The Iranian Land Route to the Mediterranean: Myth or Reality?
11 September 2017By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
As the Islamic State continues to lose ground in Iraq and Syria, one of the
more common talking points for debate is the supposed prospect of an Iranian
"land-route" running through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean,
and what the U.S. response should be. But how seriously should the idea of the
land-route be taken? If the land-route concept is taken seriously, what are
the viable U.S. policy responses, if any?
When it comes to supporting clients and allies in Syria and Lebanon, Iran has
relied on aircraft (mostly traveling to Damascus) and naval routes, both
during and prior to the Syrian civil war even when a theoretical land-route
passing through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon existed. Broadly speaking, the U.S.
and its allies have been unable to prevent the use of aircraft and naval
routes, and indeed there is little that can be done about those routes.
The prospect of a pure land route as an additional guarantee in the event of
loss of access to all airbases and naval ports (which seems highly unlikely
anyway) might sound attractive. However, using such a route as the primary
means to move important supplies and weapons would have to take into account
the problem of an Islamic State insurgency that will remain potent in the
Syria-Iraq desert border areas even after the organization loses its formal
territorial holdings. For the Islamic State, attacking Iranian military
convoys using a land route through the Syria-Iraq border areas would be
worthwhile for two reasons. First, the attacks would allow the group to
bolster a propaganda message of fighting Iran. Second, the convoys could offer
chances for seizing valuable war booty.
It is true that Iranian forces and Iranian-backed Shi'a militias (e.g.
Hezbollah and multiple Iraqi groups) have been participating in the Syrian
regime's broader offensive pushing eastwards towards the borders with Iraq.
Yet this should not obscure the fact that the regime has its own vital reasons
for pushing eastwards that tend to be ignored in favor of a simplistic view of
the Syrian civil war as primarily proxy warfare between international powers.
For instance, the regime wants to restore land trade routes with Iraq that
existed before the war, and wants to reclaim the country's most valuable oil
resources as well as important agricultural resources. Otherwise, the regime
will face difficulties in trying to secure reconstruction and will be left too
economically dependent on its allies Russia and Iran.
For native Syrian militias fighting for the regime, there are reasons to want
to push eastwards: for example, among those militias participating in the
fighting are Sha'itat tribesmen with origins in the eastern Syrian province of
Deir az-Zor. The Sha'itat tribe rose up in revolt against the Islamic State,
which seized control of its areas in 2014, only to be brutally crushed. Now,
many of those tribesmen who fled to regime-held areas are seeking to return
home and exact revenge.
The Iraqi Shi'a militias in particular also have their own reasons for
participating in the offensive. Their ideological allegiance to Iran and
service to Iranian interests should not be denied, but participating in the
fight to take eastern Syria is something they genuinely view as being in
Iraq's interests by securing the borders and reducing the Islamic State
threat. As Ja'afar al-Husseini, the military spokesman for the Iraqi Shi'a
militia Kata'ib Hezbollah, explained to me: "Linking up [on both sides of the
borders] secures the borders of Iraq, prevents the movement of the armed men
[Islamic State] and helps to liberate the land of Syria, which is part of our
belief that the battle is one in Iraq and Syria."
One may ask why the regime and its allies are only conducting these operations
now. The most important point is that from the standpoint of the regime's
immediate survival, the insurgency concentrated in the western half of the
country posed by far the bigger threat than the Islamic State in the east.
When the insurgency, led by jihadists and Salafists with CIA-backed groups
functioning as auxiliaries, made major gains in the northwest of Syria by
expelling the regime from all major towns in Idlib province in spring 2015,
the regime lost a provincial capital (Idlib city) and was at risk of losing
another one (Hama city), and faced the prospect of insurgent advances into
important Alawite constituent communities for the regime in Latakia and the
al-Ghab plain.
Blocking the possibility of these advances, and then inflicting a decisive
defeat on the insurgency by retaking Aleppo city, served as the impetus for
the Russian intervention in the fall of 2015. With those insurgent threats in
the west now largely neutralized, the priorities have simply shifted. A lot of
the discourse though failed to anticipate the eastward shift, believing that
the regime and its allies did not have the manpower to retake the eastern
areas and were only interested in "useful" Syria, rather than taking the
regime's declarations on multiple occasions about retaking the whole country
seriously.
In short, the Iranian land-route angle is being overplayed in the current
events. But even supposing that such an ambition were driving the current
offensive, one must ask whether the U.S. could actually stop this prospect
from being realized. In the current circumstances, the Iranian forces and
their allies would either have to take the Albukamal-al-Qa'im crossing between
Deir az-Zor and Anbar, or construct a new route entirely. U.S. forces,
meanwhile, would have to maintain an indefinite presence in the areas of Syria
that could function as land-routes for Iran but are currently blocked off by
the American presence.
Since before the Trump administration, U.S. policy had intended for Syrian
rebel forces trained by the U.S. and Jordan from the remnants of the Deir
az-Zor insurgency destroyed by the Islamic State to retake the eastern regions
from the Islamic State. These forces initially came under the moniker of the
New Syrian Army, which captured the Tanf border crossing with Iraq in the
Syrian desert from the Islamic State in March 2016. Yet these rebels failed to
make any meaningful advances beyond that, notably botching a raid on Albukamal.
The rebels holding the Tanf border crossing have since been reconstituted as
the Revolutionary Commandoes Army (RMA), but it is clear these forces and
similar groups that were intended to retake Deir az-Zor province do not have
the capability to do so.
Indeed, their spokesmen seem to exaggerate their numbers. A spokesman for RMA,
one of whose commanders fled recently to regime-held areas, claimed his group
has more than 1,000 fighters. It was further claimed that within a month, the
group would have 4,000-5,000 fighters. A spokesman for the Qaryatayn Martyrs
Brigade, a group that recently broke with the U.S. on account of a
disagreement on fighting the regime's forces, similarly claimed to me that his
group has 4,000 fighters. RMA, on the other hand, says that the Qaryatayn
Martyrs Brigade only consists of approximately 300 fighters. Whatever the
truth of these claimed figures, these groups are not sufficient in manpower to
take Deir az-Zor province.
Thus, in the case of the Tanf border crossing, the American presence would be
set to be stuck there indefinitely, likely subject to harassment by
Iranian-backed forces falling short of all-out war. The only alternatives are
either to try to pressure the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)
currently assaulting the Islamic State's de facto capital of Raqqa to launch a
major offensive to take all of Deir az-Zor province (an unlikely prospect) and
maintain a permanent U.S. presence and substantial economic commitment to SDF
areas, or unilaterally deploy thousands of U.S. troops to take Deir az-Zor,
only to face an insurgency that will either bolster the Islamic State or take
on a different form. After all, the province was a source of fighters who
ended up going to Iraq to fight the American presence there during the Iraq
War.
In sum, the notion of confronting Iran in the east of Syria and blocking a
supposed Iranian land-route may sound tough rhetorically but lacks a basis in
reality. The idea of claiming a U.S. stake in the east of Syria and thus
somehow being able to push for a political transition in the long run away
from the Assad regime is fantasy. The Trump administration should resist calls
to engage in a major escalation for a poorly defined objective that does not
actually reverse what my colleague Kirk Sowell of Inside Iraqi Politics
describes as "Iran's position as the pre-eminent player between Iran and the
Mediterranean." Any U.S. policy-making should focus instead on dealing with
the reality as it is and deterring threats that arise from it: that is, making
clear that any actual attacks on U.S. assets and allies will be met with
severe retaliation.
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