The Syrian government, flush with pivotal battlefield gains and bolstered by support from Iran and Russia, is finding itself the beneficiary of an evolving regional realignment spurred by the war in Syria.
Egypt and Turkey, countries that were once vocal opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have, to varying degrees, softened their positions. Egypt, the region’s most populous Sunni country and wary of Iran’s Shiite theocracy, has made its tacit, increasing support of the Syrian government public for the first time. And Turkey, a Sunni regional power, is reshaping the Syrian battlefield by edging closer to Russia and dampening its long-time support for rebels fighting al-Assad.
The shifts come at a volatile time as countries in the Middle East long aligned with the US are hedging their bets and looking to Moscow for support as Russian intervention transforms the conflict in Syria.
Illustration: Yusha
The maneuvering comes as Russia asserts itself across the region to a degree not seen since Soviet times, partnering with an increasingly ambitious Iran.
Long-standing US alliances with Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are frayed, and face new uncertainty with the election of US president-elect Donald Trump, whose foreign policy remains largely undefined, except for an avowed eagerness to shake things up.
Egypt, which has seen its influence wane, is seeking allies and relevance wherever it can find them, even if that means shelving concerns about Iran.
While Russia’s goal seems to be to expand its influence and pave the way for the international rehabilitation of al-Assad’s government, the scrambling of alliances remains in motion and the results unclear. The new relationships are messy, contradictory works in progress.
“In today’s regional context, this tactical hedging by countries on multiple fronts is likely to continue and may accelerate under a Trump administration,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
Egypt and Turkey both provide examples of hedging, testing realignments but not jumping in with both feet.
Turkey has reached a potentially game-changing understanding with Russia in northern Syria — slackening support for besieged rebels in the divided city of Aleppo in exchange for a sphere of influence along its border — but continues to push the deal’s boundaries politically and militarily. And Egypt is diverging from its traditional allies in some ways, by splitting from Saudi Arabia on Syria; it remains financially dependent on the kingdom and hopes to mend fences with the US under Trump.
Egypt, Katulis said, is “seeking to signal that it has an independent perspective and position” on the Syrian conflict and on regional policy, balancing the US and Russia, not aligning entirely with either the Gulf Arab states or Iran.
The emerging “al-Sisi doctrine,” named for Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, is “rigid anti-Islamism and rigid anti-militancy and a very vocal support for nation states and sovereignty,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a New York research institute.
Those positions are congruent with al-Assad’s. However, they diverge from those of Saudi Arabia, which has long been one of Egypt’s main financial lifelines, supplying aid worth tens of billions of US dollars.
Al-Sisi is also increasingly wary of Turkey. He sees the recent defeat of a coup attempt against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hardline Muslim government as “the birth of a religious state in Europe,” he told Katulis in July during a two-hour interview for a forthcoming report on US policy in Egypt.
Yet, Katulis said, the Egyptian president also made clear that he remained suspicious of Iran’s Shiite brand of Islamism despite its alignment with al-Assad and opposition to Turkey in Syria.
However, for now, al-Sisi seems to be putting concerns about Iran on the back burner and focusing more on Sunni movements, which he sees as a bigger threat. And lending support to Syria helps a weakened Egypt evoke its glory days as the leader of Arab nationalism in the 1960s.
Al-Sisi’s emphasis on state sovereignty, supporting Arab states against insurgents, is also a major boon to the Syrian government’s quest for legitimacy, said Kamal Alam, a visiting fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and Levant Consultant for the Hoplite Group.
Three years ago, Turkey and Egypt were prominent supporters of the Syrian rebellion, aligned with Saudi Arabia in what the Saudis saw as a geopolitical and sectarian struggle against Iran.
Today, both countries have tilted to different degrees away from Saudi Arabia and toward Russia, if not directly Iran. So has Jordan, another US ally and mostly Sunni country whose support for rebels had always been relatively lukewarm.
All three seek to insulate themselves from the upheaval in Syria — from refugees and migrants, from militant groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda affiliates that gained footholds within the insurgency they helped support, and from any possible popular revolt.
The first to peel away was Egypt, in 2013, after al-Sisi, an army general, seized power from former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who had emphatically supported the Syrian revolt. Pro-government news media made it clear that the Egyptian stance on Syria had changed; Syrian refugees were even attacked in the streets.
Al-Sisi and his foreign ministry avoided explicitly voicing support for al-Assad — presumably to avoid antagonizing the Saudis. However, they quietly hosted Syrian officials and positioned themselves as an Arab partner for Moscow on Syria.
Then relations soured with Saudi Arabia, in part over Egypt’s refusal to actively engage in its fight in Yemen against Iran-backed rebels. The Saudis cut off discounted oil deliveries.
Egypt’s alignment with the pro-al-Assad front became more public. In October, Iran pushed to add Egypt to international talks on Syria, and Egypt voted with Russia on a UN resolution on Syria.
Cairo also recently hosted Syria’s powerful security chief, Ali Mamlouk — not his first visit during the Syrian war, but the first to be publicly acknowledged.
Then, last month, al-Sisi tossed a modicum of public support to al-Assad. Asked whether Egypt would be willing to send peacekeeping troops to Syria, al-Sisi said it was best to support “national armies.”
When pressed to clarify if that meant forces loyal to al-Assad, al-Sisi gave a terse “yes.”
It was just a few words, but for al-Assad, internationally isolated, any small nod to legitimacy matters.
Soon, reports even circulated that Egypt was sending pilots to aid al-Assad’s war effort. Egyptian officials strongly denied it and regional analysts agreed it was extremely unlikely.
Egypt is not in a position to carry out foreign military adventures, so the significance of its new steps is mainly optical. However, they left Saudi Arabia “pretty clearly irate,” said Hanna, who studies Egypt and the region at the Century Foundation.
However, the chances are that Saudi Arabia will continue to send Egypt aid the main purpose of which is to shore up stability there. And al-Sisi appears undaunted.
Even as an outcry arose over the intensive bombing of Aleppo last week, Egypt in an emergency UN Security Council meeting justified its decision not to support “any side against the other.”
The statement was seen as a polite way of refusing to apologize for not hewing to the Saudi line.
Turkey, too, has been unusually quiet on Aleppo. That, to many observers, confirms it has essentially agreed with Russia on a trade: Turkey allows rebel defeat in Aleppo, in exchange for Russia’s blessing of its incursion into Syria farther north to keep Kurdish militias away from its border.
Erdogan even submitted to public censure from Russia on Thursday, for declaring his country was still trying to topple al-Assad.
After being asked for clarification by Moscow, Erdogan reversed himself, insisting that Turkey’s goal in Syria was solely to fight terrorism.
However, the parameters of the Turkey-Russia deal remain murky and possibly undefined even between the parties, Hanna said, making for a volatile situation.
Turkey entered Syria with a force of anti-al-Assad rebels to set up what it calls a safe zone along the border. However, as they move farther south and east, the likelihood increases that they will come into conflict with Russian-backed government forces, or US-backed Kurdish forces.
“It’s a dangerous fault line,” Hanna said. “If you put anti-al-Assad rebels who have sublimated their goals to serve Turkish interests in very close proximity to regime forces, how much control does Turkey have over its proxies?”
Another question is how much control Russia has over the Syrian government.
Diplomatic realignment can go only so far, and the more triumphant Damascus feels the harder it might be for Russia to deliver “a de-escalatory path,” said Hanna, who favors US-Russia talks to reach a political solution, but says the main obstacle is the Syrian government’s inflexibility.
“Russia lines up the regional dominoes,” he said. “And the regime says, ‘Great, now let’s continue fighting this war.’”
Nour Youssef contributed reporting from Cairo
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
For the incoming Administration of President-elect William Lai (賴清德), successfully deterring a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attack or invasion of democratic Taiwan over his four-year term would be a clear victory. But it could also be a curse, because during those four years the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will grow far stronger. As such, increased vigilance in Washington and Taipei will be needed to ensure that already multiplying CCP threat trends don’t overwhelm Taiwan, the United States, and their democratic allies. One CCP attempt to overwhelm was announced on April 19, 2024, namely that the PLA had erred in combining major missions
The Constitutional Court on Tuesday last week held a debate over the constitutionality of the death penalty. The issue of the retention or abolition of the death penalty often involves the conceptual aspects of social values and even religious philosophies. As it is written in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, the government’s policy is often a choice between the lesser of two evils or the greater of two goods, and it is impossible to be perfect. Today’s controversy over the retention or abolition of the death penalty can be viewed in the same way. UNACCEPTABLE Viewing the
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused