The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Toppling Assad: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s Fragile Grip on a Divided Syria

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

The Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has succeeded in toppling the Assad regime.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/toppling-assad-and-a-divided-syria

Howdy, it's Michael from the Zogteam back again to talk about Syria. Today is Monday, December the 9th. And I think the Syrian question has sort of answered itself. Assad has fallen. And from our perspective, from a geopolitical perspective, the biggest interest we had in watching this conflict was whether or not this key element of Iran's sphere of influence in the region was going to fall. It's fall as Assad is in Russia. The loyalists have sort of disbanded.

And now we're just left with a morass. It's going to look like Libya. It's going to look like post-Saddam Iraq. There's really not any chance, realistically, of Haitha al-Shan being able to extend its authority or the entirety of the country. I'm going to have Kyle put the map up that I shared in today's brief, because I think it does a really good job with just showing how broken the Syrian landscape is. currently. So with a map on the screen, what I would like everyone to look at first is this sort of New York Yankee desk pinstriped white portion that's covering the entirety of the central part of Syria and then those coastal enclaves of Latakia and Tortoise. This is mostly empty space

barring those coastal enclaves. This is all territory that the Assad regime claimed to hold, but really nobody lives here. But in order to extend your authority over this region, you have to be able to move guns, people, supplies, etc. Over vast distances, that's difficult. That's expensive. And if you start doing it, people like the United States, the Israelis, potentially the Turks, can just blow it up in the sky. That's really hard to sort of authority over. So what we have seen is Hyatir al-Sham in this gray portion that kind of looks like New Jersey, the Aleppo of the Damascus corridor is under their claimed control. So far, nobody has challenged their hold over these cities. I think there's

sort of in a wait and see a lot of people in this primary population court, including in Damascus, are very, very, very, very happy to see Asakot. They were incredibly happy to let Ayatimiyah do that dirty work. Are they going to be equally happy to be under the rule of high territorial sham? Probably not. A lot of the population centers in Syria today

have enjoyed a relative degree of autonomy, given how weak the Assad regime has been over the past decade, but they're not going to give up willingly. I'm looking at Dara in the south. Directly east, Asueda, that's where the Drew's stronghold is. If you recall,

Peter's video from over the weekend has always been very difficult for any regional power to sort of fully bring the Jews under central government authority. Amma, Holmes, Damascus, Aleppo, these are all going to push back against an Idlib-based authority, even if they try and move the government into Damascus. It's also a heck of a lot different for Haytir al-Sham having, you know, success in governance in Idlib, having to manage. millions of people and millions of people in a post-war reconstruction.

For any government here to be successful, you have to either have, here being the entirety of Syria, you can either force everybody under rule. And again, there's not an outside power that's going to boost this small militant group, relative to the entire outside landscape, small village group to be able to have that force projection necessary, or you have to incentivize everybody to come, you know, play ball. Are you going to guarantee rights and have food and an economy and water?

And they're not set up to do this. So we're going to see just a new phase of a civil war. For us, by and large, the Syrian question has a resolution. It's going to be disaster. We're still going to track noteworthy events that happen. We'll include it in the daily brief. But there's no more, there's no big question mark for us over here. Having said that, what is going to be most geopolitically relevant is how the main actors in the region orient themselves to what's going on in Syria.

So looking at the north, that big purple region are Kurds. And we have those two islands of pale yellow. Those are Turkey's direct proxy. The Syrian National Army. Turkey would love to see those two bands of yellow join into one continuous geography. In order to do that, they have to take Manbej, which is that orange blip in the north of the country. Manbech, if you've followed Syria over the past decade, decade, a half or so, has continuously come under attack by either Kurds or Turkish-Pact forces, U.S. forces, Ayyaz, Okaida, any number of Sunni tribal and, you know, Islamist militants. the reason for this is that is the largest

and really only main hub population center between Aleppo and the Euphrates River. So what Turkey would love to do is see its proxies, take Man Beach and then push all of the Kurds east of the river and then from both sides of the river sort of push those two yellow portions into one, again, contiguous territory. It's not going to be easy.

The Kurds have, had some backing, some training, some coordination of the United States. They're good. Everybody was really happy when they were spanked on IS, you know, five, six years ago. This is not going to be a pushover for these Turkish back elements. And this is probably the only time, space. We'll see Turkish forces either potentially move cross-border, but much, much more likely. air support material, etc. What we've seen in the last 24, 36 hours is Turkish back forces claiming they captured

Manzich and then Mambitch, excuse me, and then Kurdish forces saying they've taken portions to be back. This is going to be kinetic space over the next few days, weeks, months, unless the Turks are able to really just route the Kurds and push them back. And then we'll probably soon go toward Raqa. the south, Daran Alsoueda, those regional tribal elements are tough. The mountains give them good cover. We're unlikely to see the Israelis push further beyond the Golan, unless Haytahir al-Shan really wants to fight with those groups in the south, the Dara tribes and the Druze. I wouldn't

recommend it, but, you know, jihad's going to do what jihad's going to do. And then finally we have the U.S. back forces in the Altaf deconfliction zone, your Jordanian border. I think the U.S. has shown what its primary concern is. Over the weekend, they just, you know, bombed a bunch of IS groups. That's the U.S.'s primary concern. They don't want to see any militant group coalesce and start to extend authority over a large geography and be able to consolidate control, like the Islamic State did before. I don't think the U.S. is going to do much beyond that.

So it's up to Hyattriy al-Sham convince other groups on the ground to respect its authority that establish itself as sort of a moderate-ish ruling authority and to have people either be incentivized

or scared enough to fall on the line. I think that's a toller. So we're probably going to see Syria be an excluded place for a while now. And something also to give in mind is that this moderating effect that the Turks tried to encourage within Ayatahil Hasham.

So the post-Nusra incarnation has seen a lot of Turkish influence to elevate these moderate elements. I mean, moderate compared to an actual Al-Qaeda descendant, group. So take it with a grain of salt. A lot of the previous elements within this organization structure did not want to work with Turkey. They don't want to work with the Kurds. don't want to work with the Shiites. I don't want to work with the Alawites.

They want to establish their version of a Sunni Islamist state. It's not going to be particularly democratic. They might come back. They might say, hey, look, you've won. We don't need to work with the Turks anymore. We can go back to our old ways. And this is where you're really going to see the inter-up consolidation efforts under success. So we'll probably see an intra-hyterial

sham fight. We're going to see a bunch of intrac communal violence. We're going to see the Turks try and push the Kurds back and the U.S. and Israelis bombing anybody. And the last question is, what are the Iranians going to do? I think they're going to hope and pray nobody pushes, but not tries to poke him in the eye because they have a severely degraded proxy in Lebanon. They have the collapse of those structure in Syria, and they're going to try and hold what they can in Iraq. So we've had the sort of Iranian ascendancy building, and then plateauing for a while, I think now we're sort of seeing that ed and recede back, which is good news for the Saudis, because while they don't have a direct border to this, even if they did, I don't know how much they could do. So it's, I guess, choose your adventure now in the Middle East, which, you know, if you're sicker like me, it's always going to be fun. So Peter is still traveling.

We'll probably see videos from him beginning later this week on the broader geopolitical arcs now unfolding in the Middle East. And if you have any questions about this stuff, post it, you know, either people will get to it video or we'll answer it within the Patreon. Or if you're really interested about the minutia of Syria, I can always hop on and you know do videos again. Thanks.