(Beirut) Since the start of the war in Gaza, the Syrian regime has tried to stay away from the conflict, despite the attack attributed to Israel on the Iranian consulate in Damascus which almost set fire to the powder in the region, according to analysts.
Weakened by a thirteen-year civil war, the power of Bashar al-Assad is trying to maintain the balance between its powerful allies, Iran, Israel’s bete noire, and Russia.
If the Iranians and their proxies show their solidarity with Palestinian Hamas in its war against Israel, the Russians are pushing for stability in the region.
“Assad was clearly warned by the Israelis that if Syria was used against them, they would destroy his regime,” says a Western diplomat who requested anonymity.
Andrew Tabler, an analyst at the Washington Institute, assures for his part that Russia and the United Arab Emirates, which normalized their relations with the regime in 2018, “urged it to stay away from the conflict” between Israel and Hamas.
Since the start of the war on October 7, targeted raids against Iran and its allies, attributed to Israel, have intensified in Syria, inflicting heavy losses on the Revolutionary Guards, Tehran’s ideological army.
The strike of 1er April which targeted the Iranian consulate in the capital and killed two senior Guards officers was the biggest blow for Iran in Syria.
On April 13, Iran carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel in retaliation, with 350 drones and missiles, most of which were intercepted with the help of the United States and other allied countries.
A week later, an attack blamed on Israel targeted central Iran, but Tehran downplayed it and said there would be no retaliation.
Coded message
The intensification of strikes and the war in Gaza have raised fears of a response from the Syrian front, largely dormant for decades, against Israel.
But if Tehran’s allies have mobilized to support Hamas from Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, this front has remained relatively calm.
Since the start of the war, only 26 rocket attacks have been recorded from Syria against the Israeli-occupied Golan, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH).
Most of the rockets fell in uninhabited areas, according to Andrew Tabler. He believes that this “has been interpreted in Washington and elsewhere as a sort of coded message that the Syrian president wants to stay away from the conflict in Gaza.”
In addition, Iran recently reduced its military presence throughout southern Syria, particularly the areas bordering the Syrian Golan Heights occupied and annexed by Israel, revealed a source close to Hezbollah and the OSDH.
The Russian army, for its part, announced at the beginning of April that it had established an additional position in Syria “in the Golan Heights region” to “monitor the ceasefire and promote de-escalation”.
Counterparty
For the Western diplomat, “Assad hopes to obtain compensation from the Arabs and Westerners for this restraint, and the Russians are pushing him to do so.”
Weakened by the civil war which divided his country and pushed the economy to the brink of asphyxiation, ostracized by the West, he is trying to normalize his relations with Arab countries.
The Syrian head of state hopes to involve the rich Gulf monarchies in financing reconstruction in his country.
While several capitals in the region were shaken by demonstrations in support of the Palestinians in Gaza, Damascus also saw only timid rallies.
“The regime hates Hamas and has no desire to support the Muslim brothers, whose victory could only strengthen their comrades in Syria,” explains the Western diplomat.
The Syrian president has still not forgotten that Hamas, once a close ally of Damascus, supported the popular uprising in 2011.
Hamas had announced in 2022 the opening of a new page with Bashar al-Assad, but the latter considered that it was still “too early” to speak of “a return to normal”.
reference: www.lapresse.ca