Lebanon and Syria’s destinies are intertwined. Today, with Syria’s post-Assad government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa and the new Lebanese leadership led by President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam in power, bilateral relations can potentially reset and enter into a new chapter.
Yet, there are serious risks of sectarian fragmentation and intensified conflict dynamics in the region that dim the hopes for peace and stability in this new era of Lebanese-Syrian relations.
When Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell on 8 December 2024, many in Lebanon were celebratory and ecstatic. Considering modern history, this was no surprise.
In mid-1976, a little more than one year into Lebanon’s civil war, the Syrian military began its 29-year occupation of Lebanon. Yet after that occupation ended in 2005, Damascus continued asserting its heavy hand of influence in Lebanon primarily through Hezbollah.
As a land bridge between Iran and Lebanon, Syria made it possible for Iranian arms to flow into Hezbollah’s hands, making it the most powerful actor on the ground in Lebanon. The Iran-backed party, which fought Israel to a standstill in 2006, intensified its intervention in the Syrian crisis in 2013 and played a major role in propping up the Assad regime until its fall last year.
Therefore, while most Lebanese welcomed Assad’s ouster, Hezbollah saw the Syrian regime’s collapse as a major loss for the party. That loss came on top of the organisation’s leadership being decapitated and much of Hezbollah’s military capacity being degraded in last year’s war with Israel.
The new Syrian government is anti-Hezbollah and there are certain actors inside the “New Syria” which are extremely hostile to both the Lebanese Shia organisation and Tehran.
This hostility to Hezbollah on the part of certain groups in Syria that fought the old regime was underscored by their reactions to Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral, held on 23 February, in which they mocked those mourning the loss of the group’s late Secretary-General.
“Hezbollah lost its main Syrian regional power base and key political support system when support for the Assad regime ended. Syria was also an important transit country for smuggling Iranian missiles and weapons to Lebanon. Now that this transit is gone and amid Israeli pressure, Hezbollah feels squeezed between Israel from the south and sky and Syria from the east,” said Yeghia Tashjian, the Regional and International Affairs Cluster Coordinator at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in an interview with The New Arab.
“Moreover, Hezbollah encounters rising local opposition in Lebanon for its involvement in the Syrian conflict because its support [for Assad during] the Syrian conflict has decreased national resources while intensifying Lebanon’s economic decline,” he added.
Hezbollah’s preferred presidential candidate, Suleiman Frangieh, who was close to Assad, had to drop his bid after the Damascus regime fell in December.
Thus, as Ali Rizk, a Beirut-based political and security analyst, told TNA, Assad’s ouster “clearly undermined Hezbollah politically in Lebanon.”
Additionally, Hezbollah is deeply unsettled by the lack of any response by the post-Assad leadership in Damascus to Israeli aggression toward Syria.
“What is also concerning for Hezbollah is that Sharaa has shown no enthusiasm whatsoever for being an enemy of Israel contrary to the Assad dynasty, so the hopes appear dim that the Lebanese movement and the Sharaa-led leadership will find common cause against Israel — that’s assuming that the other obstacles can be overcome related to the hostility with which Hezbollah is perceived in the new Syria, particularly [by] the more extremist elements,” explained Rizk.
Nonetheless, today many in Lebanon — and not just Hezbollah and its supporters — worry about the political order that will take shape in post-Baathist Syria and the possible implications for Lebanon.
The Salafist nexus
In the nearly three months that have passed since the Hayaat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-led coalition of rebel factions overthrew Assad’s government, Salafist groups in Lebanon have been emboldened by the way in which the Syrian regime fell.
Salafist networks in Lebanon will probably deepen ties with Salafist groups in Syria in this upcoming period. Concerns about sectarian temperatures rising and possible new local conflicts breaking out in Lebanon at this time are valid.
When it comes to the future of relations between Lebanon and Syria’s current governments, “the biggest challenge will be from the more radical elements in the new Syria who feel a new sense of empowerment,” said Rizk.
“Not only could these elements seek vengeance against Hezbollah given how the latter was instrumental in thwarting their goals in Syria (before the demise of the former leadership), but they could also target the Lebanese army who is often accused as being complicit regarding Hezbollah’s cross border activity when it initially came to the aid of former president Bashar al-Assad,” he added.
Nonetheless, Lebanon’s deep divisions will complicate the country’s relationship with Damascus. Although some Lebanese view Assad’s fall as a positive development which will bode well for Lebanon’s future, there are others who are concerned about the sectarian tensions and the ways in which Israel is opportunistically and aggressively taking advantage of Syria’s fragile transition and weakness in order to further weaken the country and illegally usurp control of more Syrian land.
Blood-soaked conflicts have left large portions of Lebanon and Syria in ruins. The two countries have a long way to go in terms of redevelopment following the 2023-24 Israel-Hezbollah conflict and Syria’s 14 years of civil war.
“The current Lebanese government must carefully manage its relations with Syria, as it seems that the reconstruction efforts in both countries are related to each other,” Tashjian told TNA.
Thorny bilateral issues
Some of the key issues that are in play in bilateral relations between Lebanon and Syria’s governments include the frozen Syrian assets in Lebanese banks, which the new Damascus government wants returned in exchange for a plan to bring Syrian refugees home from Lebanon.
When Sharaa met with Lebanon’s then-caretaker Premier Najib Mikati in Damascus on 11 January, he emphasised that these two issues are tied to each other, even if the interim Syrian president suggested that it was still too early to address the issue of border demarcation, explained Tashjian.
“Moreover, it seems there is an understanding between both sides to tighten the border to prevent border smuggling in both ways. However, the position of Lebanon will stay intricate because its political parties hold different perspectives about Syria’s future as well as Iran’s and Saudi Arabia’s impact on regional politics,” he added.
On 6 and 7 February, tensions between certain Lebanese Shia clans and HTS’s security forces heated up along the Lebanese-Syrian border, resulting in deadly clashes. In total, there were three deaths and ten injuries on Lebanon’s side, and one death in Syria. This episode followed a detainee exchange along the border’s Jusiyah crossing, which the Lebanese Armed Forces was overseeing.
According to some sources, the violence began on 6 February when Syrian security forces waged an operation in the Lebanese village of Hawik, situated along the border. The Zuaiter and Jaafar clans are this village’s inhabitants. Allegedly, Hezbollah has smuggled arms and illicit goods across the international border via Hawik.
The Syrian side launched this operation as part of their wider efforts to clamp down on Hezbollah-linked networks that operate along the border. Nonetheless, shortly after this deadly episode President Aoun called Sharaa to congratulate him on being appointed Syria’s president and the two leaders addressed “efforts to secure the Lebanese-Syrian border.”
Dr Karim Emile Bitar, a lecturer in Middle East Studies at Sciences Po Paris, does not believe that this offensive was part of a plan premeditated by the Syrian authorities to attack Lebanon. Given that HTS only has roughly 30,000 fighters, it is clear that the new Damascus government is far from having cemented its power in Syria, which can help explain the deadly border clashes earlier this month.
“I think [Syria’s new authorities] are facing difficulties controlling the entire territory. They are trying at this stage to replicate the Idlib model—the way that HTS ruled the city of Idlib—at the national level. This is proving to be quite challenging. So, you have lots of tribes and military groups who have not yet been controlled by the Syrian authorities” he said.
Yet, “These clashes on the border have reignited existential angst on the part of many Lebanese who are worried of a new Syrian overstretch,” Dr Bitar told TNA.
That episode at the border “points to the likelihood that [the] new Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sharaa doesn’t fully control the situation on the ground even if he has no ill intentions,” agreed Rizk. “It further sheds light on how there are those in the new Syria who are keen on extracting what they believe to be revenge against Hezbollah by attacking Shia areas where inhabitants support Hezbollah,” he added.
Unresolved border disputes combined with regional turbulence and a weak Syrian state are a recipe for conflict dynamics along the Lebanese-Syrian border.
These conditions will continue exposing Lebanon to the impact of problems in Syria amid the country’s fragile transition. Nonetheless, it was positive that Lebanon and Syria’s presidents had a phone conversation shortly after this month’s clashes and addressed the episode while reaffirming that neither side has interests in such tensions exacerbating in the future.
Israeli aggression and regional conflicts
A key factor influencing the future of Beirut-Damascus relations will be Israel’s conduct in the region. The Lebanese will be keen to better understand the new Syrian government’s relationship with Israel and how Sharaa’s government will respond to Israel’s military operations in Syria, enlarged occupation, and agenda of demilitarising southern Syria.
“At this stage the new Syrian authorities seem unwilling or uncapable of facing or confronting these Israeli threats. So, the mutual threat that Lebanon and Syria are facing is a risk of sectarian fragmentation. Israel, throughout its history, has seen, at least in certain ideological currents, a willingness to carve up the Middle East into sectarian entities that would be easier to control and that could be, potentially for some of them, allied with Israel. So, the next few months will be decisive,” explained Dr Bitar.
“It is very important that both Lebanon and Syria manage to control their territory, to reestablish the monopoly of force over their entire territory, and to strengthen their national institutions in order to maintain cohesion, inclusion, and to prevent fragmentation. At the same time, they will have to open channels of dialogue to make sure the mistakes of the past are not repeated,” he added.
There is good reason to assume that the new leadership in Beirut will be determined to forge a positive relationship with Syria’s new government.
Yet, this will require stability in Syria under the post-Assad leadership. Nicholas Noe, the president of The Exchange Foundation, believes that the two most important variables in the equation to monitor are, first, the extent to which the Damascus government is indifferent toward Israeli actions in Syria and, second, the degree to which there is space for Islamic State (ISIS) and other violent Sunni extremist groups to operate in post-Assad Syria.
“Both of these factors are seen, I think, as threats by the new Lebanese government, certainly in regard to ISIS and violent religious extremist groups emanating from Syria. So as long as there is stability and those two anchors of potential conflict with Lebanon aren’t allowed to bloom, then I think the relationship could be productive,” Noe told TNA.
“The main problem, however, is that the regional atmosphere and the regional conflicts do not look as if they will subside, but rather, especially driven by the Trump administration and the Israeli government, that regional conflicts will escalate,” he added.
Tensions in this part of the world are set to exacerbate due to the fact that root causes of conflicts are not being addressed while the Israeli government’s aggression only further intensifies, as demonstrated by Tel Aviv’s recent military operations in Syria and the West Bank. Disturbingly, these dynamics suggest that Beirut-Damascus relations can easily destabilise in this upcoming period.
“The relationship between the new Lebanese government and the new Syrian government, while in theory it probably should be much better, of course, than previous relations with the former governments, unfortunately, the context is one, I think, of increasing regional conflict and a return to violence in both Palestine and also parts of Lebanon and quite possibly Iran, because Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran are very unwilling to accede to American-Israeli demands. Hezbollah is also unlikely to accede to the demands of the new Lebanese government for a full disarmament,” Noe told TNA.
“The next period of conflict will create new problems and opportunities for all actors—it’s incredibly hard, then, to predict who will be able to gain advantage in that. What is clear is that we are entering an accelerated period of ‘might makes right’ and laws of the jungle, where raw power—military and technological etc.—will be used at a far greater rate and with very little restraints,” he concluded.
Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics
Follow him on Twitter: @GiorgioCafiero
