Prepare for Disintegration of Syria and Rise of Imperial Turkey

The desolation wrought on Hezbollah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

First things first. The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. The Iranian regime, in its last days, is lurching toward a nuclear breakout to save itself. Such a breakout would not only leave one of the most destructive weapons in one of the most dangerous regimes in the world —as President Bush had warned against in 2002 — but in the hands of one of the most desperate ones. This is a prescription for catastrophe. Because of that, and because one should never turn one’s back on a cobra, even a wounded one, it is a sine qua non that Iran and its castrati allies in Lebanon be defeated.

However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. Indeed, not only are those threats surfacing and becoming visible, but the United States and its allies need already now, urgently in fact, to start assessing and navigating the new reality taking shape.

These new threats are slowly reaching not only a visible, but acute phase. They only increase the urgency of dispensing with the Iranian threat expeditiously. Neither the United States nor our allies in the region have any longer the luxury of a slow containment and delaying strategy in Iran. Instead, a rapid move toward decisive victory in the twilight struggle with the Ayatollahs is required.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of ISIS is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, or HTS — a descendant of the Nusra force led by Abu Muhammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of the al-Qaeda system and cobbled together of ISIS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey. Ankara used the U.S. withdrawal from northern Iraq a few years ago to release Islamists captured by the U.S. and the Kurds. It sent some to Libya to fight the pro-Egyptian Libyan National Army under General Khalifa Belqasim Haftar based in Tobruk. It reorganized the rest in Islamist militias oriented toward Ankara. The rise of a Muslim-Brotherhood dominated Turkey, rehabilitating and tapping ISIS residue to ride Iran’s decline/demise to Ankara’s strategic advantage, will plague American and Israeli interests going forward.

Added to this is the power vacuum created by the destruction of Hamas. The defeat of that terrorist group has been, for good reason, a critical goal for Israel and the United States, but it is one that also involves consequences that must be navigated and hopefully countered. The world of Hamas is a schizophrenic one. It has two heads, aligned with different internal fractions — one more anchored to the world of Sunni, Muslim Brotherhood politics led by Turkey and the other to the Iranian axis. In 2012 Israel killed Ahmad al-Jabri, a scion of the powerful al-Jabari clan lording over Hebron but who had transplanted westward to become the leader of the Murabitun forces (part of the Izz ad-Din al-Qasem Brigades) within Hamas in Gaza. He had transported those forces to train under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Mashhad, Iran, in the years before and became the driving force of Hamas by the time Israel felt it had to deal with him. Despite his demise, the structures he led anchored to Iran continued to grow and assume ever more dominance over the Hamas structure, in part because of the release, in the 2011 Gilad Shalit hostage-release deal, of several key figures, including Yahya Sinwar. But Iran did not cleanly control all of Hamas. Turkey maintained a powerful presence in the organization and had some senior Hamas leaders likely more loyal to Turkey than to Iran. In many ways, Hamas reflected the schizophrenia of its patron, Qatar, which served a critical ally to both Iran and Turkey in the last two decades.

In the past two decades, however, Iran proved more ascendent strategically in the region than Turkey. In fits and starts, Ankara had tried quietly to compete with Iran in the last two decades, but more often than not it was left only to nibble at the scraps left by Iran along the edges, whether in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon (after the August 2021 port explosion, for example) or among the two structures of geopolitical discourse, the “Lingua Franca” embodiments of regional competition — the Palestinians and the Islamists. Hamas, therefore, as well as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (an organization whose fealty was far more homogeneously held toward Iran), became increasingly far more defined by Tehran than by Ankara. Iran had become the region’s new Nasser, and its minions accordingly flourished as did its factions in Palestinian and Islamist politics.

However, suddenly the ground shifted. Israel has, since summer 2024, starting with Operation Grim Beeper and the demolition of Hezbollah, triggered an earthquake in the normally slow pace of regional strategic change. If Israel presses onward with priority, as it should, to devastate and destabilize the Iranian regime, and if the Iranian axis meets its demise, then Hamas—indeed all Palestinian and Islamist politics—drifts to a Turkish direction and they slowly emerge as Ankara’s strategic assets. This reorientation does not represent an increase in the Palestinian threat to Israel, but it would be the triumph of hope over experience to think it would reduce it. Indeed, it is likely no more than an exchange of a rabid donkey for a crazed mule.

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