The surprise resurgence of Syria’s civil war is shaking the table for the United States, which tried to turn the page years ago on a devastating conflict where it saw few good outcomes.
The latest turmoil in a chaotic region comes less than a couple months before the return of President-elect Donald Trump, whose team could see an unexpected opportunity as part of its bid to reshape the Middle East, albeit with plenty of question marks.
The lightning offensive by Islamist rebels, who seized Syria’s second largest city of Aleppo, came after US ally Israel worked to degrade two key supporters of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad — Iran and its affiliated Lebanese Shiite militia, Hezbollah. Russia, another backer of Assad, has been heavily focused on its invasion of Ukraine.
In a region left in flux since the Gaza war, the US position on Syria, articulated again by President Joe Biden’s administration, has changed little for a decade — though Assad has lost credibility through his brutality, the United States is not prioritizing pushing him out and does not support the rebels.
“The Biden administration didn’t just put Syria on the backburner. They took it off the stove,” said Andrew Tabler, a senior advisor on Syria during the last Trump administration who is now a senior fellow at The Washington Institute.
“You can take things off the stove all you want, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to boil over,” he said.
He said that the battlefield setbacks could finally force Assad into a negotiated solution, which he had long resisted.
“I think an incoming administration with more attention to Syria and conflicts like it will be better able to manage it,” he said. “We just don’t know what that looks like yet.”
In US interest?
President Barack Obama, who resisted pressure to attack Assad and refused to embrace the rebels, settled on another option — allying with Kurdish fighters for the narrow US goal of defeating the Islamic State extremist group. Some 900 US troops remain in Syria.
Trump in his first term — in a characteristically impulsive approach — ordered out US troops at the urging of Turkey, which supports the Islamist fighters and likens Syrian Kurdish forces to domestic militants.
He later backtracked after international appeals led by France.
Raising further questions, one of Trump’s most controversial nominees, intelligence chief-designate Tulsi Gabbard, has made waves with past statements sympathetic to Assad.
Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, said that the primary interest of US policymakers has been “to support Israel and to hurt Iran and Russia.”
“So the onslaught of the rebels is very good for America, from that point of view, because it changes the security architecture in the Middle East in a dramatic way,” he said.
A rebel triumph would sever the so-called Shiite Crescent, in which Iran’s clerical state has extended its influence westward all the way to Lebanon, he said.
“This would be a big boon to Israel and a big karate chop to Iran,” he said.
But the Sunni Islamists would also oppose the United States, which would again face the question of whether to protect Kurdish allies from Turkey.
“It presents a dilemma for the United States and Israel — whether they really prefer an Islamist government running Syria or they prefer to keep it divided and weak,” Landis said.
Renewed humanitarian crisis?
Despite criticism of inaction, the Biden administration has committed more than $1 billion over the past year in humanitarian aid for Syria’s displaced.
Under a sanctions law that expires this month, the United States opposes reconstruction involving Assad without accountability over the war, which has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions more since 2011.
But a growing number of Arab countries have reconciled with Assad, believing the war was over, or at least frozen.
Recently, several Western countries, notably Italy, have broken with the United States by returning ambassadors to Damascus, seeking stability in the hopes of preventing another migration crisis akin to what shook up European politics a decade ago.
The renewed fighting has already displaced nearly 50,000 people, according to a UN report, and will cause growing humanitarian needs as winter sets in, noted Mona Yacoubian, vice president of the Middle East and North Africa Center at the US Institute of Peace.
“So it raises a big question — where do folks who are on the move go?” she said.
“With these shifting power dynamics, is the door open for a redefining of the region and its security architecture? I think that’s a big and very open question,” she said.
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