GAZA DISTRACTION HELPS ASSAD TO PUSH AHEAD IN SYRIA
▶ Regime strikes on rebel-held areas threaten to reignite dormant civil war as world’s back is turned, say experts
The weekend missile strike in the heart of Damascus shows how quickly the Israel-Gaza war is turning into a regional conflict and how violence is spreading across Syria as all players seek to capitalise from the chaos.
Saturday’s strike, widely attributed to Israel, killed Sadegh Omidzadeh, the commander of Iran’s intelligence service in Syria, and four of his colleagues in Damascus’s diplomatic quarter. Israel rarely comments on such incidents.
The attack, which also killed several civilians, demonstrates how the Israel-Gaza war has spilt into Syria.
Since the conflict began after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, rockets have been fired from Syria into northern Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
At the same time, Iran’s proxies in Syria and Iraq have for months been launching attacks against US bases in the two countries, prompting retaliatory strikes and threatening to drag the US deeper into a broad Middle East conflict just as it tries to extricate itself from the region.
It is against this complex backdrop that experts say the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad is looking to benefit.
He has increased attacks on rebel-held areas across northern Syria, escalating the nearly 13-year civil war that had until recently been at a relative standstill.
Syria’s Civil Defence Force, better known as the White Helmets, has warned Washington about an increase in artillery and missile attacks in north-western Syria since October, a US State Department official said.
The “unusual intensity of the attacks” had hit population centres far from the civil war’s normal front lines, the official told The National, “including attacks on Idlib city for the first time since Turkey and Russia reached an agreement in March 2020 to designate Idlib as a de-escalation zone”.
The Assad regime’s Russian backers are supporting the rise in regime attacks, the official said, noting that these undermine regional stability and impose “a state of terror and fear, leading to displacement waves”.
“Military escalation only exacerbates the suffering of the Syrian people and will only further destabilise Syria,” the official said.
Recent regime assaults on villages west of Aleppo killed six people and injured 11 more, the White Helmets have said.
Idlib’s main anti-Assad force is Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, an Al Qaeda offshoot widely believed to have open channels with Turkey.
The group has been retaliating by ambushing regime troops in neighbouring Latakia province and firing rockets at loyalist areas, opposition sources say.
“There is no comparison in firepower,” Othman Biraqdar, an aid worker in Idlib, told
The National.
“The regime is using phosphorus and napalm, and the casualties are overwhelmingly civilian.”
Idlib province is home to about 2.6 million people, mostly refugees who fled the regime’s crackdown on the 2011 pro-democracy revolt and the subsequent civil war.
Charles Lister, senior fellow and director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism and Extremism programmes at the Middle East Institute think tank, said the rise in regime attacks is “arguably the result of events in Gaza and elsewhere in the region”.
Mr Lister told The National that noting that the sharp rise in activity is being largely ignored.
“With more than 100 people being killed in Gaza every day, and missiles crossing nation-state borders all over the region, nobody bats an eyelid when Assad decides to shell an [internally displaced persons] camp in Idlib,” he said. “It’s sadly as simple as that.” Merissa Khurma, director of the Middle East Programme at the Wilson Centre think tank, said the Israel-Gaza war has allowed Mr Al Assad to return to his “old-guard messaging”.
He is “going back to the narrative that he’s been championing, which is engaging with the West doesn’t work, and that alliances with the West do not serve the interests of the region and its people”, Ms Khurma told The National.
Waiel Olwan, a senior research fellow at the Jusoor Information Centre think tank in Istanbul, said attacks on Idlib help the regime to distract attention from the country’s economic woes. They also serve to shift focus from loyalist troop losses and military deaths from Israeli attacks in Syria.
Experts also pointed to Tehran’s role in regime attacks, saying Iran uses Idlib to distract from damage and deaths caused by Israeli air strikes to Iranian-backed groups in Syria.
Russia, the Assad regime’s
Recent regime assaults on villages west of Aleppo killed six people and injured 11 more, the White Helmets have said
top backer, has left a margin for Iran to operate in Idlib, Mr Olwan told The National.
“Neither Assad nor Iran want relative stability in Idlib, and Russia is going along.”
Ms Khurma said that for Iran and its allies, “there’s an opportunity to press buttons and project power”.
Mr Olwan said that Russia is hoping to use the violence as a tool to keep Turkey in check, especially as Moscow and Ankara’s positions diverge over the war in Ukraine. But Russia
“does not want a land invasion of Idlib and a collapse of the current map”, he said.
The war has also affected a major part of the Turkish zone of control, located in north-western Syria.
The fallout from the Israel-Gaza war, including a sharp increase in attacks on Washington’s own forces in Iraq and Syria, has again complicated the US’s goal of moving away from the Middle East as it emphasises its strategy in the Indo-Pacific region. For
Ms Khurma, the question of what Washington should do as it works around regional hostilities has a simple answer: “Listen to your allies in the region,” particularly those who have been “calling for a ceasefire” in Gaza.
She said tough decisions must be made about what the region will be like in a few months if the Israel-Gaza war continues.
The escalating regional dynamic “is very much the result of years of various
portfolios in the region that are key to US national security interests that have been left unresolved, whether we’re talking about the lingering Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or we’re talking about Syria”, Ms Khurma said.
“When the United States disengages or withdraws politically from an important theatre such as the Middle East, then others fill in the gap.”