EXPERT INTERVIEW — An already volatile Middle East has a new frontline: Syria. Actually, it’s an old frontline that’s returned to the fore, as Syrian rebels have overrun the city of Aleppo and are now moving against Hama, another major city in central Syria. Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad put down a rebellion during the 2011 “Arab Spring,” but the latest revolt appears to have caught Assad’s regime off guard.
The rebellion has been led by Syrian Islamic militants, in particular the group Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham — or Headquarters for the Liberation of the Levant — which has past links to Al-Qaeda and has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.
The week-old offensive has raised several questions: Will the rebels keep up the advance, and how will Assad’s regime respond? Can Syria’s traditional allies Russia and Iran be counted on — given the military commitments those countries have elsewhere? Is Assad’s regime under threat — and if so, what might follow? And how should the U.S. respond?
The Cipher Brief turned to Norman Roule, former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, for his reaction and insights. Roule says the rebellion is the latest development in “a conflict that the world has ignored,” and adds further complexity to “the most complicated geography in the Middle East.”
Cipher Brief CEO Suzanne Kelly spoke with Roule for the latest episode of The World Deciphered.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kelly: Can you bring us up to speed on where we are in Syria right now?
Roule: We’re watching the latest chapter in a conflict that the world has ignored, and one more eruption of turbulence in a region that has been jolted by tectonic political and military movements over the past year and a half. This conflict in Syria represents a potential inflection point for the region. Although the Syrian regime does not appear in danger of falling, how and whether and to what extent Iran and Russia respond will shape events in the region for the foreseeable future.
The primary implications are for Iran and its Quds Force empire. The Quds Force has never faced such repeated and effective blows and terrible disasters. It’s not out – it has thousands of personnel who are left – but they now face the arrival of a Trump administration in January. I think because of Syria, other events and the Trump administration’s arrival, we are likely to see an internal debate within Iran itself as to how they should respond to the West.
Syria is the most complicated geography in the Middle East. There are a few good actors, some of the actors are quite bloody, and in the end, this chapter tells us once again that the Biden administration is leaving office with the region more contested and more dangerous than any time since 1945.
In 2011, you had the Arab Spring – Syria’s under threat, and Iran sends its forces in, under the Quds Force, because Syria represents its only state ally. And in 2013 and 2014, operations were not going well. The Quds Force was losing multiple senior officers. In some of the demonstrations in Iran, you had protesters asking why Iranian funds were spent in wars abroad instead of at home.
The Quds Force traveled to Russia in 2015 with [Quds Force commander] Qasem Soleimani meeting [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and convinced the Russians to involve themselves more thoroughly in Syria. The Quds Force lacked air capacity, it lacked battlefield management capacity, it lacked a good artillery experience, and Russia brought all of this to the table.
Aleppo, the city in question this week, fell in 2016, but took probably 4 years of fighting and, at the very least, tens of thousands of casualties. The fact that Aleppo has fallen so quickly now compared to then tells you how much the world has changed.
This is a terrible intelligence failure for the Syrians, the Russians, and the Iranians simultaneously. This attack tells you an awful lot about their capabilities in the region, how thinned out they were, and in some ways it’s a systematic failure, not dissimilar to October 7th in Israel. This rebel group, Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham, and the Kurds are the two largest of the Syrian opposition movements. The Islamists came inside Aleppo, reassured the population, which includes a large Christian presence, that they would not be harmed, their belongings would not be touched. But then the opposition discovered that the Syrians had abandoned a massive amount of ordinance, anti-tank guided missiles, MANPADS. And this is important because in the past, the Syrian opposition was always incapable of competing against Syrian and Russian armor.
The Syrian government claims it’s preparing a counter-offensive. It’s possible that they’re waiting to see if the rebels thin themselves out in this conflict before they move forward. The Iranians have responded by dispatching their foreign minister to Turkey and to Damascus. The Iranians apparently had a casualty — a senior Quds Force officer, General Kioumars Pourhashemi, died in the fighting and he was described as a military advisor to the Syrian regime. The Russians have sent a senior official. They’ve relieved their official on the spot, who previously was fired from his work in Ukraine.
Kelly: What’s at stake in Syria for the United States and what’s at stake for Russia?
Roule: For Russia, they need the naval bases at Tartus and Latakia because this allows them to maintain a naval presence outside of the Black Sea, and they also have an air logistics line based in those locations that allow them to support operations in Libya and Africa. The loss of Syria for the Russian military would be very consequential.
For the United States, we don’t want to see the return of ISIS, and ISIS still remains a regional or a local problem. The nature of its attacks are increasing and the sophistication, they’re demanding funds from businesses to stay afloat. ISIS is far from out, and although the militants who are responsible for the capture of Aleppo claim that they are not radical, Hayʼat Tahrir al-Shams formerly was associated with al-Qaeda. They broke away. The idea of Islamic militants in charge of such central geography would be a consequential complication to the region.
Kelly: What is Turkey’s role in this and what’s at stake for Turkey as well?
Roule: Turkish history with Syria is also — I hate to overuse the word — complicated. There are parts of Syrian territory that were once part of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey itself, and Turkish nationalists see that as their territory. The Turks view the Kurdish actors that the United States supports in Syria as terrorists, and they believe that a presence in Syria allows them to push back this threat by Kurdish militants. The Kurds have had an on-again, off-again effort to build relations with Assad.
What I think we’re probably likely to see with the Trump administration or the world in general is that Turkey will have a lot more influence or responsibility for Syria, if only because nobody else wishes to involve themselves in this mess.
Kelly: What does this mean for Israel?
Roule: For Israel in the near term it’s good news. This puts Iran’s architecture in Syria under greater threat, under greater pressure. It means that the Quds Force will have less time and personnel to spend to reconstitute Hezbollah, which is Iran’s primary goal following the ceasefire in Lebanon.
Looking forward, I think it’s an open question and probably a threat. Some members of the Islamic militants have openly stated that they’re fighting Israel’s enemies and that Israel’s enemies are their enemies. But these are Salafists who have at the same time made a number of anti-Israel comments over the years, and I don’t think it’s in Israel’s interests to have a Salafist militant government on their border. For Israel, they became, as many did in the region, comfortable with the stalemate – comfortable with the devil they know [Assad], comfortable with the fact that Assad was too weak to participate in Iranian attacks on Israel itself and would just have to stand by when Israel attacked the Iranians. I think we’re going to see a lot of attention paid by Israel to what’s happening, but as long as the Assad regime is not threatened in Damascus, I don’t think Israel will worry too much.
Kelly: What kind of response could be launched in reaction to this attack?
Roule: So if you are the rebels right now, you need to make sure that you’ve got Aleppo under control. Set up your defenses for a counterattack by Syrian, Russian and Iranian forces. You’ve got to see what you can do with all these wonderful MANPADS and anti-tank weapons that have fallen into your lap. There will be some thought that the rebels will want to push south to the cities of Hama and to Homs. That would be important because if they capture these historic cities, Homs would cut Damascus off from the Russian base at Tartus. It’s a question of will the rebels be able to properly mount these attacks, or constrain themselves and decide they can’t go any farther because they don’t want to thin out their lines?
For the Russians, they’ve replaced their commander, they’ve brought a new one in who’s quite tough. He will bring in air support against the rebels in Aleppo, but also in Idlib. He will also bring in some artillery. There’s a risk of it being quite bloody.
For the Iranians, they’re going to marshal a number of different forces. Lebanese Hezbollah is not out, it’s just a lot less capable. The Iranians have a lot less experience, and I think we need to look at the last couple of years: it’s not just that the Iranians lost Qasem Soleimani [who was killed in a U.S. strike in January 2020], but think of the number of generals and mid-level senior officers the Israelis have killed among Iran’s Syria operational elements over the past year. The April 2024 consulate attack took out 7 of their most experienced Syrian officers.
For Iran, they’ve got to demonstrate that they’re standing with Assad. Iran has been unable to stand with Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis. Iran’s reputation of having a connection to its proxies has suffered tremendously, and it simply must stand with Bashar al-Assad if it’s going to retain any credibility in the region. And if it doesn’t, that becomes an opportunity for the West, for the region, because it’s a different Middle East if Iran no longer has that connection. I think if you’re the Quds Force right now in Tehran, you’re making this argument of, “We must do this.” The Supreme Leader and others will say, “That’s fine, but we fight to the last proxy. We’re not going to have an uptick on losses of generals. We’re not going to spend a lot of money on this at a time when our economy is weak. So manage this accordingly.”
If you’re the Syrians, the army is weak, tired, demoralized, they kind of ran away from Aleppo, their intelligence apparently isn’t very good. There have been rumors of coup attempts in Damascus — probably untrue, but that’s unknown.
Most of these movements will not be visible to outsiders – hopefully to intelligence services, to include the U.S. obviously. As Iran moves its forces in and Russia responds, unless you’ve got some terrific on-the-ground insights, we just won’t see this in the West. So some patience will be required to see how this plays out.
Kelly: If you were briefing policy makers today, what opportunities would you be telling them to look for in the coming days and weeks?
Roule: Anything we can do to degrade Iran’s capacity to operate in Syria would be useful. Anything we can do to stay away from Russian aircraft and Russian operations will be important because we don’t want to risk a conflict with Russia. Making sure that we have very close relations with our Gulf partners because the Gulf partners see Syria as a source of [the drug] captagon and as an Iranian threat, and their historical access to the region is much deeper than ours. So this is a time for close involvement with those parties.
I don’t think we need to have a military presence in this area, but I would watch whether Daesh [the Islamic State] decides this is an opportunity for it to expand its own activities in the villages around the al-Hawl displaced persons camp and elsewhere in Syria. I would have our personnel supported appropriately with intelligence and logistics to protect them and to push back on any possible Daesh action. I would also try to stay in close contact with the Turks. I would want to make sure I understand how far the Turks are willing to go on this issue, where they see themselves going in six months or six weeks even as this goes forward. This is a time for some very important diplomacy and intelligence engagement.
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