Assad Flees Syria: Are The Russians Next?

Long isolated by the brutish weather of the high north, Russia looked abroad to acquire warm water ports through which it could sail ships to and fro no matter the time of year. Originally, this interest led the country to expand west and wrest control of Crimea from the Turks. Fast-forward a century, this same interest lingered and Russia established a naval base in Syria. Yet after intervening militarily in 2015 to protect and then modernize its naval base at Tartus, Russia now looks set to lose it. 

A year ago, it seemed Russia’s naval base and facilities in Syria were safe enough, largely due to an apparently successful intervention that saw Moscow providing air support to an array of forces on the ground. Yet, due to the intervention of another foreign power, Turkey,  Russia ultimately agreed to halt full-scale hostilities in 2020 to prevent conflict with the NATO nation thus allowing the rebellion to live on in the Idlib province. 

Fast-forward to a couple of weeks ago, when rebels were pouring south out of Idlib, rushing towards the capital city. As the Islamists pushed south, Kurdish rebels advanced to the northeast thus threatening the regime of Assad. Faced with a prospect of a three-front war, the regime’s backers showed little faith in its ability to resist. Egged on by a variety of foreign actors, Assad fled overseas to Russia. Seeing the writing on the wall, Syrian soldiers laid down their arms, fled to Iraq, or changed into civilian clothes. 

While it had some capable units, such as the highly trained Tiger Forces, the Assad regime was propped up by a sizable influx of Iranian, Russian, and Hezbollah forces who brought both firepower and capabilities. Yet now, due to Israel’s effective campaign against Hezbollah, the group is heavily degraded — and many claim it is incapable of mounting another significant intervention. And Iran, like its proxy Hezbollah, has been targeted to such a degree that it might be wary of another full-scale intervention. Finally, the Russians find themselves trapped in an intractable war in Ukraine, which continually swallows the country's manpower and draws most of its strategic focus, thus preventing it from intervening elsewhere. Without any support from allies, the Assad regime was entirely incapable of mounting a sizable response to the HTS offensive. 

Through this coalition of bad actors, the Syrian government had once been able to gradually force the rebels into the northwest province of Idlib by annihilating the country’s infrastructure and killing tens of thousands of its people. Yet the Assad regime’s own army was full of conscripts, corrupt officials, and young men with low morale — much like the Afghan army, bar the conscripts. War is often a test of wills, and the rebels festering in their resentment of the ancien regime in the consistently bombarded province of Idlib were able to easily break the army’s lines and ultimately unravel everything Russia thought it achieved with its initial intervention. 

Russia’s continuing war in Ukraine could see the country founder into strategic obsolescence further afield. Currently in the Black Sea, Russia’s fleet remains port-bound either on the eastern edge of Crimea or in occupied Georgia or Russia proper. Its mobility has been significantly reduced and is functionally useless due to Ukraine’s highly effective military campaign, which has utilized special forces and unmanned sea drones to wrest control of shipping lanes and degrade Russian military assets. And due to the Montreux Convention, an agreement which gives Turkey control over the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, Russia is unable to send reinforcements to contest Ukraine’s initiative. As such Crimea, the recently reacquired jewel of the Russian empire which gave the motherland a warm water port at Sevastopol, has lost its lustre. 

“We are overstretched. The defeat of the Syrian side will also be our defeat,” said former Russian FSB officer and commander of militia forces in the Donbas, Igor Girkin. 

Thus bringing us to the fate of Russia’s bases in the west of Syria. Much has been written about how Russia could negotiate with HTS to maintain its bases. Yet, the group, like the rest of the world, saw Russia consistently bomb its territory, killing its people and comrades. Rank-and-file HTS soldiers must surely consider them brutes who ravaged their country, and any remaining Russian military presence would be profoundly unpopular with the jihadist group, one that has its roots in Al-Qaeda. As he tries to curry international favour, would its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, seek to alienate a significant number of his followers and push them to ISIS or Al-Qaeda by keeping Russia around? It appears unlikely.