Winners and losers in Syria’s regime change

Winner: Turkey

Turkey’s support for rebel groups including HTS was critical to the recent offensive. Ankara gave the rebel organisations the green light after the Assad regime rebuffed its efforts to normalise relations with Turkey. Given the success of the offensive, Turkey will probably emerge as the most influential foreign actor in the country.

Having taken in more Syrian refugees than any other country, Turkey will be eager to allow Syrians to return home. But its main interest there is to topple the Kurdish forces in the north where the Democratic Union party (PYD), an offshoot of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), operates. Ankara will also want to ensure that any government that emerges in Syria is friendly to Turkey and not Iran.

Read more: What Syria’s rebel takeover means for the region’s major players (The Conversation)

Loser: Iran

The fall of Assad disrupts the so-called “axis of resistance”, comprised of Iran, Syria and Tehran’s proxy groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Iran’s critical military supply lines to Hezbollah will likely be severed, isolating the militant group and likely weakening it even further.

Assad was a crucial ally in Iran’s regional proxy network. And the collapse of his government follows the significant damage that Israel has already inflicted on its other partners, Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran’s regional influence has now been severely diminished, leaving it more vulnerable to direct conflict with Israel.

Read more: How will this change the Middle East? (The Conversation)

Winner: Islamists

Western and Arab nations fear that the HTS-led rebel coalition may seek to replace Assad's regime with a hardline Islamist government, or one less able or inclined to prevent the resurgence of radical forces.

"There is strong fear inside and outside the region of the power vacuum that Assad's sudden collapse may cause," said Abdelaziz al-Sager, director of the Gulf Research Center, a think tank focused on the Middle East. He cited the civil wars that followed the toppling of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

One senior Western diplomat in the region told Reuters that – with the rebel forces fragmented – there was no plan for how to rule Syria, a complex nation divided into various sects and ethnic groups, each with its own regional power base.

The senior diplomat expressed fears that lawlessness in Syria could allow the flourishing of extremist groups like Islamic State (IS), which in 2014 swept through large swathes of Syria and Iraq and established an Islamic Caliphate before it was driven out by a US-led coalition by 2019.

US forces on Sunday conducted dozens of strikes within Syria against IS to prevent it reasserting itself.

Read more: Assad's fall may fuel Islamist resurgence (Reuters)

Loser: Women, Kurds, secularists

There is no reason for the Kurds or anyone else to mourn Assad, who is responsible for the bulk of civilian deaths in Syria and persistently sought to undermine the Kurdish-led DAANES. But HTS imposes its own deeply authoritarian Islamist rule.

Human Rights Watch has documented consistent arbitrary detention and torture of thousands of journalists, opposition figures, and civil society activists who sought to document HTS abuses or protest their authority. Though the organisation has moderated its approach in recent years as part of a bid for legitimacy, HTS has reportedly conducted morality patrols, arresting young women for failing to follow religious dress codes; arresting young men for shaving or listening to music; and conducting public executions for witchcraft and heresy.

Turkey will seek to remove Kurdish-led governance in areas along its borders and resettle Syrian refugees in formerly Kurdish settlements as a way of both satisfying domestic anti-refugee sentiment and entrenching ethnic change along its border.

Read more: Will Kurds survive in the new Syria? (Jacobin)

Winner: Syrian refugees

Thousands of Syrians have flocked to Turkey's borders with Syria, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced the opening of a border gate "to prevent any congestion and ease traffic".

But almost three million Syrians are currently living in Turkey, having fled their country's civil war since it began in 2011, and they will face a difficult decision on what they do next.

"There is still no water in many regions in Syria, electricity comes at certain times of the day. It is not even clear who will govern the country and how, but we need to return to get Syria back on its feet," says Ibrahim, a chemical engineer who has lived for 12 years in the Hatay province which borders Syria.

Despite all the risks, he is among those Syrian refugees planning to go back as soon as possible, even though they will have to restart their lives from scratch.

Many Turks are also keen for Syrians to go back as soon as possible and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said Turkey will work for their "safe and voluntary return home".

Read more: Turkey's 3m Syrian refugees face big decision on going home or staying (BBC)

Uncertain: Israel

Syria had been a potent threat to Israel in the past. As of last week, it boasted the largest concentration of air defence systems in the world. It also had vast arrays of weaponry, chemical weapons infrastructure and substantial arms-production facilities.

Deeply wary about assurances from Syria’s new jihadi leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani that Syria is “exhausted” by war and won’t be embarking on new ones, Israel reacted to the Islamist rebels’ lightning takeover in Damascus with a lightning strategic assault of its own: destroying not Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian Army per se — its troops had melted away — but Assad’s Syrian armaments.

An estimated 80 per cent of that Syrian military capacity has now been eliminated by the Israel Air Force — giving Israel air supremacy along the very corridor where the ayatollahs had sought to hold sway — from the Mediterranean, through Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Iran.

Israel has taken over the buffer zone on the Syrian border, including the Syrian side of the strategic Mount Hermon. Iran-backed Assad was a potentially potent threat but not an immediate one. The border was stable. That is no longer reliably the case, and thus Israel moved quickly to ensure that its citizenry is protected.

For Israel, the key strategic concern in an era where almost all bets are off in this region, is how Iran will react.

The fear is that the ayatollahs, running out of options, may conclude that Assad in Syria, like Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq before him, proved vulnerable because he never got to the bomb, and that they will expedite their nuclear weapons drive.

Read more: Israel pulls itself together; Iran’s axis falls apart (Times of Israel)