Is Syria the Middle East’s next exploding powder keg?

 

By James M. Dorsey

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Syria could be the Middle East’s next exploding powder keg.

Five months after toppling President Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is struggling to hold the state together and fend off financial collapse.

Mr. Al-Shara’s efforts to prevent Syria from splintering into ethnic or sectarian statelets are complicated by the country’s powerful neighbours, Israel and Turkey.

The two countries exploit Syrian minority aspirations in competition with one another and want to shape the country in their mould.

If that were not enough of a headache, Iran is potentially seeking to compensate for the loss of one its staunchest allies by weighing support for armed pro-Assad opposition groups.

To boost his efforts, Mr. Al-Sharaa hopes that a Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates-engineered possible watershed meeting with US President Donald J. Trump during both men’s visits to the kingdom this week will give him desperately needed relief.

Mr. Al-Sharaa has sought to prepare the groundwork for a meeting by engaging in UAE-mediated talks with Israel and visiting France to consult President Emmanuel Macron, his first trip to Europe as Syria’s president.

To entice Mr. Trump and mollify Israel, Mr. Al-Sharaa suggested that Syria was “under certain circumstances” open to normalisation with Israel, a codeword for establishing diplomatic relations.

Mr. Al-Shara said that he respected the United Nations-monitored “disengagement of forces agreement.”

Israel violated that agreement by moving forces into the UN buffer zone and beyond further into Druze-dominated Syrian territory immediately after Mr. Al-Assad’s downfall.

Mr. Al-Sharaa made his remarks in conversations with two visiting Republican Make America Great Again Congressmen, Cory Mills of Florida, who serves on the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees, and Marlin Stutzman of Indiana.

The two men returned to Washington enthusiastic advocates for engagement with a country run by a former jihadist, putting themselves at odds with pro-Israel administration officials opposed to a rapprochement with post-Assad Syria and an easing of US sanctions.

Prominent evangelicals, a significant pro-Israel constituency in Mr. Trump's support base, share their enthusiasm for engagement.

Mr. Trump’s recognition during his first term in office of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war would likely complicate Syrian-Israeli normalisation.

In a further gesture, Syrian authorities last month arrested two senior members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second largest armed group in Gaza, to demonstrate Mr. Al-Sharaa’s sincerity.

The group participated in Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

In an encouraging sign, the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control recently granted Qatar an exemption from US sanctions, allowing it to offer Syria a financial lifeline by bankrolling the country’s public sector.

Earlier, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, agreed to settle Syria’s US$15 million debt to the World Bank.

Playing to Mr. Trump’s transactional inclinations  and economic priorities, Mr. Al-Sharaa has let the president know through intermediaries that he would welcome U.S. oil-and-gas companies and American participation in the reconstruction of his country, ravaged by more than a decade of civil war,

The United Nations estimates that rebuilding Syria will cost US$250 billion.

Mr. Al-Sharaa conveyed his message in a meeting in Damascus last week with Jonathan Bass, the CEO of Louisiana-based Argent LNG, and Mouaz Moustafa, the head of advocacy group Syrian Emergency Task Force.

Mr. Al-Sharaa presented to Messrs. Bass and Moustafa a plan to develop his country’s energy resources with Western firms and a new U.S.-listed Syrian national oil company.

Mr. Al-Sharaa “is willing to commit to Boeing aircraft. He wants U.S. telecom. He doesn’t want Huawei,” Mr. Bass said, referring to the Chinese telecommunications conglomerate that has invested heavily in the Middle East.

Messrs. Bass and Moustafa have pitched Mr. Al-Sharaa’s plan as a way of ensuring that Iran and Russia don’t reestablish themselves in Syria and to keep China out of the country.

Iran and Russia kept Mr. Al-Assad in power during the civil war.

In exchange, Mr. Al-Sharaa said Syria would continue to fight jihadists like the Islamic State, share intelligence with the United States, and curtail Iranian-backed Palestinian militants operating in Syria.

In March, US officials identified eight conditions Syria would have to meet for the Trump administration to ease sanctions.

The conditions included the destruction of remaining chemical weapons, cooperation on counterterrorism, helping find Americans who went missing in the civil war, ensuring that foreign fighters are not part of the government, and designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organisation.

Qatar recently sent a team to Syria to look for the remains of Americans killed by the Islamic State.

Mr. Al-Sharaa needs Mr. Trump’s support to get US, European, and UN sanctions on Syria, his associates, and himself lifted.

An erstwhile jihadist, Mr. Al-Sharaa is seeking to convince the world that he has shed his militant Islamic antecedents. Mr. Al-Sharaa remains subject to United Nations sanctions. He needed an exemption to travel to France.

Former US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz’s recent demotion has made life for Mr. Al-Sharaa slightly easier.

Mr. Waltz reportedly refrained from conveying Mr. Al-Sharaa’s plan to Mr. Trump.

Like Israel and pro-Israel figures in the Trump administration, Mr. Waltz opposed Mr. Al-Sharaa’s quest to rebuild Syria as a strong state and influential player in the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Earlier this month, Mr. Trump removed Mr. Waltz from his post and nominated him to be the US ambassador to the United Nations, among other things, because he was coordinating with Israeli officials plans for joint US-Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.

If Mr. Trump engages with Mr. Al-Sharaa, he could potentially change the balance of power in the battle for influence in Syria between Israel and Turkey.

Accepting Mr. Al-Sharaa’s plan would potentially allow Mr. Trump to withdraw some 2,000 US troops deployed in northern Syria to fight the Islamic State with Syrian Kurdish help.

It would give the Syrian president a boost in his rejection of the Kurds’ Israeli-backed quest for a federated rather than a centralised Syria and the demands of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the US-supported Syrian Kurdish armed group, that it integrates into the Syrian military en bloc, not individually.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar on Israeli support for Syrian Kurds and Druze

Israel has used its support for the Kurds and the Druze, a religious minority in the south, as a monkey wrench to weaken the Syrian state, if not splinter it.

Israel also sought to weaken Mr. Al-Sharaa in recent months with hundreds of airstrikes that destroyed much of the Syrian military’s weapons arsenal and infrastructure.

Last week, Israeli fighter jets bombed an area next to the presidential palace in Damascus in what Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said was a "clear message to the Syrian regime" that Israel would "not allow the deployment of forces south of Damascus or any threat to the Druze community".

Israel has lobbied the Trump administration to back its quest for a decentralised and isolated Syria and reject Turkey’s bid for a strong centralised Syria.

Israeli officials argue that Mr. Al Sharaa and his associates cannot be trusted to have genuinely shed their jihadist antecedents.

In April, Mr. Trump lavished praise on Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan as Mr. Netanyahu sat next to him on a visit to the Oval Office.

Stressing his good relationship with the Turkish leader, Mr. Trump told Mr. Netanyahu, “Any problem that you have with Turkey, I think I can solve. I mean, as long as you're reasonable, you have to be reasonable."

Mr. Trump’s possible acceptance of the Al-Sharaa plan would be a blow to Israel, which has lost several recent battles within the Trump administration with Make America Great Again, supporters, who are more critical of Israel and reject the notion that US and Israeli interests overlap.

If Mr. Trump warms to the Al-Sharaa plan, he would dampen Syrian Kurdish aspirations for autonomy and bolster Turkey’s vision of a future Syria and demand that the Kurds disarm.

Last month, Turkey and Israel held talks to prevent tensions between the two countries from deteriorating into an armed clash in Syria.

Mr. Al-Sharaa wouldn't be out of the woods if Mr. Trump opted to work with the Syrian leader, but it would go some way toward providing a pathway to solving his financial and economic woes.

Even so, there are geopolitical jokers in the Syrian leader’s deck.

One joker is Israel. It is unclear whether an understanding with Mr. Al-Sharaa would persuade Mr. Trump to rein in Israel.

Another joker is the Syrian Kurds. It is unclear whether Syrian Kurds will abide by this week’s likely decision by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to follow its imprisoned leader’s advice to disarm and dissolve itself as part of a deal with Mr. Erdogan’s government.

Syrian Democratic Forces commander Mazloum Abadi welcomed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s call for an end to the four-decade-long insurgency in southeastern Turkey but insisted that iy did not involve his group.

The PKK move could lead to Mr. Ocalan’s release after 26 years in prison.

Some senior PKK officials have insisted that the group would only disarm once Mr. Ocalan is free.

Iran is a third joker.

Armed groups loyal to Mr. Al-Assad formed a unified military command under the umbrella of the shadowy Islamic Resistance Front in Syria, two months after sectarian clashes in Alawite strongholds along the Mediterranean coast killed 1,500 people, including 745 civilians.

Mr. Al-Assad’s family are members of the Alawite Shiite Muslim sect.

The front and Iran have denied Iranian involvement in the clashes.

“If the United States does not act, Iranian proxy activity could persist and accelerate… Chaos and instability emanating from a collapsing state would suck the United States back into Syria,” warned Luc Wagner, an Atlantic Council young global professional.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.