Cry Havoc: Iran Builds Land Bridge to Syria

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November 9, 2017, 2 AM ET

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{Originally posted to the author's website, Liberty Unyielding}

Americans were startled to learn on Saturday that Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri had resigned abruptly – addressing his nation from a remote perch in Saudi Arabia – and within a short time, Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen had fired a ballistic missile at King Khalid International Airport near the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

The Saudis intercepted the incoming missile. They were also busy throughout the day on Saturday rounding up princes and arresting them, in order to consolidate power in the Kingdom.

Lebanon will be left with Hezbollah to decide what comes next there. Whatever the Saudis’ next move is, it won’t be brokering a follow-on coalition in Lebanon under the now-ended status quo. Riyadh has effectively checked out of that loop for the time being.

This isn’t some nutty Middle Eastern ritual going on. The reason it’s all happening now is that a sequence of events is unfolding: one that’s visible on a map, but that there is virtually no reporting on in the U.S.

The sequence of events, taken together, equals Iran completing her land bridge – her military line of communication – across Iraq and into Syria. This is a major shift, one that under the best of circumstances would be a permanently destabilizing, if latent, condition.

But the best of circumstances are not what we face. The U.S. is out of position to contain this situation. No one else can contain it. It will metastasize; the only questions are how, and how fast.

Iran’s progress in assembling core “caliphate” territory. (Google map; author annotation)

I have been arguing for months that we should engage the erstwhile U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria to block this move. (See here for the proposed strategy, laid out.) But we never made the feeblest attempt to do that, and now Iran is completing the move. It’s a done deal at this point. Forces backed by Iran are within a few dozen miles of each other in eastern Syria now, and will be able to hook up in the next few days.

The pretext for Iran, as always (since 2014), is “defeating ISIS.” Iran has exploited this strategic pretext throughout her campaign across Iraq, and the companion drive with Assad into eastern Syria, to gobble up the territory that will form her land bridge.

Her move against the Kurds in northern Iraq a few weeks ago makes the land bridge more secure, relieving the pressure on Iran from Kurdish military capabilities in northern Iraq, and positioning Iran to hold a veto over the territory where Turkey will also want to gain leverage.

High payoff: Iran dominates far more territory now than she had to gain through direct maneuver and control – because a “unified Iraq” makes that possible. (Google map; author annotation)

Iran’s earlier moves toward completing this genuinely epic strategic goal were behind the Saudis’ decision in early June to cut ties with Qatar. Qatar, a key member of the U.S. coalition, has been too cozy with Iran for some time now – as the Saudis see it – and is actively working to foster policies that Iran favors, and that are disadvantageous to the Saudis’ and other Sunni Arabs’ (Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states) political vision for the region.

It became clear in the last six weeks that the U.S. was going to do nothing to stop Iran’s progress across either Iraq or Syria. What was not so clear, until this weekend, was that the Iran-backed move to complete the land bridge could be accomplished as quickly as it has been. The final campaign has taken only about eight days so far, and the link-up of the pincer Iran has closing in is imminent.

In brief, Assad and the Iran-backed militias on the Syria side have fully taken the key city of Deir ez-Zor, and are now moving southeast from it toward the border town of al-Bukamal. They are also headed east along the border toward al-Bukamal (see map).