A video clip circulating on social media in recent months shows Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara, astride a handsome black horse in a sand riding ring with a few thick palm trees. He is alone, wearing a trim leather jacket, as the high-stepping horse circles within the ring.
The video’s soundtrack is a song glorifying the Umayyad caliphate, which ruled the Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries. “The Umayyads are of golden lineage; their name provoked fear in Persian kings,” the video’s opening lyrics say. The actual first line from the popular song, “I am an Arab Muslim, not an Iranian appendage,” is omitted. Still, the message comes across: Syria, no longer under Shiite Iran’s influence, has returned to the hands of the country’s Sunni majority.
For many Arabs, that dynasty was the halcyon age of Muslim history. Starting in Damascus in A.D. 661, the Umayyads established the first Muslim kingdom, defeating the Persians as it spread into Central Asia and across North Africa over 90 years. Now, some find a distinct echo in Syria’s being unshackled from Iranian dominance.
The collapse of Iran’s regional influence, in particular its expulsion from Syria, its main Arab ally, represents an inflection point of the kind not seen in the Middle East for more than two decades. One part of the geopolitical rebalancing could be a retreat from the overt sectarianism that has plagued the region ever since the U.S. invasion of Iraq resulted in Shiites taking control in Baghdad.
With the fall of the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria last December, what King Abdullah II of Jordan once famously referred to as the “Shiite Crescent” — a network of armed allies stretching from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, to Hezbollah’s areas of Lebanon — disintegrated. The Assad government in Syria, a fully fledged state rather than a militia, had been the Iranians’ capstone and a hub for supporting other forces in the so-called Axis of Resistance against Israel and the West.
Of course, religion goes only so far in explaining what is happening in the Middle East. For years, regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia have used theology as a cover for material concerns. In the realignment today, political, military and economic power are at stake. That is underscored by the fact that the change has been driven not by Sunni or Shiite Muslims, but by Israel. Still, Iran, to project its influence, helped to push a sectarian agenda for years, which the Gulf Arab countries often reciprocated. Iran is unlikely to be able to do that again soon.
The question is what will emerge once Sunni-Shiite differences are no longer used as a cudgel in their geopolitical rivalry. Syria now becomes the primary test for a different order. Majority-Sunni countries led by Saudi Arabia and Turkey are determined to bury sectarian differences, which they see as a threat to political stability and economic development.
There may be no more challenging test case than Syria. A decade ago, when Iranian forces rescued a minority-Shiite regime in Damascus, the capital, from an opposition movement rooted in a Sunni majority, it increased sectarian tensions to new levels across the Middle East. In Syria, those tensions have not entirely dissipated. In addition, the new government in Damascus has roots in Sunni jihadist groups, implacable foes of all things Shiite. But its leadership has recognized that any sustained eruption of sectarian fighting will doom efforts to forge a stable, unified state.
“When you give Damascus back to the Sunnis, you change the entire political geography of the Middle East,” said Mustafa Fahs, a political commentator with deep ties in Lebanon’s Shiite community. “It is history.”
The New Sectarian Era
For centuries, Iranian rulers have sought to turn Shiite Muslims far beyond their borders into their natural constituency, pressuring them to look to Iran as their political, as well as spiritual and cultural, patron. It was the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that unleashed a new, modern era of Sunni-Shiite rivalry.
The clerical regime that took over Iran alarmed the Arab world because Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the country’s leader, sought to export the Iranian brand of revolutionary Islamism — with the Supreme Leader as spiritual and political guide — to other Muslim states. It never worked — but Iran was able to use its ideology to win allies and undermine adversaries.
In Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah used the Iranian template as he ran Hezbollah for more than 30 years, until he was killed in an Israeli strike last September. But recreating the Iranian state in Lebanon was never possible. Mr. Nasrallah acknowledged in an interview with me in 2002 that his country was too multicultural to impose traditional interpretations of Shiite Islam, like veiling all women or banning alcohol.
Arab countries were anxious that Iran was out to destabilize them, especially after the Arab uprising gave it the opportunity to strengthen a series of proxy forces across the region, including the Houthis in Yemen and various Iraqi militias. Saudi Arabia, especially, remained openly hostile. Its concern was more that Tehran may try to undermine its neighbors, however, than about the fact that Iran belonged to a different sect of Islam. It was mainly fervent believers in both sects who focused on sectarian differences.
Anti-Shiite diatribes that depicted members of the sect as subhuman were a staple of Saudi satellite channels featuring hard-line Sunni clerics in the 1990s and 2000s. In its official propaganda, the kingdom used to call the Iranian government “Safavids,” referring to the 16th-century expansionist, theocratic Shiite empire. In 2016, the Saudi government beheaded a prominent Shiite cleric and numerous activists, accusing them, among other things, of seeking Iranian intervention.
In a 2018 interview with The Atlantic, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia called Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, worse than Hitler. “Hitler tried to conquer Europe,” he said. “The supreme leader is trying to conquer the world.” He described the ideology behind the Iranian revolution as “pure evil.”
But by 2023, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states decided to de-escalate regional tensions through détente and diplomacy toward Tehran. Prince Mohammed had already dismantled Saudi religious institutions that he thought fed radicalization, including those that fanned sectarianism.
Saudi Arabia — like much of the Arab world — is under pressure from a population boom. The region needs jobs for its young people. A lack of prospects for the future once helped to drive recruitment for jihadist groups. Now, governments in the region hope to change that dynamic through ambitious economic development, including plans for futuristic cities, artificial intelligence initiatives and other tech ventures.
Regional chaos would disrupt their plans. That’s why the Israeli attack on Iran, joined by the United States, initially provoked dismay. Gulf states were concerned not just about being targeted by Iran in response, but of a repeat of what happened in Iraq, when the American invasion brought regime collapse, floods of refugees and years of sectarian bloodshed.
Ultimately, however, the short conflict shattered the illusion of Iranian strength. Although just how much the strikes on Iran set back the country’s nuclear program is uncertain, its failure to protect itself exposed deep-seated weaknesses — and suggests that a new regional order has arrived.
Syria, the Testing Ground
Syria, decimated after nearly 14 years of civil war, is now the testing ground for what comes next.
The Assad regime had little in common with the Islamic republic, but it allied with Tehran out of mutual antipathy toward Israel and the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. So the return of Syria into the Sunni fold is being viewed like the central piece of a jigsaw puzzle suddenly clicking into place.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates — all Sunni-majority countries — are determined to reconstruct Syria and turn it into an economic crossroads for the region, linked by roads, oil pipelines, fiber optic cables, power supplies. The weak central government needs to be propped up, however. The estimated cost of reconstruction is between $250 billion and $400 billion, an amount that the moribund Syrian economy cannot possibly generate.
First and foremost, the new government will have to tamp down the violent sectarian differences that fueled — and were fueled by — the civil war and that could still prevent Syria’s emergence as a unified state. A bloody massacre of Alawites, the minority sect to which the Assad family belongs, left an estimated 1,600 dead in March, while a suicide bomber killed at least 25 people at a Greek Orthodox service in Damascus in June.
The jihadist beginnings of the ragtag militia that formed the core of the new government raises questions. “Syrian nationalists, in particular the group that came to power in Syria, comes out of the far-right, extremist Al Qaeda, Sunni Salafi perspective, which was rooted theologically and politically in a deep anti-Shiite perspective,” said Prof. Nader Hashemi, an expert in Middle East and Islamic politics at Georgetown University. Still, some analysts consider the flood tide of anti-Shiite sentiment among Syrians as a means to rebuke Iran.
Analysts close to the Syrian government say that it is seeking to end sectarian strife, as are its Arab and Turkish patrons. Arab leaders used to compete ferociously in places like Lebanon, tearing the country apart by funding competing militias. In Syria, they seem to be trying to work in tandem.
“A new geographical balance is indeed emerging,” said Col. Hisham Mustafa, a Syrian political and strategic analyst who defected from the army during the revolution. “It hasn’t fully crystallized yet, but it’s clearly taking shape — especially following the irreversible retreat of Iranian influence from Syria and a broader reordering of Arab affairs away from sectarian slogans.”
Colonel Mustafa acknowledged that some people were evoking history and religion to make sectarian political statements about Syria’s new role. Comparisons to the Umayyads imply “that Syria’s political leadership is reclaiming its authentic Arab identity and freeing itself from foreign dominance,” he said.
Dr. Mustafa al-Issa, a Syrian political analyst, said that the new leadership had not officially used the term Umayyad. “The Syrian government is actively working to bridge the divide between Syrian communities,” he said. “The simplest — and most dangerous — tool that the previous system used was religious fragmentation, not just between Sunnis and Shiites, but even within each sect or community.”
‘Caught Between Two Fires’
Arab states do not mind that Iran is being pushed back behind its borders and its nuclear threat diminished, but they are disturbed that it is a result of Israel’s military offensive across the region with the United States’ backing. The cordial relations that Gulf states were fostering with Israel were already problematic, given public opinion in the Middle East outraged by the war in Gaza and its calamitous toll.
That war, also outside the sectarian framework, presents another formidable obstacle to visions of a less volatile, more interconnected Arab world in the wake of Iran’s decline. As long as the Palestinian issue is unresolved, it will be a wellspring of instability.
“We’re caught between two fires here,” said Bader al-Saif, a history professor at Kuwait University. “The Gulf states certainly do not want to be in an Israeli-led regional order.”
It is not clear what will emerge as the sectarian strife diminishes. Iran’s foreign policy is a question mark, as is the degree to which the proxy forces across the region that it had armed will endeavor to reconstitute themselves.
The most recent precedent was set in the 1990s, when Iran, staggering from the destruction caused by an eight-year war with Iraq, turned inward to rebuild. In an effort toward regional reconciliation, the moderates who came to power largely abandoned the effort to export the Islamic republic’s revolutionary ideology. So many Shiite Muslims in the region shifted away from the effort, too.
Analysts believe something similar could transpire now. With Iranian influence diminished, Arab countries can push back, and Shiite communities from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Bahrain might pursue domestic integration rather than separation.
“What will be interesting to see in the coming months and years is how Shiite centers of power in Lebanon, in Iraq, even in Bahrain and Pakistan, will take into account the weakening of Iran, of its ability to force these patronage networks among Shiite communities throughout the Middle East,” said Laurence Louër, a Middle East specialist at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris. “What we could see is Shiite national dynamics, local dynamics, taking precedence over Iranian attempts to try to form the Shiites into a pro-Iranian constituency.”
Muhammad Haj Kadour, Hwaida Saad and Jacob Roubai contributed reporting.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
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