Syria’s war seemed to have its ending. The uprising that began in early 2011, as the contagion of the ‘Arab Spring’ spread, threatened for a time to undo the dynastic despotism of Bashar al-Assad. But after Iran summoned its jihadist legions and the Russian air force made its presence felt, the tide was turned, culminating in the scorched earth campaign at the end of 2016, which broke the back of the rebellion in its final urban bastion, Aleppo. The regime coalition had prevailed, and with the final destruction of the Islamic State (ISIS) ‘caliphate’ in March 2019, Syria moved off the front pages. The war had not ended, however.

Four pockets of insurgents remained around the country, and a diplomatic agreement between Russia, Turkey, and Iran was supposed to preserve them as ‘de-escalation’ zones. But the agreement was subverted and the pro-Assad coalition picked off these zones one by one until, by mid-2018, there was only the north-western Idlib enclave left. By that point, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a jihadist group once loyal to Al-Qaeda, which has ostensibly severed these connections, had taken control of Idlib’s insurgents and, in doing so, inherited the mantle of what had been a nationalist anti-Assad revolution.

Meanwhile, the US attempt to lead a counter-terrorism mission against ISIS divorced from the politics of the Syrian war that had provided the context in which ISIS could flourish, had created further problems. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the anti-ISIS coalition supported to dismantle the caliphate in Syria, was left holding a third of the country in the north-east once the jihadists were gone, including most of the Syria-Turkey border. As the SDF is a front for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a remnant of the international Soviet ecosystem and the premier security threat to Turkey since the mid-1980s, the Turks did not look kindly on this – and less kindly still on US troops remaining in Syria to protect the PKK statelet, no matter that the stated purpose was to ensure ISIS remained defeated.

Turkey took matters into its own hands with a series of incursions, grabbing territory in Aleppo province, north of the city, and a strip further east to break up the PKK’s control of the border. This badly damaged US-Turkey relations, but the Turks established control on the ground. The Turkish fiefdoms have been administered by the Syrian National Army (SNA), an unruly collection of former rebels and Syrian refugees hired from the camps in Turkey, and in 2017 Turkey became the guarantor of Idlib. Turkey already hosts three million Syrian refugees and cannot handle the political and economic strain of a new refugee wave if the regime coalition conquers Idlib.

This was the situation for four years. The borders between the Turkish and HTS enclaves, the US-backed PKK zone, and the Assad/Iran system were frequently bloody, but there were no important territorial changes.

Things altered radically after the onset of the HTS-led offensive, supported by the SNA, on 27 November. By the evening of 29 November, insurgents had taken control of more of Aleppo city than they held at the height of their power in 2012-13, and swept south towards Hama, pushing into areas that likewise had been off-limits even a decade ago when the insurgents were being supplied with vast amounts of financial and military aid from the Arab States, as opposed to the current situation, where the Gulf States are openly siding with Assad.

How has this happened? The key factor is that Assad’s foreign backers are debilitated.

The Syrian regime basically collapsed in the first 18 months of the war. From late 2012, Assad has been effectively mayor of Damascus, directly controlling only a couple of Praetorian units, while Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) led the war effort. Iran, and Russia, tried to arrange the shattered pieces of Assad’s regular army and the various state militias into a workable military force, but the Assad system is fundamentally unreformable: these elements remained in practice predatory, local gangs that succeeded in terrorising civilians and ran away at the first sign of danger.

What sustained the façade of the Assad regime was the IRGC, which pulled its unit in Lebanon, Hizbollah, and its ‘Iraqi’ Shi’a militias, into Syria in large numbers, and orchestrated an international Shi’a jihad that brought in motivated volunteers from as far afield as Afghanistan and the Ivory Coast. Even that proved not to be enough by 2015, hence Tehran brokering Russia’s overt aerial campaign.

Russia’s presence in Syria was always mostly a mirage, a political show piggybacking on the IRGC Network. Since 2022, with the Russian army tied down in Ukraine, Moscow has barely had the forces to go through the motions in Syria. When the insurgent offensive began last week, Russian troops scattered at outposts in northern Syria fled to their secure (for now) bases on the coast.

The decisive change is the damage that Israel has done to the IRGC network. Iran was behind Hamas’ pogrom in Israel on 7 October 2023, and coordinated its assets – especially Hizbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen – in a multifront war thereafter. But it has gone disastrously: the only question in Gaza is the extent of its defeat, and Hizbollah has been ravaged, its military infrastructure destroyed and its leadership, including its ‘untouchable’ leader Hassan Nasrallah, eliminated. Hizbollah has been desperate for a ceasefire for some time, and it is perhaps not coincidental that it was on the very day it got it that HTS initiated the offensive. But Hizbollah is in no position to stage a rescue operation in Syria, and even if it was, Israel has already demonstrated that, unlike the last time, it will not permit Iran to mobilise and mass IRGC assets in Syria.

Turkey’s role in recent events has been minimal. Ankara has been pursuing a normalisation of relations with Assad, but he proved intransigent, so the Turks gave a green light to HTS’s plan and allowed the SNA to get involved. This has had the additional benefit of removing the PKK from some entrenched garrisons in northern Syria. The Turks were surely as shocked as everybody else at just how feeble the Assad regime is, but the contours of the Turkish vision, namely to use the insurgent gains as leverage to get to terms with Damascus, likely remain in place.

Which brings us to the final actor in this drama, the United States. The White House has released a statement blaming the current chaos on Assad’s refusal to engage in the United Nations-sponsored political negotiation process, while stressing that the US ‘has nothing to do with this [insurgent] offensive’, and reiterating that HTS is ‘a designated terrorist organisation’. Contrary to the widespread belief that the US tried to overthrow Assad in the 2010s, the nominal American support to the Syrian rebels was meant to pressure Assad to negotiate, and perhaps inertia has kept some version of this fantasy alive in the US government. Equally, if not more likely, a lame-duck administration with no intention of formulating a Syria policy at this late stage needed something to say, and this was the template on file.

Syria has entered an all-bets-are-off phase of a kind unseen since 2012, making any predictions about what comes next folly. All that can be done is restate what was obvious from the start: those worrying about instability if Assad falls have it the wrong way around. For as long as Assad remains in office, there will be no peace or stability in Syria.