Assad’s humiliating retreat is a blow to Iran

The rapid advance of Syrian rebels into Aleppo has proved a grievous blow to Bashar al-Assad’s vile regime. Radical Islamist and Kurdish forces have mounted separate assaults that have pushed Syrian army forces back, with speculation that the assault could press on into major cities.

It is clear that the situation is extremely fragile, and that Syria could easily extend into extreme chaos. Assad is a monster, but the Islamist rebels are no friends of the West.

While a great deal of focus is on these dynamics and the involvement of Russian forces backing the Assad government – with reports of airstrikes around Aleppo – perhaps just as significant is the damage dealt to Iran’s ambitions in the Middle East. It seems increasingly likely that the barbaric October 7 assault, far from signalling the beginning of a new era of Iranian strength, was instead the high-water mark for Iranian influence in the region.

Over the past year Tehran has had to watch its Hamas allies in Gaza be dealt defeat after defeat, and its Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon be decimated. Iran’s own assaults upon Israel produced minimal effects, and invited in return airstrikes which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated struck Tehran’s nuclear programme.

It is clear that the regime’s great gambit has failed. The current disorder in Syria appears to be directly downstream of decisions taken after October 7, with Iran-backed militias launching attacks on US-bases in turn resulting in US airstrikes on Iranian positions in Syria, and the barrage of Hezbollah rockets into Israel triggering an eventual Israeli ground-assault into Lebanon.

This weakening of Assad’s allies and their positions within his countries appears to have opened the door to the current offensive, and the prospect of what could be a significant loss of power for Damascus.

It is clear that Tehran badly miscalculated its decision to escalate its conflict with Israel and the West.

While the regime has managed to win some victories in the propaganda war – successfully persuading many young, Left-wing people in the West that it is Israel that is the aggressor in this conflict in a sickening perversion of the truth – it has suffered humiliation on the battlefield, and strategic goals it has worked towards for years have been torn to shreds in a matter of months. The result appears to be the implosion of Iran’s dream of regional domination.

The Syrian regime has been greatly weakened after Iran exerted enormous effort to stabilise it; Tehran’s proxies in Lebanon have been devastated; Hamas has been all-but neutralised as an effective force. There is a golden opportunity for the West to finish the job of shattering Iran’s malign regional influence for an extended period.