Tehran, Iran For years, Iranian officials have been carefully building an “opposition coalition” of like-minded groups to oppose Israel and the United States across the region.
The coalition has included military and government personnel in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, along with Palestinian groups.
I am the fall of Bashar al-Assad in SyriaTehran lost not only its ten-year alliance with the ruling family in Damascus but also its main means of life.
Amid claims that the deal has collapsed, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last week that such views were “ignorant” and wrong.
The height of the resistance, he said, “circulates the entire area” as the axis is not hardware that can be damagedrather it is faith and commitment that only grows under pressure and will succeed in driving the US out of the region.
Expelling the US, especially in neighboring Iraq, is still the main goal for Tehran to avenge the January 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Iran's top general and the main architect of the axis.
Reducing access to Hezbollah
With Iran's support since the early 1980s, Hezbollah has grown into Lebanon's largest political force and a more powerful military force than the country's former military. The group has carried out many attacks in Israel in the past year, including the assassination of its former leader Hassan Nasrallah and other senior officials.
The message from Tehran has emphasized that “Hezbollah is alive” despite the Israeli attack, Khamenei refers to the resistance of the Lebanese and Palestinian forces. means “the defeat” of Israel.
At the moment, there is no doubt that Tehran has lost an ally in Syria and this will show its regional power in a short time, according to Tehran researcher and writer Ali Akbar Dareini.
“The biggest damage to Iran's security is the withdrawal of cooperation with Lebanon. The Tehran-Baghdad-Damascus-Beirut axis made it easier for Iran to find Hezbollah,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The fall of the Assad regime seriously undermines the hope of rebuilding and rehabilitating the opposition network, especially Hezbollah,” Dareini said, adding that Israel will now be more emboldened to attack the Lebanese group despite the ceasefire that has been achieved so far. among many violations.
Israel has also taken advantage of the fall of al-Assad to push inside Syria, have more space in the south while launching hundreds of flights across the country.
In a second statement on Tuesday, Khamenei emphasized that “the Zionist regime believes that it is preparing itself through Syria to surround the Hezbollah forces and uproot them, but the one that will be uprooted is Israel”.
While Iran has said that it wants to maintain relations with Syria and that the new governing body away from Israel it would be a major decision, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the new organization, says that Syria is tired of war and does not want to make an enemy of Israel.
Hossein Salami, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said this week that it was “difficult” that Israeli forces were now a few kilometers from Damascus, but added that they would be “buried in Syria” in the future. .
Another attack on the members of the axis
Resolute Israel has struck Yemen's Houthis again, sparking protests on Wednesday night in Yemen infrastructure for the third time since July, killing nine people and hitting oil stations, ships in the main port, and power plants.
Israeli media have also reported that the Israeli military and intelligence agencies may be following them a decades-long process of killing leaders in Yemen to disrupt the movement.
They have set their sights on Houthi leader Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, along with senior Yemeni military officials and an Iranian general who oversees the IRGC's Quds Force efforts in the country, according to Israel's Hayom newspaper. .
In addition to attacking waterways near its waters in protest of Israel's war in Gaza, the Yemeni movement has been attacking Israel.
The Houthis announced on Thursday that they had fired two missiles against Israel's armed forces, which appear to have been partially confiscated, and the rockets that fell on the school and destroyed it without harm.
The Houthis fired another missile at Tel Aviv on Saturday, injuring 16 people and leaving the valley in a civilian shelter. Two interceptor missiles were filmed failing to shoot down the missile, and the group's spokesman vowed to launch another attack.
In Iraq, the US asked Baghdad to stop the Iranian forces in the country, according to Ibrahim Al-Sumaidaie, a senior adviser to the Prime Minister who said in a television interview on Wednesday that Washington threatened the army if the Iraqi government wanted. it does not allow.
Many of the Shia militias allied with Iran are now part of the Iraqi security forces.
The US has been a staunch ally of Israel throughout its war in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East.
'Rejection without an axis'
The coalition is no longer able to function as a united front for international and terrorist groups that extend from Iran to the Levant, Vali Nasr, a professor of international and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said.
“It has lost its anchors in the Levant.” Although it is still present in Iraq and Yemen, it will not have the role it had until now,” he told Al Jazeera.
“If it has to be important again, it has to be in a different way and then depending on the situation in the Levant.”
The alliance, which has supported Iran's ambitions to become a regional superpower, won some of the biggest victories in the Syrian civil war – keeping al-Assad in place with Russian support, and pushing back ISIL (ISIS) and other militant groups. .
The Iran-led coalition was built on three main pillars that have been replaced by the fall of al-Assad, according to Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
The first was the connection between the key members, who were supported and spread in the Mediterranean by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen holding the south side, he explained.
The second was the close cooperation and cooperation between the members, and the principle that means a threat to one member of the axis is considered dangerous to all, triggering a collective response.
“The third pillar was his ideological foundation: the very concept of resistance. This idea, characterized by strong anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments, served as a unifying concept behind the axis,” he told Al Jazeera.
Azizi said that the first two pillars are now badly damaged, if not destroyed, but the third remains and can be strengthened in other ways.
“This change can be described as 'resistance without rulers'. What we are seeing is Iran trying to strengthen its first line of defense in Iraq and Yemen, while the rest are working less and less coordinated than before.