Damascus: Iran’s embassy in the Mezze district of Damascus is a striking-looking building - the facade covered in elaborately decorated turquoise tiles that would look at home in Isfahan or Tabriz. Its roof bristles with communications antennae and it is guarded by machine-gun-toting security men and a high, earth-filled blast barrier that juts awkwardly into the busy main road outside. The embassy is the most visible sign of the Islamic Republic’s presence in Syria. Its economic, political and military backing for President Bashar Al Assad has been crucial for the last four-and-a-half years.
And it looks like becoming more so - both in shaping events on the ground and, perhaps, in international efforts to end the conflict.
“The Syrian regime is increasingly dependent on Iran,” says a senior western diplomat. “Its footprint is growing.”
Outside the Damascus embassy the Iranians keep a lower profile than the Russians, who have a naval base near Latakia and a more visible role boosted by the arrival of new equipment and personnel . IRGC advisers, who are occasionally spotted near the frontlines, shun publicity. Fit-looking Iranians in civilian clothes are sometimes seen crossing the Lebanese border, handing over their passports en masse without being required to leave their vehicles - a sure sign of their discreet VIP status.
“The Iranians are there - and they are not there,” quips a Sunni businessman from Homs. “They are a ghostly presence.” Speculation about their activities is rife. But the consensus among many Syrians and foreign experts is that their role is extremely important - though very shadowy.
“We know quite a lot about what the Iranians do in specific places - we see weapons, equipment and intercepts - but we still don’t have an understanding of what they do in institutional terms,” says Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
“The question is to what extent they are involved in planning and command and control.” Iran has certainly provided a financial lifeline to Al Assad since the 2011 uprising, releasing billions of dollars of loans and credit for imports of oil and other commodities. Another important contribution was setting up the national defence forces (NDF), locally-based militia units outside the regular army, which have acquired a reputation for profiteering and brutality. But in recent months Iran is said to have stopped paying NDF personnel, adding to the growing strain on the Al Assad regime - admitted by the president in an unusually frank speech in July.
The Damascus rumour mill suggests some senior Syrian officials are unhappy with the Iranian role - but that their dependence on Tehran means they have to grin and bear it. Relations go back to Syrian backing for the 1979 Islamic revolution - and Hafez Al Al Assad’s support for Iran during the grinding eight-year war with Iraq. Still, at the personal level, Russians are more comfortable allies for a relentlessly secular regime - their vodka toasts easier to stomach than the dour religiosity of the Iranians, laughs a well-connected foreign observer.
And on one view, Moscow’s increasingly active role reflects in part its own unease at Tehran’s growing influence in Syria and an effort to obtain greater leverage over Al Assad.
It is a measure of Tehran’s clout that Iranian officials, with Hezbollah representatives, have in recent weeks been directly conducting ceasefire negotiations over the strategic town of Zabadani, near the Lebanese border - as they did last year over the siege of Homs in central Syria.
The rebel fighters in Zabadani are from Ahrar Al Sham, a powerful Islamist group that is backed by the Turkish government and is trying to appeal to western countries. Further north, in Idlib province, its men are besieging the two Shiite villages of Foua and Kafraya. The Iranians demanded a Sunni-Shiite population exchange and want to resettle the Shiite around the Sayyida Zeinab shrine - revered by Shiite everywhere - in Damascus.
To suspicious Syrians that sounds like a plan for replicating Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut - and making sectarian cleansing an explicit element in the war. Faisal Itani, of the Atlantic Council , said: “Iran’s handling of the Zabadani crisis indicates a shift in its Syria strategy, in which it either negotiates on behalf of or ignores Al Assad and his inner circle, securing its interests directly rather than by proxy.”
Ordinary Syrians fret about wider Iranian influence: Damascenes gossip about land confiscated in Mezze to build a big Iranian housing project as well as a new embassy closer to the city centre; about Iranians buying up prime real estate, often anonymously. Last year 35% of all Syrian imports came from Iran. Now many government tenders are open only to Iranians.
“Syria has been sold to the Iranians,” complains a resident of one of the capital’s better neighbourhoods. “They control everything.”
Prejudice and paranoia make for a toxic argument that is promoted energetically by the Syrian opposition. Some even describe Syria as “Iranian-occupied” - a wild exaggeration.
Still, even some Al Assad loyalists are clearly worried. “Iranians could really control everything because they hold all the keys,” says a respected lawyer, insisting on anonymity.
“But they would be in direct conflict with the Saudis and the Americans and the international community if they were more overt. So they apply pressure quietly and acquire more cards to play. But yes, they have their own people here.”
“The more the Iranians speak about Syria’s sovereignty the more they violate it,” argues Ebrahim Hamidi, a highly-regarded Syrian journalist with the London-based Al Hayat newspaper. “The more they talk about national identity the more they promote sub-identities. The more they talk about fighting Daesh, the more they provoke it. Whatever the Iranians say, they do the opposite. The Iranians are trying to play the same role in Syria as Syria used to play in Lebanon: they create their own clients and they hold the balance between different centres of power. Now the Iranians are trying to create their own parallel regime - with their militias, businessmen and properties, and social engineering.”
Still, Iran does not always get its way. It was, for example, prepared to release prisoners in the Zabadani talks but that was apparently vetoed by the Syrians. Its recent four-point peace plan, put forward by Javad Zarif, the foreign minister and hero of the marathon nuclear negotiations, was also rejected by Damascus because it called for internationally supervised elections - something Al Assad was not prepared to contemplate.
“The Iranians are playing a key role, even a vital one,” says Hokayem of the IISS, “but they are not calling the shots.”
