In the summer of 2023, Syria and the wider Middle East seemed more stable than at any point in recent memory. It was telling that, in May of that year, the Arab League, a regional organisation of Arab states, welcomed Bashar al-Assad’s war-torn Syria back into the fold after over a decade of isolation. Four months later, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan memorably declared that the Middle East ‘is quieter today than it has been in two decades’.
Fast forward to the end of this year, and Sullivan’s judgement looks more than a little hasty. The long-standing shadow war between Israel and Iran has since erupted into open conflict, with Israel carrying out high-profile assassinations in Damascus, Tehran and Beirut, and Iran launching massive missile and drone barrages at Israel on at least two occasions. And right at the end of this year, Assad’s brutal, yet seemingly stable, Syrian regime fell to a militia headed up by an ex-member of al-Qaeda. As we head into 2025, the Middle East has rarely sounded quite as noisy as it does right now.
The conflict between Israel and Iran and the fall of Assad are directly related. On the eve of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Iran was in a position of relative strength. Through political alliances and a network of militias known as the ‘axis of resistance’ (including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and assorted Shia groups in Iraq), it exerted considerable power throughout the region. And nowhere more so than in Syria, where Iranian proxies, with help from Russia, were effectively propping up Assad’s dictatorship.
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