by Ehsan Aminroaya
The storm of events that swept across Syria for 11 days since November 27 until December 8, 2024, toppled Bashar Al-Assad’s regime and shook the Mullahs in Iran to their core. It has also put forth an important question: what was the principal factor leading to Assad’s rapid fall? This question is rooted in a deeper theoretical discussion concerning the actual strength of the ruling power in Iran. Why did the Iranian regime, in spite of having an army of 100,000 personnel, besides hundreds of military bases in Syria, at the most critical moment of its reign in that country, fail to preserve its most important allied state in the region? As a response, no one adheres to the theory of foreign powers’ intervention as much as the supreme leader of the clerical regime in Iran, Ali Khamenei. In his first speech after the fall of Assad, Khamenei summarized the reasons behind the defeat as being due to the facts that in the final days, “Zionist and American planes” had not allowed his dispatched planes to pass in order to deliver “equipment, personnel and forces” to “sites around Zaynabia”[i]. Logically, this is a clear fallacy begging the question. Khamenei has presented that which itself needs an explanation [i.e., the effect] as the cause. It is as if a knocked-out boxer cites the opponent’s heavy blow as the reason for his defeat; instead of admitting what sort of inability, unawareness and weakness he had been suffering from, that had provided the enemy with the opportunity to land the intolerable blow.
Then how should the overthrow of Assad’s dictatorship be viewed? This event has a double-significance: on the one hand, it exposes the exasperation of the clerical regime in Iran under the pressure of overwhelming crises – crises rooted at its very nature – and on the other hand, it signifies a stage in the process of the regime’s inevitable fall. The velocity of the events in December, Khamenei’s decline and confusion, the collapse of the IRGC forces in Syria, and the regime’s subsequent reactions should be interpreted based on the above assertion.
The main issue here is not the major military blow that has been dealt to the regime – although, in military and intelligence terms, what has occurred is the destruction of the greater part of the regime’s war machine in the region, the restoration of which is inconceivable; Nor is it the fact that the regime’s strategic corridors for supporting and maintaining the Hezbollah have been eliminated,[ii] but beyond these, it should be noted that one of the pillars necessary for the survival of the whole system has collapsed. For years, the regime, in order to avoid major uprisings and the possible overthrow, had established firm ties between its existence and its position in Syria. This position no longer exists.
Regarding the Gaza war, of which Khamenei was the founder and a main party, the leader of the Iranian Resistance, Massoud Rajavi, had explicitly said: “The biggest strategic loser in this war is Khamenei.” On December 8, Khamenei’s strategic defeat in Damascus reached its peak and reduced the regime to a miserable state.
The events that have taken place during the course of the eleven days have equivocally provided an objective measure of the actual strength of Khamenei’s IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps), in the sense that its military power and different capabilities were gauged in a decisive battleground.
In this respect, the period in which the regime’s forces crumbled, more specifically, the initial moment in Aleppo, is extremely important. This moment provides a better understanding of the process of the regime’s decline of power and therefore, it is exactly what the former has been trying to cover up.
The significance of the moment when the Revolutionary Guards collapsed in Aleppo is not of a tactical nature. Rather, it is a manifestation of the fundamental weakness of the entire regime. In other words, had the regime possessed the necessary power and capacity, it would certainly have prevented the collapse.
Tasnim News Agency – the main media outlet of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards – has presented a revealing picture of the initial battleground: “From the viewpoint of military logic, in the western edge of Aleppo province, where the conflict started, the resistance forces [(IRGC and its proxies)] had a very strong presence. The opposition groups say that the resistance forces had more than 30 bases in this area, but in the maps that do not exaggerate as much as the opposition does, it becomes obvious that the resistance had at least 17 bases in the area.”[iii] This report leaves no doubt about the sufficiency of the military logistics of the regime to confront the small number of opponents.
Another testament to the heavy presence of Tehran’s forces in Syria is the interview of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Russia participated in this war and since a few years ago, it has had a large air base in Latakia as well as a large naval base in Tartus besides 21 important bases and 93 military points across Syria. The Russian president, in an interview with the state television of his country, said: “350 opposition forces entered Aleppo, while 30,000 government forces and those loyal to Iran retreated without any resistance, destroying their own positions and leaving the area”. He added: “the same pattern was repeated throughout Syria”
According to this account, the 30,000 forces of Khamenei and Assad at that point were, in the precise sense of the word, routed. Sources that spoke with Reuters during this war confirmed: “Iranian forces and their allied groups were in control of the command. Most of the operational command structure of the Syrian army was run by Iranian military advisers and their allied groups. The sudden departure of the Iranians left the Syrian army in a critical and leaderless situation, which led to successive retreats”.[iv]
What happened at that critical moment in the IRGC command center? From the first hour, their headquarters was a place of internal conflict and killing. On the same day, the regime announced that Brigadier General Kiomars Pourhashemi, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, had been killed. After two weeks of silence, however, another announcement about this event was vaguely released by the regime: “He was killed by ‘an American infiltrator’”.[v] The term “American infiltrator” refers to an internal element that could be either from the Revolutionary Guards or Assad’s forces. In any case, at the initial moment of the war, the regime lost its command due to internal conflicts. This is an important link in the ultimate collapse.
The war in Aleppo, which started on December 7, ended on December 9. From that time on, until the attack of the opposition forces on the city of Hama, the Revolutionary Guards had a six-day opportunity with sufficient forces, weapons, ammunition and bases to resist in Hama. But there, too, the pattern of defeat and collapse repeated itself.
The decisive point was Homs. A city where the Revolutionary Guards had spent the past seven years building a large air base. To protect Homs, Khamenei’s regime transferred the elite Hezbollah unit called “Radwan” from Lebanon to this city. But the speed of the regime’s defeat in this city was no less than the previous ones, wherein the only achievement was the hasty flight of the Hezbollah members towards Lebanon. Finally, in Damascus and the Zeinabieh area, where the main command centers of the Revolutionary Guards were located, the regime could not do anything but to send its commanders and important figures in a hurry to the Iraqi border or Hameimim Airport to facilitate their escape to Iran. Such inability and disarray were not caused by the element of surprise or in the face of a sudden, tumultuous change. In fact, among the few parties who were not surprised by the events of December in Syria were Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards. He himself once and his foreign minister several times revealed that they had been informed of the oppositions’ plan to launch the operation several months in advance and had informed the Syrian government[vi].
In fact, the collapse of the Revolutionary Guards forces in Syria was the outcome of the severe weakness of the regime ruling in Tehran, which had previously shown itself in some major developments. These would include the unprecedented boycott of two rounds of elections, the collapse of Khamenei’s political base within the ruling body, the death of Khamenei’s president, the readiness of a society waiting for an uprising led by resistance units inside Iran, and so on.
The Revolutionary Guards, whose components Khamenei has pieced together with patronage and money, of course, are dominant in prisons while torturing a defenseless prisoner, or in the streets against unarmed and empty-handed people. But when they face an organized armed force, the result would be the same collapse as described above.
Any attempt towards explaining the velocity with which the events unfolded in Syria which refuses to take into account the severity of the conditions of the supporting force behind Assad’s regime would simply lead to the construction of hypotheses that consider the secret deals among major powers as the dynamism underlying the retreat of Assad’s military forces and his end. For example, it is said that Russia, with a prospect of stopping the war in Ukraine, has reached an agreement with Donald Trump on surrendering Syria. Other speculations introduce Turkey or even Khamenei’s regime as a party to such a deal.
Even if such hypotheses as above, despite their being grounded in insufficient evidence, are supposed to be applied to an analysis of the situation, they still need to explain two facts:
- From the political point of view, the Iranian regime, until the very last moment would refuse to lose its political influence on Syria
- From the military point of view, contrary to some accounts that describe Khamenei’s forces’ retreats from various points of conflict as well as from the entire Syrian territory as “orderly”, what was observed in Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Damascus, and the borders of Iraq and Lebanon corresponded to a completely disorganized flight. This time around, the “Saigon moment” was experienced by Khamenei’s forces. The Russian president said: “If previously our Iranian friends, for example, asked us to help them transfer their units to the Syrian soil, now they were asking us to get them out of there. We took 4,000 Iranian fighters to Tehran.”[vii]
Backyard or an anchor of survival?
After Assad’s fall, Khamenei claimed that his purpose of the deployment of IRGC to Syria had been primarily focused on fighting ISIS with limited scope and continuity[viii]. On the other hand, Ali Akbar Ahmadian, the “Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council” has stated: “After the end of the ISIS, we evacuated our forces with the consent of the Syrian government and had no operational presence in the region”.[ix] But has the presence of the IRGC in Syria been truly temporary and limited? Has Syria been a transit route for the weapons and ammunition needed by Hezbollah for the regime? Or should the regime’s influence in Syria be viewed in a completely different light?
The most prominent party that, since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, has been persistently exposing the illegitimate presence and criminal interventions of Khamenei’s regime in that country is the Iranian Resistance. In 2016, the representative office of the National Council of Resistance in the United States published a book about the regime’s interventions in Syria that estimated the number of the regime’s forces about 70,000 personnel, including 10000 “Pasdaran”, 6000 Army personnel, 20000 Iraqi militias, 15 to 20000 Afghanis (Fatemiyoun), 7 to 10000 Lebanese Hezbollah and 5 to 7000 Pakistani (Zainabiyoun). A year later, in October 2017, the National Council of Resistance revealed in a new report that the number of proxy militias tied to the Revolutionary Guards in Syria had reached more than 100,000 people. Subsequent reports confirmed that during the past seven years, the regime had maintained the quantity of its forces in Syria at this level. Last year, the Wall Street Journal, in an analysis predicted: “the Middle East is moving towards a major war,” and that the regime had then about 100,000 Iraqi fighters in Syria[x]. On the last day before the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Mohammad Javad Larijani, as an “expert and analyst of West Asian issues” told the regime’s media: “The expansive forces of resistance in Syria amount to more than 100,000 people”[xi]. In this war, according to the regime’s sources, 6,000 IRGC personnel have been killed. Of course, considering the number of casualties among the commanders, the real number must be higher than this[xii]. In addition to this one hundred thousand-personnel army, Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards had brought a large part of the territory of Syria as well as the security, military and the intelligence services of the country under their influence. Moreover, they had manipulated the demographic structure of Syria in the direction of their political and military interests. In Al-Mazza, Damascus, they had monopolized a large neighborhood for themselves. As a result, the population of this area was only Iranian. Also, another large area around Zainabieh was exclusively dedicated to the residence of the Lebanese Hezbollah forces. In general, the demographic change in Syria, which took place under Assad’s regime, was a project with a history of at least 30 years. This project was carried out by destroying property ownership document centers, bombing and starving people into forced displacement, giving Syrian citizenship to Lebanese, Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi mercenaries and settling them in evacuated areas, and so on.
It is estimated that the demographic structure has been changed in at least twelve regions of Syria, including in Darayya of Damascus, as well as around the Lebanese and the Iraqi borders. Khamenei was seeking to create interconnected Shiite areas in Syria to have a safe passage for the transfer of forces and weapons to the Mediterranean Sea.
In 2023, part of the internal documents of the regime’s foreign ministry was exposed by the “Qiam-Ta-Sarneguni” Telegram channel, showing that the amount of the debt owed by Assad’s government to the Iranian regime in the 2010s had reached 50 billion dollars. This debt did not include other amounts that have been lent to Assad since 2021. This is while during all this time, 60 to 70 thousand barrels of Iranian oil were delivered daily to Assad’s government[xiii]. The last oil tanker that was sent from Iran for him was seized near the Suez Canal and was returned to Iran on Sunday morning, December 19 (a few hours after Bashar al-Assad fled)[xiv]. Moreover, these fifty billion dollars are only the cost of oil and cash given to the Syrian dictatorship excluding Khamenei’s regime’s military expenditure on Syrian social, religious, and cultural infrastructure. Below are some examples of such expenditure:
- According to estimates by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the regime has spent between $30 and $35 billion on military and logistical infrastructure, training Syrian forces, and deploying its military advisors since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011 until 2023.
- In 2013, it built the Deir Ezzor base at a cost of about $250 million to store missiles and house 1,500 troops and advisors.
- In 2015, it established the Latakia Logistics Center with $180 million for warehouses and underground tunnels and the movement of military weapons.
- In 2017, it built the T-4 air base at a cost of $400 million, intended to house Russian and Iranian air defense systems and underground hangars for drones and missiles near Palmyra in Homs province.
- Overall, the regime has 7 air bases, 15 missile depots, 22 command centers, and 85 kilometers of underground tunnels on Syrian soil.[xv]
- The so-called “Relief Committee”, which introduces itself as a charitable organization and has received a budget of 18.5 trillion tomans[xvi] in the 1403 budget law, is essentially an organization supporting the war in Syria and Lebanon. It has been involved in extensive construction in Syria, among other things.
- “The Islamic Revolution Housing Foundation”, which annually receives a large share of the country’s budget and whose cover-mission is to build affordable homes for the underprivileged, is another institution supporting Khamenei’s war machine in Syria and Lebanon. Between 2016 and 2021, the foundation spent up to $1.5 billion on the reconstruction of residential neighborhoods in Aleppo.
- The IRGC-affiliated Sadra Marine Industrial Company invested more than $1.2 billion in the modernization of the Port of Tartus between 2015 and 2020.
- Iranian banks, which are in a state of bankruptcy within the country, have allocated more than $5 billion to finance projects in Syria, according to a report by the Central Bank.
A careful examination of the sequence of events in Syria and Iraq confirms that after the containment of ISIS atrocities in 2017, the IRGC’s presence in Syria coincidentally expanded. Syria, which was initially the regime’s most important ally in the region, became its vassal state after the civil war. Therefore, it could be said that with the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, the regime has lost part of the region under its sovereignty.
First Iraq or First Iran?
Brigadier General Hossein Hamadani, one of the murderers of the Iranian people who played a special role in the suppression of the 2009 uprising and later became the commander of the regime’s forces in Syria, is among the long list of IRGC brigadier generals who were killed in Syria.[xvii] In his remarks published after his death, he explains Syria’s irreplaceable role for the regime: “In a meeting, the Ayatollah [Khamenei] said: ‘… Mr. Bashar Assad is fighting on our behalf, on our behalf…’ … One of our high-ranking military officials says: ‘America started its war with us from Syria. In the meeting, he says in the presence of Ayatollah: ‘If they finish Syria, they will come to Iraq, then they will come to Iran!’ The Ayatollah says: ‘No, they will come directly to Iran’”.[xviii] This quote, along with dozens of other explicit statements by Khamenei and other mullahs and IRGC commanders, emphasizes Syria’s vital role in maintaining the regime’s existence. Since 1979, when Khomeini considered the war with Iraq – with one million deaths on the Iranian side – a divine blessing for his regime and used it as a means of suppressing the Mujahedin and covering up the brutal repression, the ruling Mullahs have been in a constant need for exporting war and terrorism to regional countries as a response to internal crises. The Ayatollah’s regime is inseparable from the incitement of war in the countries of the region. By doing so, it tends to stifle protest movements. Similarly, from the day after October 7 and the beginning of the war in Gaza, it set a blockade against the outbreak of uprisings in Iran. This was Khamenei’s greatest benefit from this war.
The focal point of all these social, financial, political, ideological, and class positions, in their sharpest and most political aspect, is called hegemony. If Khamenei’s hegemony weakens, the entire regime will weaken. If he loses it or if he is forced to accept a partner in it, it will lead to the immediate overthrow of the regime. What is Khamenei’s hegemony based on? Ideologically and spiritually, he has barely had any credibility, even for the regime’s depleted social base. Public opinion and social acceptance have always been the snake’s thorn in his side. As a result, Khamenei has secured his hegemony by establishing the Revolutionary Guards as a means of repression, expropriating and plundering the property of the Iranian people, and exporting war and terror – especially through Syria.
Simply put, in the balance of power within the regime, until now, Khamenei’s current language has been boasting like, “I am the one who owns Syria or Hezbollah”. With the same logic, after the Gaza War began on October 7, wherein, at the early stages, Khamenei was seen as the winner, the regime’s heads of factions such as Muhammad Khatami, Hassan Khomeini, Sadegh Larijani, and Hassan Rouhani began to praise Khamenei. While in recent days, when all of Khamenei’s capital in Syria has been wasted, the same Khatami has resumed his demands from the Supreme Leader (Khamenei) regarding the implementation of his 15-point plan, besides reminding Khamenei of the regime’s “critical situation” seven times in a short speech.[xix] In this sense, the fall of Assad’s government, which has clearly degraded the position of the ruling monster, has an anti-repressive effect, mobilizes the oppressed force and opens the way for uprisings. It also opens cracks within the regime and places the supreme leader under pressure both from within and without.
Khamenei’s inevitable mistakes
The word “mistake” may not be very accurate when applied to dictators who have reached the end of their era. It would be better to say that they – in this case Khamenei – make wrong choices that could not be avoided. This paradoxical situation is the result of the constraints in the regime’s final phase. For example, today Khamenei’s regime has implemented a macro-policy of doubling the prices of goods. This program is wrong from the perspective of the regime’s own interests and fuels the protest movement, yet corrupt rulers – from Raisi to Pezeshkian – continue to do so. With this explanation, Khamenei’s biggest mistake was igniting the fire of war in Gaza. War has rules that are completely different from peacetime. It creates factors that were previously unimaginable. Its stubborn dialectics incite movements, influences and impacts that are difficult to calculate. Khamenei believed that he would pay the price through the blood of the oppressed Palestinian people and could keep his regime away from its fire. Then, after a period of time (which in his opinion could not be very long) everything would end and he himself would come out as victorious. But he got caught in the quagmire of war and sank deeper with every step he took. Nevertheless, he could not have helped but to make this choice. This was the conclusion to his assessment of the 2022 uprising of the Iranian people. He wanted to find a way out of the uprising by inciting external war. His big mistake was that he dragged a regime besieged by uprisings and crises, which had no popular foundation and legitimacy, into war. The result was the loss of the most important stronghold of the regime in the region to this day.
During the course of the developments within the last few months, Khamenei has shown his inability and incompetence in leading his regime in the midst of a deep crisis. After the death of Khomeini and at the beginning of Khamenei’s rule, special political and international conditions were formed that gave the latter many windfall opportunities and benefits, without paying a price or facing a formidable challenge. In other words, his reign has been completely intertwined with freebies and has rarely encountered a fundamental conflict. Last year, when he faced a comprehensive crisis for the first time, he was stunned at critical moments. He did not take any steps to preserve the leadership of the Hezbollah group affiliated with him, he could not control the collapse of his forces in Syria, and did not take any explicit action to protect the bloodthirsty dictator of Damascus.
The results of a major event
The developments in Syria have made the desire to overthrow the regime in Iran and its plausibility tangible to the people. A regime that had murdered more than 500,000 people, ruling based on the dread spreading from the Saydnaya prison, despite the support of Khamenei’s Revolutionary Guards and a superpower, was still overthrown. The Shah of Iran, at a time when he enjoyed the unwavering support of the Western world, was defeated by the will of the Iranian people. Khamenei has no other fate, either.
This is a huge blow to the regime’s propagandists and accomplices and those who want the status quo to continue. Their shameful profession is to fabricate baseless arguments against the struggle and uprising. They either have rejected the overthrow of the regime in Iran or portrayed it as a goal that is completely unattainable. Today, their theoretical, media and ideological efforts have proven futile. The overthrow of any dictatorship contains some rare insights, lessons to all oppressed peoples: “the overthrow of the tyrant is attainable. Rise up!”
Bashar al-Assad’s army and the Revolutionary Guards supporting it collapsed in the face of an organized armed invasion, which highlights the importance and decisiveness of the resistance unites in the Iranian scene of political struggle.
For those who labeled the legitimate resistance of the Iranian people against Khamenei’s Regime as violent, today is a time to be ashamed; provided that they have preserved their sense of humanity and have not been alienated from the pain and suffering of the oppressed society. Those who are at heart not in favor of overthrowing the regime in Iran but rather want the status quo to continue – with edits and reforms – have neither ears to hear the great changes of the times nor a heart to feel their pulses. In essence, the choice is not over this or that strategy. Rather, it is about overthrowing or not overthrowing the regime, which is a struggle rooted at the same time in politics and class dynamics. Currently, the right strategy is devised around the resistance unites. Since, in order to overthrow the regime, it is necessary to crush the Revolutionary Guards first, which is only attainable through organized resistance and requires a liberation army, whose components are currently the same aforementioned resistance unites.
[i] Khamenei’s Official Website, December 11, 2024, https://khamenei.ir/
[ii] There are three main corridors in Syria for transferring weapons to Hezbollah: Albu Kamal, Aleppo, and Damascus.
[iii] Tasnim News Agency, December 11, 2024
[iv] Reuters News Agency, December 12, 2024
[v] Mohammad Jafar Asadi, the deputy commander of Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters, “entekhab” website. December 24, 2024.
[vi] Khamenei: “Our intelligence service had been transmitting alarming reports to Syrian officials for several months. I don’t know whether these had reached those high-ranking officials, or they had been lost in the middle. But our intelligence officials had told them that they had been reporting back and forth since September, October, and November.”, Khamenei’s official website, December 11, 2024
Abbas Araghchi, the regime’s minister of foreign affairs: “our friends in the intelligence and security services of our own country and in Syria were fully aware of the movements that were taking place in Idlib and those areas, and all the relevant information had been transferred to the Syrian government and the Syrian army… along with photos, details, numbers, and everything else.” The regime’s state TV, December 8, 2024
[vii] Burc Eruygur |19.12.2024
[viii] Khamenei’s official website: “After the ISIS affair was concluded, some of the forces returned, while others remained there”, December 11, 2024
[ix] Jamaran Website, December 20, 2024, https://www.jamaran.news/
[x] Wallstreet Journal, December 26, 2023
[xi] Fars news agency, December 7, 2024
[xii] Mohammad Mannan Reisi, Regime’s Member of Parliament, Khabaronline website, December 9, 2024, www.khabaronline.ir
[xiii] Anadolu News Agency, December 27, 2024
, December 8, 2024, https://onlylinks.cc/bijM
[xv] Center for Strategic and International Studies and middle-east institute, radiofarda, December 16, 2024
[xvi] The state Budget Law for 2024, https://shenasname.ir/?p=59967
[xvii] In December 2015, the Security and Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Council of Ministers revealed the names of 16 IRGC brigadiers who were killed in Syria. The most important one of them is Hossein Hamedani, the deputy head of the Quds Force. If he were alive, Khamenei would not have had to bring in Esmail Qaani.
[xviii] Harimeharam website, November 6, 2016, https://harimeharam.ir/
[xix] Mohammad Khatami, The regime’s former president, Jamaran website, December 26, 2024, https://www.jamaran.news/