The ousting of Syria’s brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad by his own people is not just a momentous national event but one with consequences spilling across the Middle East, nowhere more so than Iran. Tehran’s abrupt withdrawal from Syria, having propped up Assad since the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, has exposed Iran’s strategic and military weakness.
Iran’s opportunistically constructed axis of resistance – composed of Hamas in Gaza, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Assad in Syria, militia groups in Iraq and the Yemen-based Houthis – was designed to provide Tehran with strategic depth and deter attacks. In the last year, the network has suffered significant blows at the hands of Israel.
Since the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas, Israel, in a departure from past efforts, has sought to degrade the axis groups on its border and break their links with Iran.
The war in Gaza, still underway and having led to a humanitarian crisis and over 45,000 Palestinian deaths, has severely damaged Hamas.
Hezbollah, whose leadership decided to support Hamas and attack Israel on 8 October, has been gravely weakened by Israel’s military response. Tel Aviv eliminated the group’s command structure, including its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, in only three months from September 2024.
Amid these losses, Iran supported the Lebanese ceasefire agreed with Israel in November with the aim of allowing the group space to recover. Yet Assad’s departure is another clear setback for Tehran, showcasing the limitations of its ‘unity of the arenas’ strategy which intended to coordinate action by elements of the axis. While axis activity is still ongoing and certainly shifting to adapt to Israeli military shocks, Iran is left in a defensive posture with its deterrence compromised.
A shared history
Syria’s role in the axis is often reduced to that of a land bridge that allowed Iran to traffic goods and to transfer lethal aid to Hezbollah. The relationship was deeper, however, and dated back to the 1979 Iranian revolution. Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, was the first Arab leader to recognize the Islamic government. Syria was also the only regional state that overtly supported Iran during its eight-year war with Iraq that began with Saddam Hussein’s strike on Iranian territory.
The two countries remained allied against Israel and supported Hezbollah’s growth and capture of the Lebanese state. Relations were tepid after the 1990 Gulf War as Assad looked to broaden his regional alliances, including new links with Gulf states. However, the two countries continued to develop economic and military ties which deepened significantly during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
As a result of this shared history, during the Syrian uprising of 2011 Iran and Hezbollah swooped in to save their partner Assad, cementing his role within the axis of resistance.
From that point, across multiple Arab countries, Iran and its partners set up an interconnected military and economic network. These were deepened by the US ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions campaign, as the groups have developed interconnected economic linkages.
Despite perceptions of strength and unity against Israel, the axis was always built on fragile foundations. In training and equipping axis groups, Tehran expanded the predatory power of its proxy groups at the expense of local populations in weak and divided states. The instability Iran exported across the region was a weakness of the axis itself.
In Iraq and Lebanon in 2019, civil society protests against Iran’s presence were eventually repressed. Across Syria too, Tehran has been condemned for its role in protecting a brutal dictator at the tragic expense of over half a million people who were killed at the hands of the regime.
Iran’s response
To stave off growing perceptions of weakness and mounting internal criticism, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has responded in his usual style. Rather than take responsibility for a strategic blunder and lost investment, he has blamed Israel and the United States for events in Syria. Moreover, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, Hossein Salami, has further asserted that the axis of resistance remains resilient.
At the same time, regime messaging has tried to blame Iran’s retreat from Syria on Assad’s own intransigence. Some insiders have suggested that over the past year, Iranian frustration with Assad had been mounting. There were accusations that Assad appeared quietly complicit in Israeli strikes on Iranian assets in Syria and that he had not been adequately playing his part in the axis of resistance.
Coming after Israeli campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, Iran’s retrenchment from Syria makes clear that the axis of resistance has not provided Iran with ‘forward defence’. Tehran is acutely aware that Israel’s campaign against the axis is not yet over.
Having declared a war on seven fronts, the Israeli government has yet to explicitly address threats from Iraq, Yemen or more directly from Iran itself. Two direct periods of unprecedented escalation between Iran and Israel in April and October of this year cemented Israel’s military and intelligence superiority. It also revealed both Israel’s successful targeting of Iranian air defences and that active nuclear research is underway in the Iranian military complex at Parchin, further exposing Tehran.