Iranian General Admits ‘We Were Defeated Very Badly’ in Syria

Given that Iranian leaders, from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on down, have engaged for years in endless boasting about their country’s military power, often accompanying this braggadocio with bloodcurdling threats directed at Israel, the admission from Brigadier General Behrouz Esbati of a catastrophic defeat is notable. Of course, he had little choice. “Islamic Republic suffered severe defeat in Syria, Iranian general says – report,” Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2025:

The Islamic Republic suffered a significant defeat in Syria in the aftermath of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s toppling, Iranian Brig.-Gen. Behrouz Esbati said in a speech last week in Tehran, according to The New York Times, citing local Iranian media.

“We were defeated and defeated very badly, we took a very big blow, and it’s been very difficult,” Esbati noted, according to the report, adding, “I don’t consider losing Syria something to be proud of.”

Unlike some of Israel’s victories over the Islamic Republic, which the Iranian government did not need to recognize, or could have minimized their significance — such as the Stuxnet computer worm that caused uranium-enriching centrifuges at Natanz to speed up and destroy themselves, or the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists, or the Mossad’s seizure of Iran’s nuclear archives — the loss of Syria, which upon the overthrow of the despot Bashar Assad, an Alawite (the Alawite sect is considered an offshoot of Shi’a Islam), by Sunni rebels, cannot be dismissed or hidden.

The geopolitical earthquake next door was felt by all Iranians. Syria had been Iran’s most important ally, and now, in a matter of weeks, that country has gone from being that ally to becoming its mortal enemy. This is too enormous an event for the Iranian government to try to hide or minimize. And the loss of Syria can be presented to the Iranian people as something other than a victory achieved by Israel — although it was partly that, albeit indirectly, for without the IDF’s war on Hezbollah, that group might have offered military support to Assad. Instead, though Israel’s battering of Hezbollah rendered the group unable to help Assad, the loss of Syria can be presented as purely an intra-Muslim affair. General Esbati would never have delivered such a frank speech without having cleared it with the Supreme Leader. In this case, denial of such an obvious setback would have been met with popular ridicule. Better in this case to own up: “We were defeated and defeated very badly, we took a very big blow, and it’s been very difficult.”

But at the same time, General Esbati offers his conviction that Iran will still be able to continue to operate from Syria: “We can activate all the networks we have worked with over the years. We can activate the social layers that our guys lived among for years; we can be active in social media, and we can form resistance cells.”

Others in the Iranian military think Esbati, while admitting a colossal defeat, is too hopeful about Iran’s future in Syria. How can Iran hope to continue operating in Syria, as Esbati suggests, when the government in Damascus is run by Sunni Muslims who remain enraged at Iran for having helped maintain the mass-murdering Assad in power? Where exactly are these “networks” located that Esbati claims can be “activated” in Syria? Why does he think the Syrian regime would be unable to shut those networks down — assuming that they even exist? And if the Iranian military were to “form resistance cells” inside Syria, how would the Syrian regime respond, if not with a crushing blow to the Alawites and other Shi’a in the country, viewed as a fifth column supporting Iran?