Hezbollah’s Fatal Syria Miscalculation Comes Back to Haunt It

Ever since his rise to power after toppling the Assad regime, Syrian interim president Ahmad Al Sharaa has become the face of a nightmare that keeps Hezbollah awake at night.

To many observers, the Lebanese paramilitary group embarked on its worst strategic miscalculation roughly a decade ago, when it decided to join the war in Syria on the side of the Assad regime, later persuading Iran and Russia to do the same.

As a result, Hezbollah did not save the Assad regime, but merely delayed its downfall by a decade – a decade that saw unprecedented destruction and bloodshed across Syria. In the process, Hezbollah and the broader Iranian coalition, known as the Axis of Resistance, not only alienated the Syrian people to the point of no return, but also exposed themselves on an intelligence level. This proved to be a fatal mistake that the axis continues to pay for through catastrophic intelligence breaches that have so far contributed to the deaths of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Iran’s Ali Khamenei, and the infamous pager attacks.

A Syrian Payback

Recently, Al Sharaa announced his backing for the Lebanese state and President Joseph Aoun in their stance on disarming Hezbollah. Not long afterward, the Syrian government accused Hezbollah of firing shells that reached western areas of the Syrian capital, Damascus. The Lebanese group has not issued an official denial.

The escalation came in the wake of the American-Israeli military campaign against Iran – a development that triggered a wider chain reaction across the region, reopening unresolved tensions, particularly in the Levant.

Hezbollah, drained by its war with Israel since October 7, is weaker than it has been in years. That downturn has created an opening for its local adversaries to pursue long-awaited payback, particularly amid Iran’s worsening political, military, and economic situation, as well as the deep involvement of its key international ally Russia in the war in Ukraine.

In Syria, Hezbollah was widely accused of committing war crimes during the Syrian Civil War in defense of Assad, allegations that continue to hang over the group. With Ahmad Al Sharaa’s rise to power, the new Syrian leadership disentangled the country from this entrenched Iranian-aligned network, while simultaneously moving in the opposite direction by cultivating closer ties with Gulf states, whose relations with Iran have long been adversarial.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s military activities and political influence have long rivaled those of the state itself, contributing to chronic imbalance and instability. Many Lebanese voices have for years called for the group’s disarmament, arguing that it effectively uses Lebanese territory as a proxy platform for Iran. The shift in Syria’s position therefore intersects directly with Lebanon’s long-standing internal debate over Hezbollah’s weapons.

For decades, the group justified its arsenal as a form of resistance against Israel. Critics within Lebanon, however, argue that its military autonomy undermines state sovereignty and drags the country into regional conflicts not of its choosing. With Hezbollah weakened and regional alliances shifting, calls for consolidating arms under the Lebanese state are gaining renewed momentum.

This coordinated approach has produced an alignment rarely seen in recent decades. For perhaps the first time since their collaboration against French occupation, the Syrian and Lebanese governments now appear to converge on the same objective: curbing Hezbollah’s paramilitary power and ending its influence.

A Divided Left

Since 2011, Syria has represented one of the greatest point of friction within the Arab left. Historically and unequivocally pro-Palestine, the Arab left found itself forced to choose between a popular revolution and a regime that provided a crucial corridor between Tehran and Beirut, despite the fact that Syria’s contribution to the axis largely began and ended with this passive strategic role, rarely engaging in proactive or direct military efforts alongside the Axis of Resistance.

Few today account for the fact that a key grievance among Syrians who took to the streets in 2011 was Assad’s soft stance toward Israel. Despite repeated Israeli breaches of Syrian sovereignty, the regime’s response rarely went beyond the familiar line that Syria “maintains the right to respond at the right time and place” – a phrase Syrians repeated for years in quiet mockery of Assad’s rule.

In recent years, as the Syrian opposition’s hopes of taking power faded, Assad was widely believed to have won the civil war, and began reintegrating into the international community – a growing segment of the Arab left became increasingly comfortable backing Assad and circulating narratives that undermined the opposition. This deepened a schism that led more and more Syrians to view Iran’s axis as their primary national adversary, not Israel, and to welcome any efforts aimed at weakening it.

After Assad’s fall, many Arab leftists attempted to frame Al Sharaa as an Israeli or American implant, or a CIA puppet, and his supporters as traitors to the Palestinian cause. These narratives were undermined by Israel’s own reaction to Al Sharaa’s rise to power, launching a campaign to destroy the remaining capabilities of the Syrian army almost immediately after he assumed control.

Yet many Arab leftists continue to revert to narratives portraying his government as an extremist or ISIS-inspired formation, signaling a renewed avoidance of confronting their own miscalculations in Syria.

Don’t Kick a Man While He’s Down?

The consequences of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran are only beginning to unfold, but they are already reshaping regional dynamics. With Assad’s fall in 2024, Iran under arguably its heaviest strain since the Iran-Iraq War, and Hezbollah weakened militarily and politically by consecutive conflicts, the group’s future hangs in the balance.

This raises an urgent question: how far would the Syrian government go in retaliating against the group? And could we eventually see a joint military campaign by the Syrian and Lebanese states?

Yet even if both governments were inclined to act, there are concerns that such a move would be perceived regionally as siding with Israel. Any likely Israeli intervention would only reinforce that perception, potentially altering the course of events.