In this edition of The New Lines Institute Middle East Center’s Post-Assad Podcast series, Middle East Center co-director Nicholas A. Heras sits down with Dr. Kamran Bokhari to develop a strategic forecast for Syria in the upcoming year. Dr. Bokhari is a Senior Director at the Institute who is a specialist on Eurasian politics with a particular focus on the Middle East with over three decades experience in the intelligence analysis community providing strategic assessments on global events. A distinguished professor at the Institute’s M.A. in Strategy and Policy program, Dr. Bokhari also teaches a course on Central Asia at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. Heras and Dr. Bokhari investigate the key dynamics that will shape post-Assad Syria in 2025, and present especially important context on events in Syria that are not being widely discussed that will be essential to understanding the trajectory of the country.
Nicholas Heras:
Hello, and thank you for joining me for today’s episode of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policies post-Assad podcast series. My name is Nick Heras, and I’ll be your host today. I’m the co-director of the Middle East Senate here at the New Lines Institute, and I’m sitting down with Dr. Kamran Bokhari to develop a strategic forecast for Syria in this upcoming year.
Dr. Bokhari is a senior director at the institute who’s a specialist on Eurasian politics, with a particular focus on the Middle East. Dr. Bokhari has over three decades of experience in the intelligence analysis community, providing strategic assessments on key global events. He’s also a distinguished professor here in the Institute’s MA in Strategy and Policy Program, and he teaches a course on Central Asia at Georgetown University’s security studies program.
We’ll investigate the key dynamics that will shape post-Assad Syria in 2025, and we’ll present especially important context on events in Syria that are not being widely discussed but will be essential to understanding the trajectory of the country.
Dr. Bokhari, thank you for joining me today. Let’s get on to our first question. So what is one dynamic regarding Syria over the next year that you are watching closely and that you believe the conversation space among analysts is missing?
Kamran Bokhari:
Thank you, Nick. There are actually two of them. One is when we zoom out of all the details of what is happening on the ground in Syria in its various parts, this is a multi-actor battle space. Even if you just don’t look at the external forces, you just look at the internal factions and camps and whatnot and communities, you can lose track of the big picture, what is happening strategically to not just Syria but also the Levant and the broader Middle East in terms of the balance of power.
And there’s not enough in terms of looking at what it means for the region. So you can, in the open sources, talk about this is a victory for Türkiye, this is a defeat for Iran. This is an opportunity and threat for Israel, but that’s about it. What does it mean for the United States? What does it mean for Russia?
Opinion is divided in the open sources as to how bad the Kremlin has been hit by the loss of the Assad regime. What does it mean for players that are lesser actors, if you will, who do not have that sort of strategic heft or geopolitical heft? I’m talking about Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and particularly what does it mean for the broader picture that is going to emerge? So that’s one topic that I think that could use far more conversation.
The other topic that you could see the open source trying to grapple with it, but the conversation is neither here nor there, in my humble opinion. And that is what is going to be the way in which a group like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and other such factions that are part of the former Rebel Alliance, which we now can call the ruling coalition, if you will.
I’m not sure how much power-sharing has been done so far. We don’t know too much. We do know that there have been appointments by the HTS leader to various positions of authority in the new administration in the making. But what does this mean for the transformation of what was clearly a group that was very much inside the nexus of transnational jihadism and then pulled itself out of there, became what we would call a nationalist jihadist entity, and now has drifted into the Syrian mainstream. What does that look like?
A useful point of comparison and contrast could be how the Taliban has behaved in three years. I am very mindful that HTS and the Taliban are extremely different types of animals and political actors. Their contexts are very different, but there is a common denominator of a very radical ideology. And then both groups found themselves in governance much sooner than they thought, and now it is almost catastrophic success, and they’re dealing with that.
I think those are the two issues that I will be watching and digging into myself and trying to write on over the coming year, at least in 2025, because this just happened on December 8th. So we have the whole year in front of us and what the situation will look like this time around on New Year’s Eve 2026 will remains to be seen, but it’s going to be an interesting trajectory to watch on both fronts.
Nicholas Heras:
Thank you, Dr. Bokhari. And I think you mentioned really a great point here, it’s very early on. As we record this discussion, we’re on New Year’s Eve, we’re on the cusp of 2025. The entire purpose of this discussion is to forecast the year ahead, and it’s been a dizzying series of events over the last month. We’re less than a month into this new reality in Damascus.
One of the dynamics that I find very interesting is that you’ve now had unfortunately, sadly, almost a decade and a half of civil war in Syria, which has culminated in the end of a half century of an authoritarian regime. And I was talking to a former colleague of mine who said the government analysis likened it sort of, if you will, as a rough analogy, to the popular television show Game of Thrones. You may have seen or heard of it.
And essentially here, you have a divided territory where different actors all control their turf with different interests, and then all of a sudden, one of the most powerful actors just disappears seemingly overnight. And now you’re in this period when all sorts of calculations are being made by the remaining or surviving actors.
And there is, I’ve observed, this rising generation of open-source intelligence analysts who are super smart, obviously, digital natives. They’re just at home with consuming a lot of information, but it can be very difficult to develop a run-in assessment in this environment.
I just wanted to ask you, both as a multi-decade practitioner of open-source intelligence for various audiences but also as an esteemed, well-recognized professor and global expert, how should a rising generation of analysts in the open-source engage with the material that they are interacting with and consuming over this next year?
Kamran Bokhari:
That’s a great question, Nick. It’s something that I grapple with even after all this time in this space. I started my journey in 2003, and it’s a question that we will be grappling with for many years to come. But hopefully, there will be lessons learned.
So my take is there are a number of things that need to be done. So while we have become really great at the collection of intelligence, technology, particularly the rise of social media has really led to the booming of this OSINT [open-source intelligence] space and the OSINT-er community worldwide.
These OSINT-ers are not located in one part of the world or even only in advanced industrial democracies; they’re very much out there, and they’re producing a treasure trove of intelligence. And the problem that we face is that we are in this new era, and now I’d like to speak at the level of the human species.
I don’t think that the human species was prepared, I wouldn’t say designed, but was prepared to be able to process this volume of information that we now are being subjected to day in and day out. I’m from a generation that still remembers the morning newspaper, the evening news.
If you wanted more, you read Time Magazine or Newsweek or something like that, that was probably, I forget now, weekly or bi-weekly. And if you still weren’t satisfied, then go to your local library and look up the thick Encyclopedia, and those were your tools.
Over the past 30 years, we’ve seen an explosion of information. Everyone on this planet is suffering from information overload. And what has happened, ironically, is as the volume of information that is publicly available has grown exponentially and astronomically, unfortunately, that alone, that increase in volume, can add strain and stress to the ability of consumers to properly process that information.
You can’t keep up with it, forget about processing. But at the same time, what we’ve had, and parallel to the rise of the amount of information available on a planetary scale, is now the degradation of what I call analytical faculties. This is why we see this sort of hyperpolarized age that we live in, ideological polarization, political polarization, and you can see people out there literally screaming at each other in the ether, and there is a dearth even …
And then there are the whole Cable News Network and 24/7 infotainment industry. So it’s a challenge for people to analyze. Their skill sets are not being developed, at least in my opinion. They should be developed at the level of middle and high school, perhaps earlier on, but they’re not. And then students struggle when they get to universities because they have this information, but how do you make sense of it?
How do you infer and draw inferences from it? This is one of the reasons why you and I are part of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy’s Graduate Fellowship Program, where we’re trying to teach or breed a new generation of foreign policy practitioners and analysts, essentially with the best possible tradecraft that we can put together.
So I think that’s going to be a major challenge. And this isn’t just about Syria, but in general. And right now, because Syria is the latest new development in an ever-changing world with everything else that’s happening, it’s hard to do it.
I would like to add one more thing before I pass the mic back to you: there’s also this complication of what I call a conflation of area studies with the tradecraft of strategic analysis. An area studies field is basically a field in which you do research and you get to know your area, geographic and or thematic; it could be a country, could be a region, or could be an issue, and you know everything about it or almost everything about it because you spend so much time studying it.
That’s the whole purpose of the PhD in academia. But what happens is that you get caught in the weeds. And to apply that sort of concept to Syria, you will find people who know so much about all the factions on the ground and know what external actors are doing in the country, but they can’t put it all together because they’re so focused on Syria.
They’ve become area studies experts on Syria when what you really need is a robust understanding of strategic analysis, looking at the imperatives and constraints of not just the actors inside the country but also around the world, the stakeholders like the Russians, the Americans, the Turks, the Iranians, the Israelis, the Arab states, and so on and so forth.
And so unless you understand those imperatives and constraints, then you’re getting dizzy and you’re just sort of saying, “Hey, this is the latest that has happened.” So we’re working backward, we’re looking at what has happened and we try to …
If you look at tweets, for example, they’re telling you the who, what, where, and when. There’s very little of the how, why, and what next or what should the U.S. government do in the case of American analysts. I hope that makes sense.
Nicholas Heras:
Well, it makes perfect sense, Dr. Bokhari, and I just want to build on this point you make because one of the key aspects of our analytical tradecraft here, at the New Lines Institute, is in fact empathetic analysis.
The idea that you put yourself in the shoes of an actor and you try to understand the way they see the world as part of developing or running an assessment of what actions they might take in trying to seize opportunities, overcome challenges, and what type of constraints that they have that limit their agency.
And I really like how you’ve systematically taken a global perspective on how the current generation as well as the rising generation of analysts should look at the Syrian conflict. So I want to, in that spirit, start from the ground and go up from there, if you will. So let’s use empathetic analysis.
You have decades of experience, both practically and in the context of academia, with South Jihadist organizations and how they try to transition from rebels to rulers. And so I want to ask you, using empathetic analysis, putting your HTS hat on, what is HTS trying to achieve over this next year?
Kamran Bokhari:
That’s the million-dollar question, Nick. So let me try to answer that by starting with the idea of when we say HTS, who do we mean? Do we mean its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Muhammad al-Julani? Do we mean his close associates? Do we mean others who are part of the hierarchy?
We shouldn’t assume that everybody’s on the same page. Not everybody is adjusting to this reality in a uniform way. Not everybody is in the same place or pace of, for a lack of better term, moderation. I call it ideological and behavioral transformation. Everybody processes it differently.
There are certain things that become no-go areas for certain people, but others are willing to take chances. We see and hear a lot of what can be seen as promising statements and behavior from HTS so far, but it’s still very early. There are also rumblings of dissent from within the group, but then there’s the broader ecosystem in which HTS operates.
There are other factions in the South and factions that have been part of HTS’s broader network in Idlib, where it ruled for a while before it essentially took advantage of the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran and took Aleppo and then, from there, toppled the Assad regime. And so there are groups out there.
This group has had a very peculiar journey. It started with the leader himself leaving Syria to go to Iraq, joined what used to be called al-Qawiyy, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and later became the Islamic State of Iraq, which became ISIS after 2013.
It was 2014 when the group declared its caliphate. At the time, the group’s then leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, decided that, “Hey, this isn’t for me. I want to retain my own independence.” And we saw him found the group called Jabhat al-Nusra, which became Fatah al-Sham, and, since then, became HTS.
This is a journey that’s been remarkably fast. Having done my dissertation on ideological and behavioral transformation among Salafis and Jihadists, as my case studies, I looked at the Afghan Taliban and its interactions with the Obama administration, and then the behavior of a group called Dawa Salafia in Egypt that formed a political wing called Hisbunor, took part in the 2011/12 parliamentary elections, and came in second place behind the Muslim Brotherhood.
And I saw their change or adaption, as they went from saying democracy is un-Islamic to actually participating in an electoral process, which is democratization but not really democracy per se. So there are some lessons one can apply. And one of the things is that political learning is happening. All political actors, no matter how radical they are, are undergoing some measure of political learning all the time.
But this kind of overall transformation is a multi-decade if not a multi-generational process. When groups like this see opportunity before them, and they find themselves in the position of rulership, they don’t know how to deal with that, and they deal with it one day at a time. They don’t know what is going to happen the next week, much less the next month or longer.
And it is very new, it’s very fragile. And yes, there’s some grooming that happens over time. And in this case, one has to note that because of the support that HTS has had from Türkiye and Qatar, we know there’s sufficient evidence to suggest that both states have had a hand in steering HTS away from Salafi Jihadism to something more like Syrian nationalism with a mix of Islamism. And it is hard to disentangle that or disaggregate it because it’s so complex.
So I think that for HTS, the first order of business is we need to consolidate power. Consolidating power requires not just making sure everybody in the group is on the same page, but also that all those who were rebels and sided with them and were part of the ouster of Assad and then reaching out to groups that control other areas like in the South, in Suwayda, and in Daraa, and then reaching out to or working with the SNA, the Syrian National Army, which itself is a hodgepodge of different militias put together by the Turks.
And then, of course, how do you reach out to the Arab minorities such as the Druze, the Alawites, the Christians, the Shia, and the Ismailis?, And then there are non-Arabs like the Turkoman, and the biggest actors, the Syrian Kurds, who hold a sizable chunk of territory in the North and Northeast.
How do you deal with all these actors? And then you have to also, if you will, factor in your patrons and their interests. In this case, Türkiye and Qatar. You want to be able to do business with the West, with the United States. Russia used … This was a major outpost, the biggest outpost for the Kremlin for decades in the Middle East. What about their bases? What about their future influence? How are you going to deal with that?
You want to make sure that Iran is on the other side of the border with Iraq and it stays there and it doesn’t come in and try to regain space. Hezbollah is down but not out. There is Israel. You have to cautiously approach Israel because you don’t want to be seen delegitimizing yourself because of the broad anti-Israeli sentiment in the country and the broader region.
But at the same time, you have to do business with it. Israel is a power that any government, let alone HTS, has to deal with sitting in Damascus, given the occupation of the Golan Heights and now the creation of the buffer zone all the way to Mount Hermon.
And so these are things that HTS has to grapple with. In other words, you need to do empathetic analysis of HTS, but you also, by extension, have to know that HTS must do empathetic analysis of all these domestic and foreign actors.
Nicholas Heras:
I want to pick up on this point, Dr. Bokhari, because it’s varying. For me, with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, it’s interesting because just talking to former colleagues and contacts that are in the U.S. military and intelligence analysis space, I’m starting to see, over the last month or so, two camps, if you will, form. One is Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham.
They were formed in their earlier incarnation as Jabhat al-Nusra. They’re an al-Qaeda affiliate. Abu Muhammad al-Julani, al-Sharaa went to fight Americans, Iraq. Anas Hatab is intelligence chief. Also, a similar biography in that sense, yes, these are not friends of the United States, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And you need to not close off all sorts of channels of communication because ultimately, if in fact HTS and the Salvation government that it helped engineer in Idlib, if they’re able to sort of seize the command in heights of authority in Damascus over the next year and in the long term, get some type of U.N. recognition or at least get enough recognition from external actors to control a rentier position over humanitarian assistance, foreign and diaspora financial support, for the reconstruction of Syria that you need to have these channels of communication open.
Then there’s another sort of camp that I’ve heard and listened to that says, look, the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy and they’ll continue to be my enemy. And you see this sort of perspective as the official position of the Netanyahu-led government in Israel. So you see some sort of commonality in that approach, where it’s almost the idea that if you’re trying to maneuver in this new reality in Syria, but still an unstable reality, we don’t know how long it will last.
We don’t know in a few months from now, if in fact HTS will still control Damascus or still be viewed as the heir apparent over what was once the Assad-led Syrian state. It adds, to your point, an enormous amount of complexity. So I want to pivot to something you’ve alluded to, which is Iran in Syria. Iran in Syria was viewed as having secured over the long term a strategic place from which it could apply pressure on Israel.
Obviously, the Iranians have taken several blows in the face, if you will, with the damage on Hezbollah and Lebanon, the loss of the Assad regime, and divisions beginning to form with the Russians in how to approach this new reality in Syria, even as the Russians and Iranians engaged strategically. To your point, outside Syria, they seem to be strengthening their cooperation in the sphere outside Syria, but inside Syria, you see some divisions begin to form between the two actors.
So, from your point of view, now that we go from the ground up, looking at Iran and looking at Russia, what are they trying to achieve over the next year in Syria?
Kamran Bokhari:
Let’s take both separately. Let’s do Russia first. Russia has multiple options. So, first, Russia, I think, has made peace with the fact that what they had is gone, a regime in Damascus with whom they had relations going back to the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and the 1960s, and that relation strengthened, and, mind you, external players are always a conundrum in any country.
They want to target the country’s regime to be pliable and malleable so that they can pursue their interests. The problem with that is that, essentially, what you’re talking about is a relatively weak state, and that state tends to get weaker over time; in other words, it becomes a liability more than an asset.
And that’s what happened to the Russians. When they jumped into the fray in 2015 with close air support during the Civil War, initially, we thought the Russian support from the air and the Iranian support from the ground helped defeat the rebels.
And we thought the Assad regime has been cut down to size, but it has not been toppled, and there doesn’t seem to be a kinetic force that is capable of doing this or threatening the regime. So we’re at a point of stability. That was eight years ago, in 2016, when the Russians were in a very different place.
But now they have a new reality. The new reality is that Damascus and that whole corridor in the West running all the way up to Aleppo to the Turkish border is run by a particular faction. There are Kurds who have enjoyed self-rule for over a decade in the East. There are other groups in the South. Israel is occupying certain areas. The Turks occupy certain areas in the North by and large, and the Iranians have been pushed out. And so what do they do?
So they have an option. They have to look at the needs of the new administration in the making in Damascus, which is a need to do business with anybody and everybody who will do it with them to gain that international recognition that you were mentioning earlier, Nick. And so they can latch onto that and they can negotiate the future of the facilities.
It’s not really clear to me what’s happening to the Hamaim air base and to the port in Tartus; it’s very opaque. But one must assume that those assets have not completely been eliminated. They’re still there. The question is, what is their future? So there is a give and take that can happen. The Russians can also basically come in, if you will, or operate through the minorities in any power-sharing settlement, especially since they’ve given Assad asylum in his country.
And there are channels through which at least the Alawites and the Christians and others can use those connections to influence the future of Syria. They also have a relationship, a complicated one, with the Turks. They’re both partners in many ways, but also competitors.
So they have options and then, of course, they can lean on the Iranians. But as you said, there seems to be a divergence of interest between Tehran and Moscow, at least insofar as how to proceed in Syria. Those are the Russian options.
And then of course, there is also the incoming Trump administration and how it will deal with the Putin government on Ukraine, and Syria is not going to be far from that conversation, especially in light of what happened on December 8th. And so there is also that avenue with which the Russians can maintain some semblance of influence.
For the Iranians, this is a much bigger blow. The Iranians saw decimation of Hezbollah’s leadership, both civilian and military. Hezbollah is their premier proxy in the region, and they were still licking their wounds with regard to that loss when they also had to contend with the loss of Assad. And that’s a seismic shift in the region.
Essentially, for that whole contiguous sphere of influence running from the Iranian border with Iraq all the way to the Eastern Mediterranean that Tehran has been trying to construct and maintain power over for several decades, going back to the 1980s, a major hole has been punched through that contiguous sphere of influence. And with the collapse of the Assad regime, that means they’re disconnected.
Not only are they disconnected, but when Hezbollah was weakened, the Iranians thought, well, look, we have our work cut out for ourselves. We need to rebuild Hezbollah, make sure that it enjoys its preeminent position, at least inside Lebanon, even if it doesn’t have offensive capabilities, and those can be reconstituted over time.
While they were in that thought process, they incurred the loss of the Assad regime, which has really hit them hard, in the sense that now it’s become much, much tougher to help Hezbollah limp back to recovery from an Iranian point of view. On top of that, you have a geo-sectarian dynamic that runs through that entire northern rim of the Middle East.
Sunni Arab empowerment in Syria means that the future of the Iraqi regime dominated by the Shia majority, along with the Kurds of Iraq, is in question now, and it’s become much more vulnerable because there’s a cross-border Sunni Arab concentration of population.
Yes, in the North of both Syria and Iraq along that border, there’s a sizable Kurdish population, but South of that there’s a large cross cross-border demography of Sunni Arabs. And this is the same piece of geopolitical real estate that was used by Sunni insurgents that later became al-Qawiyy and ISIS to fight the U.S. occupation fight the new Shiite-led regime backed by Iran.
And now the question is, at that time, they had a Syrian regime in the form of the Assad regime, which was allied with Iran. Now the Iranians want to draw the line on the Iraqi-Syrian border and say, “OK, we don’t want this spilling over into Iraq. We just gained control over Sunni-majority areas because of the fight against ISIS.” And when ISIS was defeated, Mosul was liberated.
And you might remember, Nick, that back then, New Lines did a huge report on how Shiite militias from the Hashd al-Shaabi, aka the popular Mobilization Front, gained control of Sunni Arab majority areas in places like Ambar and the entire Sunni triangle. So they don’t want to lose that. Can they hold onto it? Well, that’s their big question.
And I wouldn’t be surprised, in order to gain leverage, that the Iranians would come out and say, “Look, we’ve suffered a massive blow in Lebanon. We’ve lost Syria, we can’t lose Iraq. We don’t have too much faith in the ability of the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad and the PMF and the militias to stand their ground. These guys didn’t perform well until the IRGC-QF came and mobilized all of them against ISIS, and now we need leverage with the United States as well.”
So it is in the realm of possibility that the Iranians may even deploy regular forces in Iraq under the guise of an agreement with Baghdad, arm twisted, of course, but under the guise of saying this is for the security of Iraq. And so that would be a major move by the Iranians.
I’m not forecasting that that will happen, I’m just putting it out there. That is an option before the Iranians. I don’t buy that they have the option to cross the nuclear Rubicon, and there are reasons for that, and we can get into it if time allows in this conversation.
Nicholas Heras:
I want to pick up this point because we talk about two other state actors, Türkiye and Israel, that have forces inside Syria itself. There has been a perception over the last few weeks that Türkiye is ascendant in the region and that there is a gathering storm of conflict, unfortunately, that could sweep across at least Syria and perhaps the Eastern Mediterranean as well, between Türkiye and Israel.
Now, of course, Türkiye and Israel have a lot of interactions with each other, and especially, however, over the course of the last year and more since the war in Gaza broke out, there’ve been a lot of recriminations against Türkiye by Israel because of the role that Hamas has been able to play out of Istanbul. You have key Hamas figures in Istanbul.
Obviously, the Turkish president, Erdogan, has also made some pretty strong statements against Israel. And there’s just this sort of, if you will, frenemy status between Israel and Türkiye that many observers are concerned could essentially lead to a type of conflict, perhaps via proxy or via influence means, that destabilize any new authority that’s trying to be established in Damascus, essentially to try to meet the needs of a war ravaged population in Syria.
My question for you is, is this perception of ascendant Türkiye in the region correct? And do you buy the argument that Türkiye and Israel are headed for some sort of clash inside Syria?
Kamran Bokhari:
Great questions. On the first question, let me start by saying yes and no. Yes in the sense that with the collapse of the Iranian position in the Levant, which has created an opportunity for the Turks, is something I predicted earlier this summer in a piece that I wrote about what would happen if Hezbollah weakens to the point where it can no longer help the Assad regime. That’s an opportunity that the rebels in Idlib can take advantage of, and definitely it’s an opening that the Turks have been eyeing.
In that sense, yes. Since that has happened now, this is a win for Türkiye. But what does that really mean? That just means Iran is out for the time being. It’s not completely out, but it’s lost the position that it held with the Assad regime ensconced in Damascus. Now that’s no longer the case, and the Turks have their work cut out for them, and even before they get to the Israelis, there are two axes that they have to work on.
It’s one thing to send your intelligence chief and your foreign minister to Damascus and have all that footage and those photo ops and video ops and whatever to say, OK, hey, the subtle message that the Turks are trying to say is we’re back in the Levant after a very long time. So yes, but what does that really mean?
And by that, I’m trying to say on one hand the Turks now need to have a new order in place with HTS, with SNA, the other factions, one that they can influence, one in which their allies have the upper hand. That’s easier said than done, where even the HTS leader, al-Sharaa, said yesterday that it could take four years before we could actually have elections in this country. That’s a very long time. That might as well be an eternity from where I’m standing, and a lot can go wrong.
So yes, in this current moment, the Turks seem ascendant. But in order to consolidate that, they need a government that will actually function and will be stable, and through which the Turks can continue to expand their influence in Syria. And from there, the broader region. That’s one thing they have to do.
The other thing is they have to solve this conundrum that they have with the Syrian Kurdish separatists, the YPG, which forms the core of the SDF, which is in control of large parts of territory. Now, yes, Erdogan comes out and says, like you did the other day, that quote, if you don’t give up your weapons, then you’ll be buried or whatever. Those are statements. You do that when you’re a leader, you’re catering to a domestic audience, you’re warning the enemy. You’re showing off geopolitically to other audiences around the world.
But even the Turks know that they have to somehow deal with this Syrian Kurdish reality. So do empathetic analysis. They want to be able to first reduce the military control that SDF has in the East, and that’s one line of effort that they’re going to work on. But there’s no way you can get rid of the SDF; even Erdogan knows that, despite what he says.
And now we have hints of what is happening and what the real strategy of the Turks is. Notice that just in the last 24 to 36 hours, we’ve had two developments. One is that yesterday there was a statement that is attributed to Abdullah Ocalan, who is the founder and the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Turkish Kurdish separatist movement that Ankara has been battling for decades, saying that he’s ready for peace.
And there was a big meeting through intermediaries that was signed off by Erdogan’s nationalist allies in the MHP. He also has the Kurdish party in the mix as well. And so there seems to be some movement, and it’s not a coincidence that this is happening at this current moment in post-Assad Syria, and everything that comes with it for the Turks. We also had the industry minister of the Turkish government come out and say the government is allocating $14 billion in development funds for 198 projects in the Southeast of Türkiye. So what does this mean?
On one hand, he wants to be able to ensure that for Kurdish separatism at home, its footprint is reduced, that somehow the Kurds are brought back into the mainstream. That’s one line of effort. The other is to sort of … He also has to bring the SDF and the Syrian Kurds into a power-sharing agreement with HTS and its allies. And that’s a challenge. How do you get them to do that? There is a model for it in the form of what happened in Iraq, but that model has a peculiarity because the regime, the post-Ba’athist regime in Iraq, had heavy U.S. input.
The United States, at the height of its military presence in Iraq, had 170,000 troops. While it didn’t maintain that level of deployment throughout the occupation, but it was a sizable occupation for many years. The United States helped build the new political system, the power-sharing mechanism and everything that came with it, bringing in the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shia, and it was one hell of an effort.
It was battling both Sunni insurgents and Jihadists along with Shiite dissenters such as the Southern movement in the beginning and then other militias that the Iranians had cultivated. So it was really, really hard. So there is no U.S. in the mix here. The incoming Trump administration wants to have very little to directly do with regard to Syria or any other place in the world and rely on regional players to do the heavy lifting.
So how is Türkiye going to achieve that goal of bringing the Syrian Kurds into the political mainstream that they want to construct in Damascus? So yeah, they look like they’re ascendant right now, but this is the road ahead. And so in a year’s time, what will happen is anybody’s guess. I don’t think that they’re in a position to even run into the Israelis just yet because they’re on the other side of the country, and the dynamics there are very different.
The imperatives of the Israelis is not creating a new regime that is pro-Israeli in Damascus; it’s more defensive. It is that, OK, whatever happens in Syria stays in Syria and doesn’t come over the Golan Heights, hence the buffer zone. They just also had a major victory by really weakening the Iranians’ grip in the Levant and weakening Hezbollah, only to now deal with a new dispensation in the making that is heavily composed of, or at least the vanguard of, that new dispensation in the making of the Sunni Jihadists turned Syrian nationalists.
That’s a huge uncertainty for the Israelis. So both the Turks and Israelis have a lot of work cut out for themselves before they run into each other because they have diplomatic relations. Yes, they have this sort of competition and sort of frenemy kind of relationship. But notice that all throughout the Gaza crisis, there was a lot of huffing and puffing on the part of Erdogan.
But in reality, Erdogan didn’t do much, and he paid for that in the form of the loss at the ballot box in the elections that were recently held. So I think that we’re going to see a very complicated Israeli-Turkish coordination competition. But more importantly, both of them have their own homework to do.
Nicholas Heras:
So I want to build from this to ask you the final question, which is of course we have the second Trump administration coming into power soon, and they have overseen the defeat, if you will, of ISIS’s territorial caliphate. They’re not strangers to Syria in that sense, Dr. Bokhari.
So you have a second Trump administration, you have an incumbent president who’s had to deal with, if you will, perhaps from his point of view, the highs of success against ISIS’s territorial caliphate, but also the lows of the irritation that comes with just the complexity on the ground in Syria.
And as you mentioned, the United States has had a challenging history recently in the Middle East over the past few decades in how to approach the aftermath of the removal of Saddam Hussein–led government from power in Iraq in 2003; the aftermath of that, the Arab Spring uprisings, depending on how you want to term it, in the early 2010s; and the aftermath of that, of which movement the Syrian conflict is a direct result.
And you have this uneasy reality, which is both you and I have been engaged in Syria analysis for many years now. None of the best case scenarios that were developed here in Washington saw a former al-Qaeda and Iraq leader as the de facto head of the transitional authority in Damascus. I mean, that would’ve just, if you will, just blown several gaskets in various different sectors of Washington.
So you have all these realities emerging at the same time. The United States, as you pointed out, through its support of the British-led Syrian Democratic Forces Coalition, essentially controls a quarter of Syrian territory and some of its most important agricultural water and oil resources.
And then if you combine the fact that Türkiye has significant influence over another chunk of Syrian territory, you kind of have a NATO-type of arrangement emerging in the aftermath of last year in Syria. So there’s a lot of strategic dynamics happening in that place as well, as you pointed out, dealing with Israel’s concerns related to what happens in Syria.
So put in your policymaker hat on. You’ve given us this wonderful discussion on how to apply analytical methodology to the uncertainty of Syria in this new year ahead. What would your recommendations be to the incumbent Trump administration on how it can potentially shape events in Syria in such a way as to benefit long-term U.S. goals for the region and the broader geopolitics that undergird U.S. strategy?
Kamran Bokhari:
To answer that question, I do have to say that whatever recommendation we give must fit the overall paradigm of a second Trump administration. We can come from any sort of intellectual background or even political background and offer our advice, but there’s a reality that a second Trump administration is not going to behave like the Biden administration or even like a Republican administration of the past.
And this is the second chance for President Trump, and he’s not going to be re-elected. So we have to factor in all these things. So knowing that he wants to keep a very light footprint, he does not want to be engaged in forever wars, he wants to be able to showcase that the promise he made to the American people, especially his voters that, look, I am going to achieve peace through strength, to me, seems like he needs to be able to deal with allies and partners in the region and elsewhere in order to deal with this future Syria.
There is Türkiye, and there are the Syrian Kurds. Now both of them are at odds with each other, and that’s a massive complexity and how he pulls both threads into a single needle remains to be seen. What I would offer is to say, look, there has to be some form of an understanding between the Syrian Kurds and Türkiye.
So that’s an axis that needs to be worked on because then that will become that sort of NATO in the region that you mentioned, Nick, in order to be able to do the job that the Trump administration wants done. But that’s part of the picture.
There are other allies the Trump administration will have to bring into this picture, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. Now, there is some evidence to suggest that they are not these two, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are not as spooked by HTS, given there are serious reservations against Islamist actors seizing power in any part of the Arab world.
And so that said, I can’t imagine that they’d be too comfortable with that either. They’re just dealing with reality. So they will have to be somehow brought into the equation. Now, when it comes to what happens in Damascus, what happens in the East is something that they’ll have to deal with in Türkiye, and Türkiye also has to be brought into the picture of what happens in Damascus.
But I would say that the Trump administration will, and this isn’t much of a policy thing because this has already happened. This is more of a forecast of what the Trump administration might do based on what it did in Afghanistan. The deal that the first Trump administration made with the Taliban was, we don’t want to be here, all we care about is that this country of yours does not become a springboard for future attacks against us, our allies, our partners, or anywhere else internationally.
As long as you can guarantee that, we have no business being here, and we really don’t care what you do. Ideally, we would like you to have that intra-Afghan dialogue. And so that there is sort of a smooth transition to the other side from what we have right now, the regime that we and your political goals. That didn’t happen, and it’s a matter of historical record, the way in which the U.S. forces had to leave.
But that is the general model that from the Trump administration’s position, if there are Syrian Kurds, if Türkiye says, we will make sure that not only that ISIS doesn’t come back to power, if you cater to our interests regarding Kurdish separatism, and in fact, we’ll add to the pot and say, we’ll also be a bulwark against Iranians trying to come back in. Then you look at HTS and say, why not?
Why not a deal if these guys are “Islamist light,” for a lack of better term? Well, we did business with the Taliban. Look what they’re doing. They haven’t given up on their ideology. At least these guys are talking constitution and elections. So if you can keep ISIS in check, you can keep Iran in check. We’re all game.
So I think this is going to be the strategy, and my advice to the Trump team will be that it will require a lot of sophistication about this multi-actor battle space. You’re going to have to work with Israel as well, given its sense of vulnerability. North of the Golan, especially whoever’s in Damascus is going to be watched very closely by the Israelis.
So somehow, the Trump administration has to bring all these actors in so that they have a working mechanism for the future of Syria. A lot can go wrong, but if you have a basic framework and mechanism, then you can address problems that exist today and perhaps tomorrow it’s not going to be pretty.
On the contrary, we can expect a lot of ugliness, but at least there is a method to the madness. That would be my suggestion to the Trump team. And of course, there are limitations on how much we can go into in terms of details in this podcast, and I think this was the last question, so I’ll stop right there.
Nicholas Heras:
Thank you very much, Dr. Bokhari, for an excellent discussion and for helping us forecast what might happen in Syria in the year ahead. And thank you all for listening today. If you liked this episode, remember to subscribe to New Lines on SoundCloud, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
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