There are already signs that Lebanon’s fragile peace may not survive the fall of Assad, with Saudi-backed Sunni groups tempted to take the opportunity of Hizballah being weakened by the loss of its Syrian patron and arms supplier to break the Shi’ite movement’s political and military dominance. Similarly, the defeated Sunnis of Iraq will take courage from the success of their kin just across a border straddled by their tribal and clan networks to push back against the Iran-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Jordan’s pro-Western monarchy is politically weak, and the same bleak economic outlook that drove many of Syria’s rural Sunnis to rebellion prevails in much of the Jordanian hinterland. The triumph of an armed Sunni rebellion in Syria is likely to spur Jordan’s Sunni Islamist opposition — both its more moderate parliamentary arm, and its more radical extremist element — to press their case, quite possibly fueled by an influx of refugees from Syria.
Even Israel has little reason to enthuse about Assad’s fall: His regime postured “resistance” and empowered Hizballah, but Israel’s border with Syria had been stable for near on four decades under the Assads. Posturing resistance to Israel, in fact, was in part an ideological device through which a minority Alawite-dominated regime sought to legitimize itself in the eyes of its Sunni majority. Today, however, residents of Syria’s massive Palestinian refugee camps appear to have thrown in their lot with the rebellion, and Hamas broke with Assad and left town last year. Even if concerns about chemical weapons or jihadists on the Golan fail to materialize, Israel could find itself living alongside a new, Sunni-led Syrian polity that, if anything, could be even more insistent than Assad had been, on recovering the Golan, occupied by Israel since the 1967 war – and which Israel has no inclination to give up.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member