey, Syria and Iran all have significant territory under threat from Kurdish separatism, Iran alone has some 8 to 10 million Kurds; they make-up a fifth of the population in Turkey but total between 35 to 45 million in a region that spans across the territories of eastern Turkey, north-eastern Syria, northern Iraq and western Iran.
The Kurdish Separatist movement includes the PKK, which like HTS is a proscribed terrorist organization, operating out of south-east Turkey and north-east Syria through its affiliate, the People’s Protection Units (YPG).
The collapse of the Assad government also has significant strategic consequences for Iran and by extension Israel, as indicated by Netanyahu’s comments. Hezbollah, striking Israeli targets from the South of Lebanon, depend on arms shipments of from Iran, supplied through a land corridor that extends from through Iraqi and Syrian territory.
The US maintains a military base at Al-Tanf, a strategic area in the Syrian desert near the Iraq-Syria-Jordan border with a small squadron of 200 US soldiers; the base sits along a major highway: the M2 which stretches from Baghdad to Damascus, one of only three major roads connecting Iraq with Syria. Al Tanf allows the US to block part of Iran’s intended southern land corridor between Iraq and Syria and disrupting the fastest supply-route to Hezbollah. Al Tanf also supplements US operations against ISIS and serves as a further security guarantee for Syria’s oil fields in the North-East, a region controlled by Kurdish forces.
Iran’s support for the recently deposed Syrian regime also stems from Assad’s Alawite religious heritage, a distinct sect rooted in Shia Islam; the alliance is however primarily driven by Iranian imperatives related to Israel.
The Alawites are a minority group in Syria, comprising under 15% of the country’s population, numbering between 2-3 million. Some 80% of the country are Syrian Arabs, the large majority of whom practice Sunni Islam. The Alawites practice Shia Islam and have become dominant despite their small numbers, holding most elite positions in the military, politics and the bureaucracy more generally.
The Coming Storm
Syria has historically been a fragile and complex mosaic of diverse religious, ethnic and political factions generating an inherently unstable socio-political landscape in a Nation-State that emerged from the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. Assad had thus far managed to survive modern US-sponsored programs of regime change across the region but this was never going to last indefinitely.
Will Assad become a bargaining chip for Russia in its quest to retain control of Tartus and Khmemimi? There are also no guarantees as to who the fall of Assad will benefit; the probability of an intense and destructive blow-back is clear and present. HTS has perviously opposed Shia militias including Hezbollah, but could yet consolidate more extreme elements from around Syria in a manner that threatens US strategy and Turkish imperatives.
Multiple domino effects can also occur: a more autonomous Kurdistan or a significantly weakened Russia, any of which might have lasting impacts on conflicts in the Middle East but also from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the valleys of the Donbas in Ukraine.
Kusum Wijetilleke has 15 years of experience in the Financial and Corporate sectors after completing a Degree in Accounting and Finance at the University of Kent (UK). He also holds a Masters in International Relations from the University of Colombo. He is a media presenter, resource-person, a political commentator, and Foreign Affairs Analyst. He is member of the Working Committee of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB).
Factum is an Asia-Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.
