January 3, 2025: Since the 1980s Iran has spent nearly $20 billion to establish and maintain a presence in Syria and Lebanon. In the last few months of 2024 all that was lost, along with billions of dollars’ worth of weapons factories and air defense systems. Now all that is gone and Iran has nothing to show for it. In early December Abu Mohammed al-Golani led a force of several thousand armed men and quickly conquered most of Syria in a few days; all but Kurdish-held areas which insist only on some degree of to-be-negotiated local autonomy. Bashar al-Assad, the former ruler of Syria escaped with his family to Russia where he was granted asylum. It’s winter in Moscow and, while the reception was warm, the Assad family found itself trapped in the land of snow, ice and a heavily sanctioned economy.

The Assads were sent to Russia because they ignored what was going in in their northwestern Idlib province. There Islamic terrorist group HTS had quietly evolved into an army of disciplined soldiers under the command of former Islamic terrorist Abu Muhammad Al-Golani. Most of Syria’s surviving Islamic terrorists, anti-Assad rebels and their families had held out in Idlib for almost ten years. Efforts by the Turks, who had to feed millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey, to get HTS, the dominant Islamic terrorist coalition in the province, to cooperate with the Turks failed. Turkey finally proposed instead that HTS work with Turkey-backed Syrian militias to overthrow the Assad regime so Turkey could move the millions of Syrian refugees back to Syria. Turkey offered HTS sanctuary in Turkish-controlled areas and let a few HTS members into Turkey. Reaching an agreement with HTS on the details proved difficult, but the reality was the HTS and Turkey had quietly worked out an arrangement that enabled HTS to assemble thousands of soldiers who were Islamic terrorists that agreed to follow HTS leader Golani in a successful lightning campaign to conquer Syria.

That ended 15-20 years of Iranian efforts to make Syria a base for Iranian attacks on Israel. This is one of many catastrophic strategic defeats for Iran’s mullah regime in the past few months. The most recent is that corruption and mismanagement of its economy have produced a shortage of oil and natural gas for domestic use. Iran’s president made a televised speech in December 2024 informing the Iranian people of this and announced his decision to divert the currently available stocks of fuel from the economy and jobs to heat housing so that millions of Iranians won’t freeze to death in the dark this winter.

Something else Iran has to rebuild is belief among all Iranians that the current leaders will be able to end the poverty that has been growing over the last decade with a third of Iranians impoverished and a few percent are without housing or enough food to survive.

Many Iranian leaders believe that an uprising is possible if the religious dictatorship does nothing or tries to suppress the continuing protests against poverty and violent suppression of protests. That kind of suppression is increasingly less effective and members of the religious establishment and some IRGC/Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders openly express concern that a more serious uprising is possible and whoever wins, Iran loses. So far, a majority of the senior clerics in the Guardians Council oppose any concessions to those demanding economic reforms and an end of lifestyle rules that punish women who do not cover their hair with a scarf.

IRGC leaders are less eager to oppose any concessions. Many IRGC leaders are closer to the protests and have a better sense of how angry Iranians are and how far most Iranians are willing to go. The IRGC is not large enough to take on most Iranians and many individual IRGC men are not willing to slaughter a lot of fellow Iranians to keep corrupt religious and IRGC leaders in power. The continued economic sanctions make life difficult for more Iranians who are unemployed and cannot afford the higher food prices. Iranian leaders have to decide whether they want to still live in a fantasy world of rapidly rebuilding and repairing all the damage the country has suffered lately. God will provide, but not in terms of infrastructure restoration and restocking the military rocket and missile arsenal.