Breaking Down the Global Power Struggle in Syria

Since it began in 2011, the Syrian Civil War has become something akin to a playground for various nations. With the fall of Bashar al-Assad, that conflict has not ended; if anything, his fall has accelerated foreign activity in the conflict.

When Assad came close to losing power in the early 2010s, the Russians propped him up and saved his regime. In exchange, they got two military bases along the country’s east coast, which allowed them to expand their reach into Africa.

Around that same time, the Islamic State began its rampage across Iraq and Syria. This attracted fighters from around the world — and likewise prompted a major response. The United States, which had already been arming and training Syrian rebels, began to bomb ISIS positions and have continued to do so through the present day.

Syria’s weakness also invited Turkey, which had long desired to gain control of Syria’s north, to create a buffer zone and push back the Kurds, their historic enemies in Syria’s northeast. Turkey did this by both actively sending its own soldiers into northern Syria and by providing aid to rebels, among them Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — the group that just took over the country, and that President Biden is attempting to downgrade as a terror group.

HTS received help from Ukraine, which provided them with 150 drones and 20 drone operators. Why? Because the fall of Assad meant that Russia, Ukraine’s enemy, would be humiliated — and the Russians may even be rejected from the country entirely.

Israel has now seized the moment and grabbed — temporarily, it claims — a thin strip of land north of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. This has three benefits: it gives Israel a larger buffer zone, it extends the border with Lebanon, and it brings Israeli tanks about 12 miles from Syria’s capital, Damascus - ensuring Israel can keep an eye on whoever ultimately comes to power.

Some on the Syrian side of the border want to make the change permanent; a regional Druze council recently called for Israel to annex their village, fearing life under Islamist rule.

The situation in Syria is extraordinarily fragile and involves numerous players, including major world powers engaged in proxy warfare. Next month, however, Donald Trump may turn America’s eyes away from the war-torn nation to focus on issues at home; as he remarked last week, Syria is “not our fight.”