HAWSH AL-SAYYID ALI, Syria — From the front seat of a black GMC truck, Maher Ziwani, the Syrian army commander overseeing this stretch of the border with Lebanon, radioed ahead to check the safety of the dirt track stretching to the frontier. But before he got a response, Syrian fighters on a motorbike sped past his window, shouting a warning.
“Hezbollah, Hezbollah!” one yelled. “Hezbollah shot one of our guys!”
A car followed, its interior smeared with blood. A patrol had come under fire, soldiers said.
In recent weeks, Syrian government forces have been trying to choke off smuggling routes that cross the rugged 233-mile border with Lebanon. These routes are the last vestiges of the “land bridge” — a network traversing the breadth of Syria — used by Iran and its allied militias to ferry weapons, cash, drugs and fuel. These had helped prop up the ousted government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and represented vital support for the regime’s powerful ally, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, including in its confrontation with Israel.
Today, it’s a dramatically different picture after Islamist militants overthrew Assad in December, dealing a major setback to Iran’s regional power and largely cutting it off from Hezbollah.
From the border smuggling hubs like Hawsh al-Sayyid Ali, still smoldering from clashes when Ziwani visited last month, to the abandoned Shiite Muslim militia bases in the war-ravaged cities of Qusayr and Palmyra to the east,
waypoints once used by Iran and its proxies are in tatters. A recent reporting trip by Washington Post journalists to these once-vital nodes in the smuggling network found abundant evidence of a hasty exit.
With its regional influence shattered, however, Iran has now started looking beyond its traditional allies, including to Sunni Muslim extremist groups, in efforts to maintain supply lines and destabilize the new government, headed by interim leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, security officials in Europe and the region have warned. This is among the many challenges for Sharaa as he tries to cope with the meddling of rival outside powers and unite Syria.
Clashes on the Lebanese border
Iran’s once uncontested dominance over Syria’s strategic corridors has given way to a new uncertain order.
After Hezbollah was pummeled by Israeli forces in Lebanon last fall, the group remains desperate to replenish its arms stockpiles and bring in cash to compensate its traditional supporters in Beirut and southern Lebanon who lost property in the conflict
“They are trying to open gaps,” Ziwani said, referring to the attempts of clans aligned with Hezbollah to retain smuggling routes.
Efforts by Ziwani’s forces to cut smuggling routes have flared into deadly clashes. The most severe came last month, when local clans in the border area confronted Syrian government troops, residents said. Three Syrian soldiers were killed, and Syrian forces responded by entering the village of Hawsh al-Sayyid Ali, which they said had been a base for operations against their forces. They poured thousands of reinforcements into the area — largely from the northern Syrian province of Idlib, which has long been a stronghold of the Islamist militants who overthrew Assad.
The Lebanese military also said it became involved, responding to shelling inside its territory. Hezbollah said it did not take part.
“It’s quite difficult to draw a clear line between the clans and Hezbollah. There’s clear and strong cooperation between the two,” said Haid Haid, a Syria analyst with Chatham House who tracks transnational smuggling routes.
Even after a ceasefire was agreed upon, bullets still whistled through the air in Hawsh al-Sayyid Ali. How much does Ziwani trust the Lebanese military to secure the border? “Not even 1 percent,” he said as he eyed the Lebanese troops in the distance.
Hezbollah weapons hubs
The region around the Lebanese border became a critical hub for Hezbollah over the course of the 13-year Syrian civil war, a center for drugs manufacturing and gateway for the transfer of weapons and manpower. During operations in border villages, Syrian government forces discovered 15 factories for making Captagon, an amphetamine-like drug whose sales benefited both the Assad regime and Hezbollah. Local security officials estimated the value of the trade reached to tens of millions of dollars.
In the city of Qusayr, just six miles from the Lebanese border, the entire industrial zone had been turned into a vast weapons storage site, covering an area of about 50 soccer fields. Israeli airstrikes had blown the shutters off the windows of buildings, and boxes of munitions were visible.
“These are Iranian missiles,” said Samer Abu Qassim, head of general security for Qusayr, pointing to large wooden cases. The remnants of other ordnance littered the ground. “This was a central facility for them,” he said. “All these shops were weapons storage.”
A nearby building, formerly a school, had been used as a Hezbollah training base. Paintball pellets from exercises were strewn in the yard. Drones lay discarded in a stairwell on top of boxes of munitions. Hastily abandoned teaching aids offered a glimpse of Hezbollah’s pedagogy, including how fighters prepared battle plans.
As the Islamist fighters led by Sharaa advanced last year from northern Syria, Hezbollah militants who had gathered in the city packed up and left without a fight, locals said.
“It was a huge loss for them,” said Ahmed Adbelhakim Ammar, the head of security for Qusayr and its surroundings. For Hezbollah, the area had become a “second Hermel,” he said, referring to the group’s stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
Arms stockpiles in Syria
Still, elements of Iran’s network in Syria remain active, particularly those linked to Hezbollah, said Haid. The new Syrian government has intercepted more than a dozen shipments bound for Lebanon, he said. One such raid in January, announced by Syria’s interior ministry, yielded crates of drones hidden in a truck of animal feed.
“There is a huge stockpile in Syria that Hezbollah is trying to move out of Syria,” Haid said. “They know where those are, and they are working with Syrian networks to get them out.”
To do so, Hezbollah must evade Israeli airstrikes. The bridge connecting Hawsh al-Sayyid Ali to Lebanon — one of Hezbollah’s key supply lines — was destroyed by an airstrike during Israel’s war with Hezbollah, and Israel has continued to pound stockpiles in Syria.
Some cross-country networks are likely to be still functioning, said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Shiite militias.
“In a quasi-anarchic Syria, it’s not going to be hard for them to get across when a government is trying to solidify itself and dealing with a ton of internal issues,” he said. “They have melted back into the surroundings; operating with more criminally focused networks is probably going to be the de facto way they do business.”
Suspicions about Iran
Beyond the smuggling efforts, Syrian officials have also accused Iran of seeking to destabilize the new government, including by helping to foment recent violence along the coast, when coordinated attacks by Assad loyalists on Syrian security forces spiraled into sectarian violence.
Syrian officials have not provided details to back up their claims, and two European security officials said there is no evidence of a direct Iranian role in the coordinated attacks against Syrian forces.
But the European officials said Iran had instead been trying to sow unrest by mobilizing Sunni extremists, including militants affiliated with the Islamic State, against the new Syrian government. “We see Iranian involvement there,” one of the officials said. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, did not elaborate.
A planned trip in late March to Damascus by the German and Austrian interior ministers was abruptly called off because of a concrete threat from affiliates of the former regime against diplomats, according to a Western security official and diplomat.
Over the years, Iran has fostered a wide array of proxy groups to advance its interests. Iran, for instance, trained fighters from the Algeria-based Polisario Front, a militant group fighting for the independence of the Western Sahara from Morocco, with hundreds now detained by Syria’s new security forces, according to a regional official and a third European official.
In Palmyra, home to the breathtaking ruins of one of the most important cities in the ancient world, the fall of Assad’s regime has helped reveal the scale of Iran-backed militias in Syria.
“Death to America,” the graffiti read on the side of a former hotel that was used to house hundreds of fighters from Liwa al-Fatemiyoun, a militia of Afghan Shiites deployed to advance Iranian interests in Syria. The city, on a strategic desert crossroads, essentially became a vast military compound, soldiers in Palmyra said. Today, security forces have finished clearing booby traps and mines planted in and around the city, but their grip appears flimsy.
“State control is zero,” said Zaher al Salim, 40, a volunteer with the local civilian council.
