December 21, 2024: Hezbollah has had a bad year. Israel destroyed most of its leadership with a brilliant special operations plan. Hezbollah’s missile and rocket attacks on Israel from Lebanon finally resulted in Israel crossing the border to attack Hezbollah’s ground forces and some of its launching sites.

Worse, at the end of the year the head of Sunni Islamic terror group HTS led a force of armed supporters to overrun and occupy most of Syria in less than two weeks. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia with his family and his armed forces fell apart. This meant Hezbollah in Lebanon could no longer receive supplies from Iran, which had for years delivered supplies via a route from Iran, through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon. Hezbollah is now isolated and facing a very angry Israel by itself. And Israeli airstrikes destroyed most of the former Syrian government weapons storage sites so those weapons are not available to a terrorist-controlled successor Syrian government.

Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the leader of the invasion force, presently controls most of Syria, except for the Kurdish-controlled northwestern 40 percent of Syria. With Assad gone to Russia, millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey began returning to Syria. The Kurds and Hezbollah do not get along.

The events of November and December 2024 are quite a change from what was going on in Syria during 2023. Back then Iran openly opposed any peace with the West because of Western insistence that Iran first cease its support for violence in Iraq and Syria as well its nuclear-weapons program. Iranian forces in Iraq sought to dominate the Iraqi government. Iran supported forces in Syria trying to establish bases for attacking Israel. HTS has driven the Iranian and Russian forces from Syria. The only foreign force remaining is Syria is about a thousand American troops based on the Syria/Iraq border to deal with the Islamic terrorists (mostly ISIL remnants) which still survive in that part of Syria, and whose relation to the new HTS government is unknown.

Last year Iran supported Lebanese efforts to expel Sunni Arab refugees who had flooded in because of the fighting in Syria. Lebanon started registering and attempting to deport Syrian refugees. Nearly two million Sunni Arab Syrian refugees fled to Lebanon since 2012, radically changing the demography of Lebanon. Before 2011 the Lebanese population was only five million. Since nearly all those refugees were Sunni Moslems, it radically changed the religious mix of Lebanon from 27 percent Shia, 27 percent Sunni, and 46 percent Christians and other religions to a more volatile combination. With the refugee influx there were now seven million people in Lebanon and 47 percent were Sunni, 19 percent Shia and 34 percent Christian and others.

This put the Hezbollah militia in a bad situation. Their better armed and trained fighters have been able to dominate the other minorities since the 1980s. That was possible because of Iranian cash, weapons and advisors. But the Iranian help and better organization is no longer enough when the Sunnis are nearly half the population and out for blood because of the slaughter the Iran-backed Alawite Syrian government inflicted on Syrian Sunnis.

Lebanon does not want another civil war over this and it was becoming difficult to contain the anger. Hezbollah and Iran have had some success attracting non-Shia factions, especially Christians to be part of the Shia coalition. This is traditional Lebanese politics, with the Christians surviving by forming a coalition with non-Christian groups. Now even these Christian factions are backing away from Hezbollah. In late 2024 Israeli forces invaded Lebanon, determined to further reduce Hezbollah strength and severe the Hezbollah connection with Iran. That was done and now Hezbollah is a much smaller and largely leaderless organization. Currently, Iranian power is unusually weak inside Iraq and nonexistent inside Syria. The Assads have gone to exile in Russia.

In early 2023 Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi visited Syria for two days. Raisi met with key members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. These two terror groups are based in Gaza and depend on Iran for financial support and weapons. Raisi discussed planned terror attacks in southern Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem and now from Lebanon. Iran forced Hamas to establish a partnership with Hezbollah to recruit Palestinians living in Lebanon to carry out rocket attacks into Israel. This plan failed, in part because this Iranian meddling prompted Israel to invade Lebanon and portions of southwestern Syria. When HTS forces unexpectedly overran Syria in late 2024, Israeli troops occupied portions of Syria to expand their buffer zone. Israel had recently wiped out most Hezbollah leadership with airstrikes and exploding electronic devices.

By the end of 2024 Hezbollah was in tatters and virtually leaderless. The Assads were gone from Syria and Israeli forces had occupied and will apparently annex portions of Syria and Lebanon.