Written by Parisa Hafezi
DUBAI (Reuters) – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad complained to the Iranian foreign minister in the final days before his ouster that Turkey was strongly supporting Sunni opposition fighters in their offensive to oust him, two Iranian officials told Reuters this week.
Five decades of Assad family rule ended on Sunday when he fled to Moscow, where the government granted him asylum. Iran has supported Assad in Syria's long civil war and his ouster was widely seen as a major blow to the Iran-led “axis of resistance,” a political and military alliance that opposes Israeli and American influence in the Middle East.
As opposition forces of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, formerly allied with al-Qaeda, seized key cities and advanced toward the capital, Assad met with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi in Damascus on December 2.
At the meeting, Assad expressed his anger at what he described as Türkiye's intensified efforts to oust him, according to a senior Iranian official. The official said that Araqchi assured Assad of Iran's continued support and promised to raise the issue with Ankara.
The next day, Araqchi met with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to express Tehran's deep concerns about Ankara's support for the rebel advance.
A second Iranian official said, “The meeting was tense. Iran expressed its dissatisfaction with Turkey's bias towards the American and Israeli agendas and conveyed Assad's concerns,” referring to Ankara's support for the rebels and its cooperation with Western and Israeli interests in targeting Iran's allies in the region. .
The official said that Fidan blamed Assad for the crisis, stressing that his failure to engage in real peace talks and his years of repressive rule were the root causes of the conflict.
A source in the Turkish Foreign Ministry familiar with Fidan's talks said that these were not Fidan's exact statements, and added that Araqchi did not carry or transmit any messages from Assad to Turkey, without going into details.
Fidan told reporters in Doha on Sunday that the Assad regime “had valuable time” to address the existing problems in Syria, but did not do so, instead allowing the “slow deterioration and collapse of the regime.”
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday that Assad's ouster was the result of a plan by the United States and Israel.
He said that one of Syria's neighbors also played a role, and continues to do so. He did not mention the name of the country, but it seemed that he was referring to Türkiye.
NATO member Turkey, which controls large swaths of territory in northern Syria after several cross-border incursions against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, has been a major supporter of opposition groups aiming to oust Assad since the outbreak of civil war in 2011.
The fall of Assad stripped Iran and its ally, the Lebanese Hezbollah group, of a vital ally. Tehran's relations with Damascus have allowed Iran to extend its influence through a land corridor from its western border through Iraq to Lebanon to bring weapons supplies to Hezbollah.
Iran spent billions of dollars to support Assad during the war and deployed its Revolutionary Guards in Syria to keep its ally in power.
Hezbollah also played a key role, sending fighters to support it, but having to return them to Lebanon over the past year to fight in a bruising war with Israel – a redeployment that has weakened Syrian government lines.
