The fall of the Assad regime in Syria created a unique problem for Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They are relieved that their regional and sectarian rival, Iran, has lost its power and influence in the Levant, but its demise has empowered Sunni Islamists in Syria, the likes of which Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have spent many years and untold amounts of money suppressing. Sunni Arab states will now have to deal with Islamists at the state level.
For now, it seems as though they will at least try to play nice. On Jan. 2, for example, a delegation of Syria’s government-in-the-making that included Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani, Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra and intelligence chief Anas Khattab arrived in Saudi Arabia – the first trip of its kind for the administration led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Discussions with their counterparts focused on how the kingdom could assist the transition process. Separately, the Saudis sent 60 trucks and six planes laden with essential supplies, including food, shelter and medical aid, for the Syrian people.
It was an interesting move considering the Saudi government is not prepared to deal, let alone interested in dealing, with a government not led by Bashar Assad. Before the uprising that toppled his regime, Saudi Arabia and the UAE had been trying to reconcile with Assad in the hopes of dislodging him from Iran’s sphere of influence. They had begun to mend ties as early as 2023, with Assad paying visits to the UAE in March and Saudi Arabia in May of that year. The process seemed to be going well: Riyadh reopened its embassy in Damascus in September – only a couple of months before rebels mounted the offensive that led to Assad’s toppling.
That decision was likely informed by the fact that Israel was degrading Iran’s position in the Levant. The thinking was that it was the right time to accelerate efforts to engage with Assad, who could use the opportunity to distance himself from Iran (something, by all accounts, he wanted to do but lacked the ability). However, Riyadh hadn’t realized that the vacuum left by Iran’s retreat would so quickly be filled by the Turkey-backed rebel alliance that ousted Assad.
It’s a bit of a Catch-22. Arab states believe they are under duress from radical forces on both sides of the geosectarian divide. On the one hand, there is Iran and its largely Shiite Islamist allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and, more recently, Yemen. On the other is a diverse array of Sunni Islamist forces, ranging from Muslim Brotherhood-style groups to the dyed-in-the-wool jihadists. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have generally been able to contain the Sunni threat from within, even during the Arab Spring, so they concentrated their efforts on the Shiites from without. This owes largely to the fact that Shiite Islamism, having achieved statehood in Iran after the 1979 revolution, had hegemonic designs that clashed with Riyadh’s own ambitions. Many Sunni groups had similar designs, but they were dispersed and divided and thus more easily countered. Some, such as the Islamic State and Syria’s rebels, were more stubborn, but they were both eventually defeated. To varying degrees, Syria was the arena in which these two threats fought each other.
Sunni Islamists are now Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s top priority, one that implicates other regional competitors. Turkey and Qatar, for example, support the fledgling Syrian government and its attempts to consolidate power. The good news for Riyadh and Abu Dhabi is that the situation in Syria will be fluid for years, so they have some time to think and some room to maneuver. But in the meantime, they are worried that the Islamists’ success in Syria could be replicated in places such as Jordan and Egypt. They will try to prevent that from happening, of course, and they will try to prevent Syria from falling entirely into the hands of Turkey and Qatar. With so few options, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are thus trying to engage the new Syrian government, which will need all the help it can get just to be able to govern the country and manage its many problems. They will use the power of their respective purses to gain influence and shape the government’s behavior.
It’s a sensible short-term strategy, even if they are years behind the likes of Turkey and Qatar. But in the long term, they have no solution to the fact that they are trapped between Shiite Islamists, backed by Iran, and Sunni Islamists, backed by Turkey and Qatar. Countering one empowers the other in a cycle from which there appears to be no escape, at least in the short term.
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