Behnam Ben Taleblu
“We must possess Syria. If the thread from Lebanon to here is cut, bad events will happen,” warned former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in 2012. Fast forward 12 years, and the Islamic Republic no longer possesses Syria, a point made clear when images of Tehran’s ransacked embassy in Damascus surfaced online recently.
The empire created by Iran’s chief terrorist, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, killed in Iraq in 2020 by a U.S. drone strike utilizing Israeli intelligence, is fast crumbling. The Assad regime in Syria, the Islamic Republic’s sole state ally in the Middle East, has fallen to Sunni Salafist jihadists. Lebanese Hezbollah, the brightest star in Tehran’s constellation of regional terror proxies, has seemingly been neutered by Israel, and its influential leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is no more. The land bridge, the terror highway connecting Tehran to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, now has a gaping hole in it.
None of this was foreseeable on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas, an Iran-backed Palestinian terror group, burst forth from the Gaza Strip and killed 1,200 Israelis in addition to taking more than 200 hostages. Nor was the breadth of the response from other Iran-backed proxies to broaden the war and support their fellow Axis of Resistance member foreseeable: Hezbollah from Lebanon on Oct. 8, Shiite militias from Iraq on Oct. 17, and Houthi rebels from Yemen on Oct. 19. But one year later, Israel has withstood Iran’s “ring of fire,” Hamas has been decimated in Gaza, and many of its leaders, such as Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, and Saleh Arouri, have been killed.
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