The Middle East is at a crossroads again. Undergoing significant shifts to traditional security structures and balances of power, coupled with a hard-to-predict U.S. foreign policy, may make the region unrecognizable in a few years. Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 attack by targeting the long arms of the Iranian octopus, extending into neighboring Arab countries, has created substantial security gaps that are altering the status quo enabled by the Arab Spring revolutions fifteen years ago and is now paving the way for new actors to dictate the future of the region. The ripple effect of such changes is way broader than the Iran-Israel battlefield or the Middle East’s strategic dome. It will also upset the political and economic interests of world superpowers, who have been competing for a while on the geopolitical chessboard of the Middle East. In particular, four interrelated trends will define the region's future and long-term impact on the broader Great Power Competition in 2025 and beyond.
The first trend is Israel’s ascendence as a regional agenda-setter, independent from the reckonings of its Western allies.
Israel has been the epicenter of the ongoing geopolitical quake in the Middle East, with its strategic responses to Hamas and Iran-sponsored militia fundamentally fluctuating the regional balance of power. When Hamas’ deceased commander, Yahya Al-Sinwar, and his Al-Qassam Brigades orchestrated the October 7 attacks on Israel, with the blessing of Iran, they likely gambled on the international community’s intervention, in sympathy with the Palestinian civilians, to tie Israel’s hands from taking an all-out response. As expected, Hamas’ staunch supporters, Qatar and Türkiye, who are also members of the so-called Axis of Resistance alongside Iran, have worked with full force to lobby the international community against Israel.
On one hand, they partnered with South Africa to take Israel to international trials on accusations of genocide and apartheid. On the other hand, Türkiye provided Hamas with a political blanket to justify its attack on Israel as a political cause, while Qatar dedicated its massive multi-lingual media network, Al-Jazeera, to twist the narrative about the actual causes and objectives of the war in Gaza. The worst part was ignoring the Israeli hostage situation and exempting Hamas from any responsibility for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza resulting from the war.
Hamas should be held accountable for the blood of the innocent civilians in Gaza. That is not only because Hamas started this war but also because it is the responsibility of Hamas, as the government of Gaza, to provide shelter for civilians in the time of war. Instead of doing so, Hamas militants hid among the civilians in Gaza. They hid in tunnels they purposefully built under houses, schools, and hospitals to deter the Israeli Army from shooting at them. Hamas did not only use the Gazans as human shields, but it left the civilians naked from any kind of protection to face the horrors of the war alone, claiming that it is “the responsibility of the United Nations, not the Hamas government, to protect the people of Gaza.”
Close observers of the former episodes of the Hamas-Israel conflict know that Hamas purposefully aims to increase the number of civilians killed to use “their blood as fuel in the fight against Israel,” as Ismael Haniyeh, the assassinated political leader of Hamas, clearly stated during the early weeks of the war. In simple words, Hamas leaders believe that the greater the number of civilian casualties, the greater the sympathy and legitimacy Hamas gains.
Israel’s resilience, Iran’s unprecedented defeat, and the short policy freeze experienced by key Arab policymakers following the fall of Syria in the hands of a jihadist organization in December have opened the door for two powerful but rival actors to set the agenda for the region’s future; namely Türkiye and Israel. In the new phase, it is highly likely that Israel, energized by a well-deserved sense of triumph, will prefer to play a bigger regional role independent from the concerns and preferences of its international allies, especially against the backdrop of Türkiye’s expansion in the levant region and rising influence on Egypt and Arab Gulf states.
The second is the emergence of a Türkiye-sponsored Ring of Fire around Israel, which could be way more potent than the collapsing Iran’s militia network.
Sinwar’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation aimed to devastate Israel and indirectly bolster the influence of the Axis of Resistance states—Iran, Qatar, and Türkiye. Instead, it has galvanized Israel’s resilience and strategic capabilities, fundamentally altering the dynamics of the long-term conflict between Israel and Iran. One year later, Iran’s regional strategy has faced unprecedented setbacks, and its network of proxies and militia – often referred to as the “long arms of the octopus” or “the ring of fire around Israel” are increasingly vulnerable.
Now, the Islamic regime in Iran is experiencing a historic moment of defeat that they may not recover from anytime soon. Over the past year, Tehran has lost its strongest proxies in Lebanon and Syria, including Hezbollah, in a masterful Israeli intelligence operation. Meanwhile, the Iran-sponsored Houthis in Yemen are highly weakened by Israel’s pointed attacks on the Houthi-controlled ports and munition centers, on one hand, and the US Central Command attacks in defense of the trade flow in the Red Sea, on the other hand. At the beginning of the war in Gaza last October, the Houthis purposefully blocked the Red Sea and attacked dozens of vessels operated by Western companies and did not stop until the US Central Command intervened in March to control the situation.
In a desperate attempt to save his face, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a statement in late December abandoning his defeated proxies and detaching from them. “The Islamic Republic does not have a proxy force.” Khamenei asserted, “The Houthis in Yemen fight because it has faith. Hezbollah fights because the power of faith draws it into the field. Hamas and [the Islamic] Jihad fight because their beliefs compel them to do so. They do not act as our proxies.” Then, he added, “[The Americans] keep saying that the Islamic Republic has lost its proxy forces in the region! This is another mistake. If we want to take action one day, we do not need a proxy force.”
Domestically, the Iranian political and economic structures are also shaking. Iran’s axis of resistance partners, Türkiye and Qatar, have been desperately trying to rescue the Iranian economy for a while. However, the energy crisis caused by Israel’s bombing of two main gas pipelines in February is beyond repair. Natural gas accounts for 70% of Iran's energy consumption. The government had to cut gas service to residential houses, factories, schools, and governmental offices to adapt to the daily deficit of 350 million cubic meters. Politically, media reports claimed a division between the older and younger officials in the Iranian regime over the failure to protect the Al-Assad regime in Syria. If true, such divisions on policy priorities may eventually lead to endeavors from within the regime to overthrow Khamenei.
Ironically, Israel’s targeting of Iran has not dismantled the Axis of Resistance. It only weakened Iran but somehow empowered Türkiye to lead the Axis of Resistance and create its own Sunni ring of fire around Israel. Unlike Iran’s Shiite militia network, Türkiye’s ring of fire is expected to be even more suffocating to Israel because it includes a mixture of grassroots Sunni Islamist organizations as well as Arab regimes.
In the fog of the Gaza war, Türkiye, playing on the “Palestinian Cause” string and the tragedies of the humanitarian situation in Gaza, has bolstered its relationship with the existing Arab allies, such as Qatar and Jordan, and successfully aligned hesitating Arab leaders such as President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Egypt, Crown Prince Mohamed Ben Salman in Saudi Arabia, and President Mohamed Ben Zayed in the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, the defeat of Shiite jihadist organizations at the hands of Israel has opened the space for Sunni Islamists – the Salafi-jihadist groups in particular – to fill in the geopolitical gaps created by the absence of Iran-sponsored groups. One stark example is the rise of Hayat Tahrir El-Sham (HTS) in Syria under the declared sponsorship of Turkish intelligence.
Türkiye’s network of allegiant Sunni groups is so broad. It extends from the political Islamist groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood, who still operate with variant degrees of exposure and influence in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, and Kuwait, as well as violent jihadist groups operating in the Levant region, including Hamas, HTS, the Syrian Free Army, et al.
The alignment of Türkiye with Islamist factions complicates the geopolitical landscape. Türkiye’s long-term support for Sunni Islamist organizations and its contentious relationship with Kurdish groups underscore its dual role as both a stabilizer and a disruptor in the regions of the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. This interplay has significant implications for the future of Syria and Iraq, where shifting alliances and the evolving strategies of Islamist movements and Jihadist groups could further exacerbate longstanding ethnic and sectarian tensions.
The third trend, and perhaps the most concerning of all, is watching the Salafi-jihadist groups applying the most devious trick in the playbook of the Muslim Brotherhood: converting from non-state actors violently attacking Arab nation-states and vowing death to the West into state actors willing to work within the configuration of the nation-state and the secular macrocosm without giving up on their jihad mission.
The recent fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria was the strongest shockwave of Israel’s strategy to dismantle Iran’s network of regional dominance. Syria represented a critical node in Tehran’s long-term strategy to eliminate Israel, pull the strings of the levant countries, and impact policymaking in Arab Gulf states. The failure of Iran to protect the Assad regime due to the defeat of Hezbollah and its fellow Shiite militia in Syria created a security void that has allowed Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), founded and led by Al-Qaeda terrorists, to expand its influence and hijack political power. Today, HTS jihadists are on the top of the state, calling the shots in Syrian politics while mercilessly cracking down on religious and ethnic minorities, ranging from the Alawite tribes to which the Assad family belongs to the Christians in the south and the Kurds in the north.
In the last week of December, dozens of Alawites in the west coast city of Tartus were tortured and killed by the HTS militants after they protested the burning of an Alawite shrine by the violent extremists. To justify their crimes, the HTS militants claimed that they were only targeting the “remnants” of the Assad regime. However, horrific footage of their atrocities, some disseminated by the perpetrators themselves on social media, showed that most of those brutalized by the HTS were helpless, unarmed civilians. This brutal campaign underscores the true nature of the HTS—a terrorist organization led by a career terrorist, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, whose extremist agenda threatens to plunge Syria into further chaos.
The HTS attack on Tartus took place two days after HTS chief Ahmed Al-Sharaa (jihadist alias: Abu Mohamed Al-Jolani) announced the integration of the “armed rebel factions” operating in Syria into a new Syrian army working under the Ministry of Defense. This move, far from representing unity or progress, is a calculated attempt to grant state-level legitimacy and immunity to the terrorist organizations that have long destabilized Syria, Iraq, and the broader Middle East. Let alone the fact that most of the militants in these jihadist organizations are not Syrians or even Arabs but foreigners from Asia, Africa, and Europe. If this were indeed about unifying the Syrians under the power of the state, why are Syrian Shiite, Kurdish, Druze, and other ethnic groups conspicuously excluded from this so-called national army of Syria?
The Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, in a press conference with Ahmed Al-Sharaa in Damascus on December 22nd, said that there is “no place for Kurdish armed groups in the future of Syria” and blamed the United States for supporting the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) despite the group “illegally occupying one-third of the Syrian territory and its natural energy resources.” Despite asserting the right of the Kurdish people to live safely as “a Syrian component,” Fidan, and also President Erdogan, see the armed Kurdish groups operating in northern Syria as a serious threat to Türkiye’s national security. Türkiye considers the SDF a terrorist organization similar to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), despite the SDF’s tremendous role in defeating the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization in 2014-2016.
Hakan Fidan, who previously served as the Turkish Intelligence Chief for thirteen years, is believed to be the mastermind behind Türkiye’s intervention to topple the Assad regime and allow the space for HTS to ascend to power. In an interview on a Turkish TV station on December 17th, Fidan said that Türkiye contacted the Russians and Iranians to “ensure they would not intervene militarily” to protect Assad from the HTS offensive on the state in early December. Weakened and overwhelmed by their own wars, Iran and Russia agreed to let Assad fall with minimal resistance. Fidan, in the aforementioned press conference on December 22nd, has also stated that Türkiye will work to institutionalize HTS into a legitimate government that can rule Syria.
This generous Turkish support to the HTS could perhaps explain the campaign to rebrand Al-Jolani from a career terrorist into a revolutionist or a “jihadist-politician” capable of leading the future of Syria. It started with dropping his terrorist alias and instead using his birth name, trimming his beard, and appearing in a secular statesman’s suit and neck-tie. It seems that Al-Sharaa was advised by his Turkish partners to use the playbook of the Muslim Brotherhood, who managed to survive over a century, by showing that despite their jihadist ideology, they still can operate within the architecture of the secular nation-state and cleverly separated their political leadership from their armed factions. Committing to this strategy has enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to threaten the stability of Arab monarchies and military-led regimes in Arab countries, as evidenced by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to the top of power in Egypt and Tunisia in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
The HTS, however, marks a more dangerous iteration of the political Islamism that we know. It is the first jihadist organization operating not merely as a non-state actor but as a group with aspirations for governing and playing politics. Salafi-Jihadist groups, like the HTS or Al-Qaeda, where Al-Sharaa comes from, reject the concept of seeking political power within a secular nation-state. In an interview on Al-Jazeera TV in 2022, Al-Sharaa blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for not using violent jihad against the Egyptian military instead of running for elections and making political deals with the Americans.
Nevertheless, the same terrorist propaganda machine that has been desperately trying to convince the world that Sinwar and Hamas are “freedom fighters” striving to build a Palestinian state is the same PR machine that is currently introducing Al-Jolani and HTS as “patriotic revolutionaries” working on building a free and democratic state in Syria. However, the reality that many choose to ignore is that the ideology of these jihadists fundamentally opposes the hypothesis of the nation-state. They actively fight against it, as they view secular systems of governance—whether democratic or not—as barriers to achieving the dominance of the Islamic Ummah (nation) over the world, often referred to as the dream of establishing a Caliphate.
Now, it seems that Al-Jolani, backed by the Islamist leadership in Türkiye, does not mind using the political tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood for a while. He put down the jihadist rhetoric, put on a politician’s suit, and is willing to make deals with the Americans. The United States is reportedly set to remove the $10 million bounty it had placed on Al-Sharaa after a meeting he had with a US diplomatic delegation in Damascus in early December. Barbara Leaf, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, who led the delegation, described Al-Jolani to the press as “pragmatic” and “moderate” and mentioned that he pledged to prevent terrorist groups in Syria from threatening the US interests and allies.
Yet, it is hard to believe that a long-term terrorist like Al-Jolani, who grew up killing and torturing people in the ranks of an established terrorist organization like Al-Qaeda, would ever become a moderate Muslim. Even if he miraculously can convert, his fellow jihadists are not going to change, and they are now enabled to do whatever they like in Syria under the flag of applying their extremist version of Sharia. The burning of the Christmas trees in Damascus and the brutal attacks on Alawite civilians and holy sites in western Syria are only the beginning of a potential bloody scene that may overwhelm Syria and the entire Middle East for decades to come.
The fourth trend is the increasing state of caution and disarray among Arab policymakers, particularly those struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing dynamics of power in the region.
Amid the dramatic developments that have been overwhelming the Middle East region in the past eighteen months, the regional authority of Egypt and Arab Gulf states seems to be eroding. This state of Arab bewilderment, even if temporary, ceded significant power to Israel and Türkiye, who seem to be the parties dictating the major events in the region in the coming years. Most Arab countries are consumed by domestic challenges such as economic crises and security concerns from the current state of regional instability and the rise of a jihadist organization like the HTS to the top of political power in Syria. The Arab Gulf states that rose as pivotal players in Middle East politics in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, were voluntarily sidelined from the recent clashes between Israel and Iran, and now they are almost missing on the opportunity to guide the future interplay between Israel and Türkiye.
The early signs of Arab leaders’ disarray were evident in their response to the October 7 attack. While a few of Arab states discreetly paid condolences to Israel, Arab governments showed no public support to Israel’s response to Hamas. Some Arab leaders went as far as justifying the atrocities of Hamas to win points with their politically suppressed and economically devastated citizens. This created a non-declared rift with Israel and made Arab players, such as Egypt, lose a big deal of its historical power as the key mediator of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, to the point that Egypt had to seek the help of Qatar in mediating a ceasefire deal in Gaza due to Qatar’s political and financial leverage over Hamas. Even the ceasefire deal announced in mid-January in the haste of passing the baton from the Biden to the Trump administration, seems to be prone to obstruction by unrealistic expectations and the fact that two of the mediators – Qatar and Egypt – have stakes in the war and are not neutral.
Needless to mention is Arab’s failure to intervene in any other diplomatic manner to relief the Gazans from the hell of the war. They took the easy way of blaming Israel rather than standing up for their responsibility to provide shelter for the Gazans who wanted to escape the battlefield. Other than sending trucks of humanitarian aid to Gaza, Arab governments refused to host the Palestinian people as refugees, even for a temporary period. Egypt and Jordan, the immediate neighbors of Israel and the Palestinians, were the first to mark opening their borders for the Palestinian refugees as a redline. They are now have to deal with tremendous pressures applied on them by the US Administration of President Trump to open their doors for refugees and effectively contributing to the reconstruction of Gaza.
On another level, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, who once formed an alliance to fight against political Islamism in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, are now mystified by the rise of a violent jihadist group like the HTS to the top of political power in Syria. Although they equivocally applaud the retreat of the Iranian influence after Assad’s fall, they are extremely concerned with the impact of HTS empowerment on regional security. However, it seems that the three Arab allies are adopting divergent policies on how to deal with the HTS, in contrast to their unanimous agreement to crack on the Muslim Brotherhood. That is perhaps because the HTS does not represent a direct threat to the political powers of the leaders of these Arab states as the Muslim Brotherhood were.
While Saudi Arabia and the UAE decided to accept the advances of Ahmed al-Sharaa and open channels of communication with the HTS government in hope to win influence over decision-making in future Syria, the Egyptian President is still hesitant to shake hands with the HTS President and have been timidly warning against the threat of Syria turning into a lodging hub for terrorist organizations. The three major Arab states have fostered their relationship with Türkiye over the war in Gaza, as they formed a joint stance to pressure Israel to end the war. Now, they are apparently starting to reconsider the extent of their alliance with Türkiye on the background of President Erdogan and the Turkish intelligence to the HTS.
Meanwhile, Qatar, which is part of the Axis of Resistance states opposing Israel – alongside Türkiye and Iran – is attempting to whitewash its hands from its role in nurturing and financing extremist Islamist groups over the past three decades, especially in light of President Trump’s return to the White House. In Trump’s first term, Qatar’s longstanding support for organizations like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood has increasingly drawn global attention and scrutiny and complicated its diplomatic standing.
Salvation in cooperation!
The Middle East stands at a pivotal juncture, with profound transformations shaping the region’s future. The traditional balance of power is giving way to an emerging landscape dominated by Israel’s strategic independence and Türkiye’s regional supremacy. Iran’s declining influence, coupled with the rise of Salafi-jihadist groups like Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, underscores the volatility of the geopolitical environment, raising concerns over long-term stability. The inability of Arab states to present a cohesive and effective response further exacerbates the region’s fragmentation, leaving power vacuums for other actors to exploit. While the consequences of these shifts are most acutely felt within the Middle East, the reverberations extend globally, influencing major world powers’ political and economic interests. As the region transitions into an era of heightened complexity, the key to securing a more stable and balanced Middle East lies in fostering regional cooperation, countering extremist ideologies, and ensuring that the voices of moderate Arab actors are not drowned out in the cacophony of competing agendas. The stakes are high, and the decisions made today will undoubtedly shape the region’s trajectory for decades to come.