Analysis: Al-Assad’s fall is Iran and Russia’s loss, but are there winners?

Turkiye stands to gain, while Israel feels insecure about what comes next.

After 54 years in power, the al-Assad family’s rule in Syria has come to an end. On December 8, Bashar al-Assad fled the country and sought asylum in Russia. The collapse of one of the most brutal regimes in the modern history of the Middle East came after just 12 days of fighting between the Syrian army and a coalition of opposition forces, and put an end to the 13-year Syrian civil war.

The Syrian conflict took the lives of more than 350,000 Syrians and displaced at least 13 million. Brutal repression by the al-Assad regime turned a peaceful revolution into an internationalised civil war with Russia, Iran, Turkiye and the United States as the key players.

Its collapse will inevitably rearrange the geopolitical map of the region.

Syria established diplomatic relationship with the Soviet Union in 1944 and became the first Arab country to buy Soviet-made arms a decade later. As other Arab countries, like Egypt, began moving away from the Soviet orbit in the 1970s, Hafez al-Assad’s regime in Syria remained a staunch Soviet ally.

Relations remained strong even after the collapse of the USSR as Russia retained its naval military base in Tartous. In 2004, Bashar al-Assad made his first state visit to Moscow in an attempt to revive the Cold War-era relationship and sought Russian assistance to modernise his army.