THEO VAN GOGH: DONALD TRUMPS NEW SYRIA!? / AGAINS KURDS AND MANY OTHERS!

POST-ASSAD SYRIA BUILDS RELATIONS WITH FORMER ADVERSARIES

Bottom Line Up Front:  THE SOUFAN CENTER USA  – 16-5-25

• A stable and moderate post-Assad Syria is essential to U.S. efforts to forge a new security architecture in the Middle East, using Iran’s strategic setbacks.
• Trump officials are using their leverage with both Israel and the new government in Syria to try to calm the Israel-Syria border and help stabilize the broader Middle East.
• Syria is likely to limit any accords with Israel to force disengagement and non-aggression commitments, stopping well short of normalization of relations.
• U.S. officials are using leverage over both Damascus and Syrian Kurdish groups to try to broker reconciliation and reintegration of Syria’s Kurds into national political and security structures.

Syria is emerging as the cornerstone of efforts by Trump officials to assemble a new security and political architecture in the Middle East in the wake of setbacks Israel and the U.S. have delivered to Iran and its Axis of Resistance. Trump’s aides envision a new power structure in which Iran and its coalition partners – non-state, (mostly) Shia Muslim actors – are decisively weaker, and a U.S.-backed loose alliance of Israel and moderate Arab states predominates. A moderate and stable government in Damascus is crucial to the efforts of U.S. and, particularly, Israeli officials to prevent Iran’s strategic re-emergence or reconstitution of its efforts to become a threshold nuclear state.

Ensuring the regional balance of power has shifted permanently in favor of the U.S. and Israel, as well as NATO member Türkiye, depends, in turn, on stability in Syria. The government of interim leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, head of the Hayat al-Tahrir (HTS) organization, formerly aligned with Sunni Muslim jihadist organizations, including Al Qaeda, has vowed to prevent Iran from regaining its influence in Syria. Under President Bashar al-Assad, the country was a fulcrum from which Iran was able to advise, arm, and finance other members of its Axis of Resistance, including Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas. However, the fledgling Damascus government is considered weak and faces a number of overlapping economic, security, and political challenges, including from some ethno-sectarian groups that underpinned the Assad regime.

To help Damascus overcome its challenges, Trump accelerated the process of building ties to the new government by meeting with al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia during his May trip to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha. In Riyadh, Trump announced he would lift all U.S. sanctions on Syria to provide the new government with a “fresh start” after years of sanctions, estrangement from the rest of the Arab world, and civil conflict. U.S. officials have implemented the announcement by taking the administrative and legal steps to unwind the U.S. sanctions architecture. Last week, the State Department removed HTS from the U.S. list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Collectively, these actions have reintegrated Syria into the global financial system and reaffirmed Washington’s pledge to help Syria rebuild. U.S. officials asserted the sanctions relief was justified by the Damascus government’s positive actions since taking power in December, as well as U.S. assessments that HTS had severed all affiliations with militant groups and would focus solely on rebuilding Syria and integrating with moderate Arab governments.

U.S. engagement with Damascus has provided Trump’s team with leverage to help stabilize the country, which was divided into cantons, each backed by outside powers, during more than a decade of civil war.  A key group the new central government has sought to re-integrate is the Kurds, who dominate the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which works with the 2,000 U.S. forces in Syria to prevent the Islamic State organization (ISIS) from regrouping. In March, Damascus and the SDF agreed that the group would merge with the new Syrian national army by the end of 2025, considered a key step toward restoring government sovereignty throughout Syria. Additionally, it was agreed that all SDF-controlled border crossings with Iraq and Türkiye, as well as airports and oil fields in the northeast, would come under the central government’s control, as would SDF-secured detention centers housing thousands of Islamic State militants. However, progress to implement the accord, which reportedly was vague, has been slow, as SDF leaders have insisted they remain as a cohesive unit, rather than dissolve and have their members individually absorbed into the new military.

Trump has tasked a close ally, Tom Barrack, his Ambassador to Türkiye and Special Envoy for Syria, to mediate the Damascus-SDF dispute. However, despite Washington’s leverage over both Damascus and the SDF, Barrack’s meetings last Wednesday with al-Sharaa in Damascus and with SDF commander Mazloum Abdi produced little progress. Barrack told media outlets after his Syria visit that there are still significant differences between the sides, saying: “I don’t think there’s a breakthrough…I think these things happen in baby steps, because it’s built on trust, commitment and understanding.” However, some Kurds in and outside Syria have accused the U.S. of betraying its longtime allies by siding with Damascus in the dispute. Critics cite Barrack’s comment during his Syria visit that: “When the U.S. Secretary of State talks about autonomy and sovereignty, he means that Iraq is a country and Syria is a country; I don’t think he means an independent Kurdistan…You cannot have a separate or non-national structure within an independent country…We all must give up some of our demands to reach that final outcome: one country, one nation, one army, and one Syria.” The U.S. position is supported by Türkiye, which seeks to ensure that Syria cannot serve as a base for armed Syrian Kurdish groups to operate independently or support Turkish Kurds opposed to Ankara. The leading anti-Türkiye Kurdish group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), began over the weekend to implement its pledge to disarm.

Barrack is also a central figure in the effort to definitively restructure the region by brokering formal agreements between Syria and Israel. Relations between the two longtime adversaries grew even more tense over the past decade as Iranian influence over the beleaguered Assad regime expanded. Al-Sharaa and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have common ground in their antipathy toward Iran, but Israel’s initial suspicions of HTS’ background, including referring to al-Sharaa as a terrorist, seemed to launch HTS-run Syria and Israel on a collision course. Just yesterday, in response to sectarian violence in Sweida, where the Druze minority clashed with Syrian-government backed militias, Israel launched airstrikes against Syrian government forces. Continued Israeli in intervention in Syria has the potential to further destabilize the country and could jeopardize progress that has been made to date.

To reduce the perceived strategic threat from Syria, Israel took advantage of the Assad regime’s military’s collapse to move deeper into parts of southern Syria; it launched hundreds of airstrikes on military targets in Syria, and it deployed forces across the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights. Israel occupied the Heights after the 1967 war and annexed it in 1981, but it is still internationally recognized as Syrian territory. As Washington’s relations with Damascus have warmed and Israel’s suspicions of the new Syrian government have abated, Israel has said it wants to normalize relations with both Syria and neighboring Lebanon. A normalization with both countries would advance a nearly wholesale restructuring of the region’s security architecture away from Iran and in favor of the U.S., Israel, and Washington’s Arab allies.

Barrack has mediated back-channel discussions between Syria and Israel, the agenda for which, at least initially, has been limited to border security issues. Barrack has called for Israel and Syria to forge a non-aggression pact. Syria’s Foreign Minister, Asaad al-Shaibani, said on July 4 that Syria was open to cooperating with the United States to restore the 1974 Disengagement Agreement with Israel, which established a UN- patrolled buffer zone between their forces on the Golan Heights. However, reports indicate even modest security-focused negotiations are likely to be difficult. Syrian officials demand the return of at least part of the Golan territory, and Israeli leaders assert publicly that they will not cede control of any of it.

Some U.S. officials hope Syria can move beyond modest agreements with Israel and join the Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states during Trump’s first term. However, according to regional officials with knowledge of the negotiations, Syria has thus far steered away from discussions of official political and diplomatic ties to Israel. Mouaz Moustafa, the head of a U.S.-based political advocacy group, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, said al-Sharaa told him during a meeting in April that the Abraham Accords were “not the right fit” for Syria. The interim leader reportedly asserted that any agreement with Israel would need public support from Syrians. Hassan Nifi, a Syrian writer, has said al-Sharaa would struggle to get widespread approval for a normalization deal, and, if he went ahead with it, doing so would push the country to the brink. He told journalists: “Public reaction would be overwhelmingly negative, especially with what’s happening in Gaza…Everyone knows this [normalization] deal would be entirely in Israel’s favor.” A relatively cold, limited Syria-Israel relationship would hinder U.S. efforts to strategically realign the region. However, even modest security agreements between the two presumably might, at least in the short term, satisfy the Trump team’s drive for greater regional stability and a winding down of the Middle East’s conflicts.