Gianluca Pacchiani
Times of Israel, Dec. 9, 2024
“According to my understanding, Trump will focus on the Pacific region, China, and the global economy, but first and foremost on American domestic affairs. So the incoming administration has a plan to deal with the Middle East before Trump comes into office, and that includes a retreat of Iranian forces from Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.”
The fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria has been heralded as a historic moment for the Middle East. But while many in Syria and around the world are celebrating the toppling of a brutal dictator, concern has emerged in Israel over the rise of the Islamist rebel group that brought him down and the risk of instability in a neighboring country plagued by a 13-year old civil war and deep sectarian divisions.
But alongside those worries, there are those who see the dawn of a new Middle East in the stunning events of the last several days, with Iran’s foothold in Syria likely gone along with Assad, among Tehran’s most important regional clients. In place of his iron-fisted rule, some envision a loose confederation of four ethnic substates united by a central government.
“The modern nation state in the Middle East has failed,” said Wahabi Anan Wahabi, a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT) at Reichman University in Herzliya. “All the different communities in Syria could not live together in one national state.”
In an interview with The Times of Israel, Wahabi, who is also a colonel (res.) in the Intelligence Corps of the Israel Defense Forces and a lecturer in Political Sciences at the University of Haifa, formulated a vision for the future of Syria that respects the balance between the ethnic and religious diversity of the country – which includes Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Christians, Druze, and Alawites, the religious minority of Assad.…SOURCE