David Makovsky and Simone Saidmehr
In December, a consortium of rebel factions led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham unexpectedly toppled the dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose family had ruled Syria for five decades. The new regime in Damascus inherited a country ruined by a 13-year civil war. HTS’s leader, Ahmed al-Shara, has taken charge of Syria, and foreign powers are hoping to steer his behavior. Two of the country’s neighbors, Israel and Turkey, have taken advantage of the power vacuum by establishing a presence there—and have already begun to butt heads.
Turkey has emerged as the dominant military power in Syria. Since 2019, HTS has held Idlib in Syria’s northwest, and for years, Ankara indirectly assisted it by operating a buffer zone in northern Syria that protected the group from Assad’s forces. Now Turkey wants even more influence in Syria so it can quash Kurds’ hope for autonomy, which flourished in the chaos of the civil war, and engineer the return of the three million Syrian refugees living in Turkey.
Yet Israel wants more influence in Syria, too. Although it signed a U.S.-brokered disengagement agreement with Syria in 1974 in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, Assad aligned closely in recent decades with Iran, Israel’s chief adversary. Under his rule, Syria served as a critical corridor for the flow of Iranian rockets and other weapons to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, aggravating tensions with Israel.
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