Flare-up jolts US and offers chance for Trump

The surprise resurgence of Syria’s civil war is shaking the table for the US, which tried to turn the page years ago.

Displaced Syrian Kurds drive a ute loaded with belongings on the Aleppo-Raqqa highway to flee areas on the outskirts of the northern city of Aleppo. Picture: AFP

The surprise resurgence of Syria’s civil war is shaking the table for the US, which tried to turn the page years ago on a devastating conflict where it saw few good outcomes.

The latest turmoil in a chaotic region comes less than a couple months before the return of president-elect Donald Trump, whose team could see an unexpected ­opportunity as part of its bid to reshape the Middle East, albeit with plenty of question marks.

The lightning offensive by ­Islamist rebels, who seized Syria’s second largest city of Aleppo, came after US ally Israel worked to degrade two key supporters of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad – Iran and its affiliated Lebanese Shi’ite militia, Hezbollah.

Russia, another backer of Assad, has been heavily focused on its ­invasion of Ukraine.

In a region left in flux since the Gaza war broke out in October last year, the US position on Syria, articulated again by President Joe Biden’s administration, has changed little for a decade – though Assad has lost credibility through his brutality, the US is not prioritising pushing him out and does not support the rebels.

“The Biden administration didn’t just put Syria on the backburner, they took it off the stove,” said Andrew Tabler, a senior ­adviser on Syria during the last Trump administration who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute. “You can take things off the stove all you want, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to boil over.”

Mr Tabler said the battlefield setbacks could finally force Assad into a negotiated solution, which he had long resisted.

An anti-regime fighter mans a gun on the outskirts of Aleppo. Picture: AFP

“I think an incoming administration with more attention to Syria and conflicts like it will be better able to manage it,” he said.

“We just don’t know what that looks like yet.”

President Barack Obama, who resisted pressure to attack Assad and refused to embrace the rebels, settled on another option: allying with Kurdish fighters for the narrow US goal of defeating the ­Islamic State terrorist group. About 900 US troops remain in Syria.

Mr Trump in his first term ordered out US troops at the urging of Turkey, which supports the Islamist fighters and likens Syrian Kurdish forces to domestic militants. He later backtracked after international appeals led by France.

Raising further questions, one of Mr Trump’s most controversial nominees, intelligence chief-­designate Tulsi Gabbard, has made waves with past statements sympathetic to Assad.

Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, said the primary interest of US policymakers had been “to support ­Israel and hurt Iran and Russia”.

“So the onslaught of the rebels is very good for America, from that point of view, because it changes the security architecture in the Middle East in a dramatic way,” he said.

A rebel triumph would sever the so-called Shi’ite Crescent, in which Iran’s clerical state has ­extended its influence westward all the way to Lebanon, Professor Landis said.

“This would be a big boon to ­Israel and a big karate chop to Iran,” he said.

However, the Sunni Islamists would also oppose the US, which would again face the question of whether to protect Kurdish allies from Turkey.

“It presents a dilemma for the US and Israel – whether they ­really prefer an Islamist government running Syria or they prefer to keep it divided and weak,” Professor Landis said.

Despite criticism of inaction, the Biden administration has committed more than $US1bn over the past year in humanitarian aid for Syria’s displaced.

Under a sanctions law that ­expires this month, the US opposes reconstruction involving Assad without accountability over the war, which has killed more than half a million people and displaced millions more since 2011.

Recently, several Western countries, notably Italy, have ­broken with the US by returning ambassadors to Damascus, seeking stability in the hopes of preventing another migration crisis akin to what shook up European politics a decade ago.

The renewed fighting has ­already displaced nearly 50,000 people, according to a UN report, and will cause growing humanitarian needs as winter sets in.

AFP