ҹɫС��Ƶ

Disclaimer: These opinion pieces represent the authors’ personal views, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of ҹɫС��Ƶ or PAWC.

Syria matters because its conflicts are at once regional battles and global contests. When an Alawite leader (often regarded as an offshoot of Shiism) falls in Damascus, reverberations are felt not only among Shia communities in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq, and in Tehran’s corridors of power—the capital of the most powerful Shia-majority state—but also ripple outward across Shia-affiliated communities from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia and from Yemen to Central and South Asia, populations that have long regarded themselves as victims of a Sunni majority that casts them as heretics and outsiders. When Kurdish fighters carve out autonomy in the north, Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran read it as a mirror of their own struggles. When Islamists seize territory in Raqqa, militants from North Africa to Southeast Asia study their tactics. To watch Syria is to watch the Middle East in miniature, a mirror where every fracture of the region is reflected at once. Its geography places it at the hinge of Arab, Turkic, and Persianate worlds. Its society mirrors the region’s mosaic of sects and ethnicities. Its politics refract the rivalries of powers from Washington and Moscow to Ankara, Tel Aviv, Tehran, and Riyadh.

Syria is the stage on which the future of the Middle East is rehearsed, and every actor’s role recalibrated. From the cracks opened in Syria’s decades of repression emerged the Islamic State — the most dramatic reconfiguration of Islamist politics in a generation, and a force that redrew the map of both the Middle Eastern and global security. The Islamic State rejected the gradualist strategies of the Muslim Brotherhood and the national frameworks of older jihadist groups. Instead, it built a brutal proto-state that attracted tens of thousands of recruits from across the globe. Its rise forced governments from Washington to Jakarta to confront new questions of radicalization and security. At the same time, the defeat of ISIS did not erase Islamism but fragmented it. Some groups turned inward, some toward local politics, others toward new militancy. Syria was both the graveyard of one Islamist experiment and the seedbed of others.

Sovereignty and Borderlessness: State Actors, Nonstate Actors, and the In-Between in Syria

The rise of Ahmed al-Sharaa—better known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani—and his organization Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), itself a splinter from al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch and once entangled with ISIS, resembles, in many ways, the Taliban’s ascent in Afghanistan. Like the Taliban, HTS has sought to shed the image of transnational jihadism in favor of pragmatic local rule, moving from the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib’s stronghold to the institutions of the Syrian state itself. This trajectory highlights a crucial development in Islamism: groups once tied to al-Qaeda or ISIS, including both HTS and Taliban, can evolve from insurgency into governance, not by abandoning their roots but by repackaging them for “legitimacy.” Just as the Taliban’s return signaled that Islamist movements can endure decades of war and still seize sovereignty, the rise of al-Sharaa and HTS suggests Islamism’s fate is not disappearance but adaptation—shifting from global jihad to localized state-building, with consequences that ripple far beyond Syria.

One of the most unexpected developments to accompany the Islamists’ ascent in Syria was the rise of Kurdish autonomy. In northern Syria, also known as Rojava, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by the United States and its allies, not only fought ISIS but modeled a new vision of governance—an alternative to both dictatorship and jihadism. This experiment, too, reverberated across borders and reshaped the very foundation of the Kurdish question. In Syria, Kurds transformed from one of the most oppressed and isolated communities into a decisive force shaping the country’s political future. In Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government now faced a rival pole of Kurdish authority across the border, forcing it to reconsider its strategies of cooperation and competition. In Turkey, the sudden appearance of a second autonomous Kurdish region adjacent to its borders, more ideologically tied to the Kurdish movement within Turkey itself, unsettled Ankara and altered its domestic and regional calculus, driving home the reality that the Kurdish question had exploded into a truly regional crisis, beyond the grasp of its unliteral control and entangled with the wider geopolitics of the Middle East. In Iran, home to the second-largest Kurdish population after Turkey, Rojava offered a proof of concept that made the once-distant prospect of Kurdish autonomy within Iran suddenly feel tangible.

Layered Rivalries in the Syrian Theater: Islamists, Superpowers, and Regional Hegemons

Syria’s impact was not limited to the twin shocks of ISIS and Kurdish autonomy; it rippled outward, forcing every regional and global actor to recast its strategies and stakes in the Middle East. For Russia, Syria was supposed to be the cornerstone of its return to the Middle East. By intervening militarily in 2015, Russia preserved Assad for years longer than many expected, secured its naval foothold at Tartus, and advertised itself as a reliable partner where the United States appeared hesitant. But the eventual collapse of Assad dealt a heavy blow to Moscow: it lost its most dependable Arab client, the credibility of its interventionist model, and much of the influence it had hoped to leverage across the region. Syria revealed both the reach and the limits of Russian power—capable of shaping battlefields, but unable to prevent political outcomes from slipping beyond its control, ominously echoing America’s story in Afghanistan.

For Iran, Syria was the linchpin of its “axis of resistance,” the vital corridor linking Tehran to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to Hamas in Gaza. The collapse of Assad shattered that architecture, weakening Iran’s ability to project power westward and straining its image as the region’s ascendant force. Iran’s regional peer, Turkey, captured what slipped from Tehran’s grasp. Yet Syria without Asad also proved a paradox for Ankara: the stage of its greatest gains, and the source of its deepest anxieties. On one hand, Turkey pushed its military deep into northern Syria, built buffer zones, and backed Sunni Arab factions; through ties to groups like HTS, it gained a strategic edge to shape a new Syria. Yet these gains come shadowed by a Kurdish movement empowered despite Ankara’s campaigns to contain it, a quagmire of alliances with Islamist militias that complicate Turkey’s image abroad, and an increasingly assertive Israel whose operations in Syria—often aligned with Kurdish interests—intimidate Turkey.

Israel and the Syrian Crucible of Violence: State Fragility and the Modern Leviathan

For Israel, the Syrian conflict is not peripheral; it is transformative. It altered not only the balance of regional power but also the social and ideological currents that eventually fed into Hamas’s October 7 assault. Syria became the proving ground where militant groups tested tactics, forged transnational networks, and circulated weapons. The war normalized images of unrestrained brutality—chemical attacks, mass displacement, sieges, people set on fire in recorded videos, and Yezidi women sold in cages as sex slaves—that hardened collective identities across the region in the face of what many perceived as wars of annihilation and intensified feelings of abandonment among Palestinian communities, who saw their plight pushed further to the margins of global concern. For Hamas, Syria’s descent into chaos underscored both the fragility of state power and the utility of spectacular violence as a means of reshaping political realities. In this sense, October 7 was not an isolated eruption but part of a broader arc in which the Syrian war incubated the methods, narratives, and conditions that made such an attack conceivable. Israel’s war on Gaza since then shattered any illusion of state weakness and underscored instead how state brutality has become an entrenched feature of the modern Leviathan—the sovereign’s claim to order sustained through violence, a subject that deserves separate treatment.

Out of these tragedies, Israel has positioned itself as the greatest beneficiary of the Syrian mayhem. The fall of Assad’s regime not only weakened Iran, his principal backer, but also expanded Israel’s military reach far beyond the territories it directly controls, making Syria a stage for a new regional posture. That shift emboldened Israel to pursue more aggressive policies against Iran and its networks in Syria and across the region. Israel’s growing power can be felt most clearly in the most unlikely place: Turkey, a NATO member now voicing a rhetoric uncannily similar to that long used by Iran—portraying Israel as a destabilizing force at the heart of the region, and increasingly as an adversary whose next target could be Turkey itself.

Global (Dis)Order Reimagined: Arab Division, Kurdish Unity, and the U.S. Dilemma

If Turkey’s anxieties over Syria cast Israel as its next adversary, the Arab states reveal an even deeper fracture: Syria, long a pivotal arena of Arab politics, might have been a rallying cause for Arab solidarity; instead, it left the Arab world more fractured than ever before. Saudi Arabia, framing Syria as a frontline in its struggle with Iran, found itself unsettled by the empowerment of Islamist groups it could not control. Qatar boosted its profile by backing opposition forces and amplifying their cause through Al Jazeera, but its strategy drew Doha into the orbit of Islamist factions tied to extremism. Egypt, scarred by its own confrontation with the Muslim Brotherhood, tilted toward preserving state order and quietly welcomed Assad’s endurance. Jordan, meanwhile, shouldered the refugee burden and balanced precariously between security cooperation with the West and managing its volatile northern frontier. With Assad’s fall—and the inability of these same states to prevent Hamas’s attacks on Israel or Israel’s devastation of Gaza—divisions sharpened, and disillusion deepened across the Arab world.

At the center of all of this is the inescapable imprint of the United States—entangled with every state and nonstate actor mentioned above, its role more complex and omnipresent than ever, even as Washington’s rhetoric insists on a desire to disengage from the Middle East. For the US, Syria became less about removing Assad than about shaping what followed his collapse. Washington’s alliance with the Kurds was crucial in dismantling ISIS’s territorial rule, but it also thrust America into the heart of Syria’s legitimacy crisis. The Kurds are a non-state actor whose main Syrian organization, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), operates under the broader ideological umbrella of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan—an entity the United States itself officially designates as a terrorist organization. Yet the PYD’s armed wings, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the all-female Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), form the backbone of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). At the same time, the current Syrian regime, echoing the position of its predecessor and acting in concert with Turkey, remains firmly opposed to any notion of Kurdish autonomy and refuses to cooperate with Kurdish forces. These overlapping contradictions render the U.S. military presence in the northeast both a check on Turkey, Iran, and Russia and a sign that Syria—much like after World War I—embodies the unsettled contest over legitimacy, borders, and world order.

Today, the interim government in Syria drifts in a fragile limbo—mirroring a global moment where statehood, stability, and alliances appear more contingent than fixed. During the short tenure of this new administration, groups affiliated with jihadist organizations such as al-Qaida and ISIS have carried out massacres against the Alawite community in the mountainous Mediterranean west, which the government has been unable—or, some argue, unwilling—to prevent. In the south, its joint maneuvers with radical groups and Bedouin militias to attack the Druze have triggered Israeli intervention and the occupation of parts of the country. In the north and northeast, its inability to either cooperate with or exert control over the Kurdish regions underscores fragmented sovereignty. Compounding these failures, the incorporation of jihadist factions into the Syrian army has deepened the uncertainty surrounding the regime’s future. What is certain, however, is that whatever happens in Syria does not stay in Syria.

Dr. Cevat Dargın is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History at ҹɫС��Ƶ. His academic expertise lies in the history and contemporary implications of modern state formation in the Middle East and North Africa. Dr. Dargın is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Ottoman Roads to Dersim ‘38: Engineering the Global Middle East. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Princeton University and has previously held postdoctoral and visiting professorship positions at the University of Michigan and Columbia University.