Over the weekend, the unthinkable transpired in Syria. 

The Assad family regime, which has ruled the country for more than five decades collapsed after rebel forces seized control of Damascus. According to reports, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled with his wife and three children. A video statement dictated by a group of men on the Syrian state-run TV network said that Assad was gone and all prisoners had been released, adding that all opposition fighters and citizens should preserve “state institutions of the free Syrian State.” 

On one hand, the fall of the Assad regime indicates the weakening clout of both the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia, which have propped up the dictatorship in Syria for years. While the further decimation of Iran’s Axis of Resistance in Syria is a good thing for the world, the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s Islamist roots will undoubtedly be consequential for the country’s Kurdish, Druze, and Alawite populations.

For the first time, Iran’s region-wide proxy groups and Russia have been unable to defend its interests in Syria. Damascus for many years represented the central pillar in Tehran’s strategy to destroy Israel, along with Iran’s grasp in Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon. 

Now that this Axis has been fractured, Iran’s ability to carry out operations targeting Israel and American assets in the region is jeopardized. Ali Akbar Velayati, a key adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, once called Assad and Syria “the golden ring of the resistance chain in the region,” noting that “Without the Syrian government, this chain will break and the resistance against Israel and its supporters will be weakened.”

Tehran is currently fighting a multi-faceted war against the Jewish state, likely hindering its ability to aid its Assad ally. Moscow also failed to defend the Assad dictatorship. Embroiled in its nearly three-year-long invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin did not have the resources or personnel to spare in Syria. Rebel forces in the country took advantage of these distant world conflicts to strike while Assad’s key allies were distracted.

The Syrian Civil War officially erupted in 2011, following the Arab Spring movement that swept the Middle East and toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the war and many more displaced as Assad was able to maintain control of the country with the aid of both Iran and Russia. 

During the civil conflict, the Assad regime has carried out numerous crimes against humanity, including the deployment of chemical weapons on its population multiple times. The fall of the Assad family and the clear weakened states of both Tehran and Moscow are surely welcomed, however, the rebel group designated as a terror entity by the U.S. may be just as bad for the Syrian people. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was originally the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda before disassociating itself in 2016. While the group has been trying to distance itself with its Islamist ties, how they will structure a new Syrian government remains unclear.

Maya Carlin, National Security Writer with The National Interest, is an analyst with the Center for Security Policy and a former Anna Sobol Levy Fellow at IDC Herzliya in Israel. She has by-lines in many publications, including The National Interest, Jerusalem Post, and Times of Israel. You can follow her on Twitter: @MayaCarlin. Carlin has over 1,000 articles published over the last several years on various defense issues.

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