The Fall of Assad and the Zionist “Evil Plan”

Written by Eran Benedek, CST's Senior Threats Analyst 

Strategic surprises and conspiracist banalities

The lightening rebel offensive in Syria that rapidly led to the downfall of Bashar al-Assad's regime is another reminder that strategic surprises can shock governments, intelligence analysts and subject matter experts alike. The rebellion was the product of a patient strategy of the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which lead the wide-scale offensive. Perhaps, then, this latest regional shock is also a reminder that the contours of the Middle East’s geopolitical landscape remain in flux, and that complex developments extend well beyond the war in Gaza and Lebanon. 

Much less surprising, however, has been the responses from Iranian leaders and their Western sympathisers. They have reacted in one of the only ways they know how: Zionist conspiracies. “There should be no doubt that what happened in Syria is the product of a joint American and Zionist plan”, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei averred to a public audience in Tehran on 11 December. “We have evidence. This evidence leaves no room for doubt”, Khamenei emphasised, allegedly showing that “the main conspirator, mastermind, and command centre are in America and the Zionist regime”. 

These sentiments provoked widespread media attention. Yet, Khamenei and many others quickly described the Syrian insurgency as an American-Zionist conspiracy from the very outset of the offensive in late November 2024. What's more: none of this is new. They are recycled conspiracies Iranian leaders deploy to misdirect attention for the woes and weaknesses of the regime. This piece explores these latest conspiratorial narratives, placing them in the wider (recent) historical context.

“Evil plan masterminded by the terrorist Zionist regime”  

Within a few days of the Syrian rebels’ advances, Esmail Baqai, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, called the rebel offensive "an evil plan masterminded by the terrorist Zionist regime”. Baqai urged Iranian allies to internalise that, “the recent events are the work of the common enemy of security and stability, namely the Zionist regime”. 

Similarly, the deputy commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) described the rebels as a “front” for the real “villains”: “All the villains of the world, including America and the Zionist regime, are involved in the recent events in Syria, and the rebels are merely the front of this movement”. 

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi warned regional allies that, “Ignoring the Zionist regime's role in creating tensions, unrest and war in the region is a mistake. The regime's involvement must not be forgotten”. He added that these groups have been deployed “to distract attention from the crimes committed by the Zionist regime in Palestine and Lebanon, and to compensate for their failures against the Resistance” (namely, Hizbollah).  

In a phone call with Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian on 2 December, the since-deposed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad said that, “America and the Zionist regime are seeking to redraw the map and borders of our region in favour of the goals and interests of the Zionists”. A day earlier, Iraq’s prime minister told Pezeshkian that the terrorist offensive in northern Syria is an “attempt by the Zionist regime to undermine Syria's security, sovereignty and territorial integrity”. In their call, Pezeshkian described the offensive in the direst terms as a Zionist plan to disrupt global Muslim unity: 

“These events are part of the Zionist regime's sinister plans to expand insecurity discord, and conflict within Islamic countries. This underscores the necessity of unity and joint efforts by the Islamic Ummah to prevent the spread of terrorism in the region”. 

Zionist-Turkish-Takfiri collusion 

In reference to HTS and Sunni jihadist elements in the rebellion, Iran’s Foreign Minister claimed that “active takfiri terrorist groups in Syria are closely linked and cooperating with America and the Zionist regime”. (Takfiri is a term used to describe groups who declare other Muslims to be apostates or infidels.)  

In December, Ayatollah Khamenei posted the same view on X, having posted similar content in 2017 and 2018. Likewise, the speaker of Iran’s parliament posted on X that the “terrorist-takfiri groups” are part of a design of the US and the “illegitimate Zionist regime”, while the Iranian daily Hamshahri declared that the reactivation of Syrian rebels was part of "the Zionist-Takfiri plan to eliminate the support of the resistance".  

Additionally, Iranian media have advanced conspiracies that Turkey and Israel are colluding in a secret plan to destabilise Syria in the service of Turkish President Erdogan’s imperial ambitions and Israel’s “Greater Israel” goals. These reports have looked at the ties between “Zionism and Erdoganism” and their supposed endgame for regional designs, as BBC Monitoring has reported in detail.  

All of this ignores the fact that the HTS-backed Salvation Government praised Hamas and its Qassam Brigades for the 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks and prayed for its victory. HTS also eulogised Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh last year. 

The claims of coordinated Turkish-Israeli collaboration are also peculiar. Erdogan has inveighed against Israel for years and with greater ferocity since the Hamas attacks on 7 October:

• In May 2024, Erdogan described Hamas as a “resistance organization whose lands have been occupied since 1947” and said that, “I see Hamas as people struggling to protect their own land and their own people”.

• In September, he called for an Islamic alliance to stop Israel’s “growing threat of expansionism”, expressing his own conspiracies that the Israelis “will set their eyes on our homeland between the Tigris and the Euphrates”.

• And in October, Erdogan told Turkey’s parliament that Israel aspires to invade Turkey to capture “Anatolia” as part of “Greater Israel”. 

Sympathies in the West 

Conspiracies are resistant to facts and truth. The latest Zionist conspiracies have found expression in the UK and the West, too. MintPress News posted about Israel's role backing Syrian jihadist groups to further its own interests: Israel has been buying oil from Islamic State (IS), and “Zionist billionaires, including Jacob Rotschild” are using an American energy company to exploit resources in the Syrian Golan Heights. MintPress's Instagram post is even top-and-tailed with a yellow Star of David for readers who require visual confirmation of the conspiracies.  

Mohammad Marandi, a professor at the University of Tehran and a former teenage volunteer in the IRGC, told Times Radio in December that the UK “government murdered hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Your government started the dirty war. Your government supported Isis and al-Qaeda”. 

Former MP George Galloway and the leader of the Workers Party GB (WPGB) posted on X that Israel, US, UK, Qatar and Turkey are “behind these Islamist fanatics in Syria”. He elaborated on his corresponding podcast that, “that these ISIS and al-Qaeda killers haven't as much as broken an Israeli window. Never mind take up arms in defence of the Palestinian people”. 

Before the fall of Assad’s regime, Galloway posted on 6 December that his party's position is that the Syrian rebellion is deliberately aimed to weaken “the global resistance” to Israel: 

“Hence we resolutely oppose the current NATO sponsored invasion of Syria by sectarian murderers whose death-cult ISIS and Al Qaeda format is perfectly timed and deliberately intended to weaken the global resistance to Israeli crimes in Palestine.” 

Likewise, the WPGB’s deputy leader, former MP Chris Williamson, said that the reason Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer “has welcomed the fall of Syria to NATO-backed head-chopping terrorists” is “to help pave the way for the Greater Israel Project, which extends well beyond Palestine”. 

By the time Assad fled Syria on 8 December, Galloway turned to the 7 October attacks, posting ominously that “October 7 looks like a very bad idea. Makes you wonder whose idea it really was…”. Galloway denied suggesting he meant Israel was behind those attacks but refrained from elaborating further.  

Jihadist incitement and targeting against Jews and Israel

Many of the narratives described so far fail to account for the decades of anti-Jewish incitement and global targeting of Jews and Israelis abroad by al-Qaeda, Islamic State, their affiliates and supporters. Since late 2023, these groups have repeatedly celebrated the 7 October attacks and called for further attacks against Jews, Israelis and Westerners. Last year, IS urged supporters to “turn their gatherings and celebrations into bloody massacres”.  

IS-inspired terrorists have also perpetrated fatal attacks inside Israel, including the following:

• Ramming and stabbing attack in Be’er Sheva (March 2022)
• Shooting attack in Hadera (March 2022)
• Shooting attack on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv (January 2016)
• Shooting attack at the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv (June 2016)

And for over a decade, Israeli authorities have also disrupted numerous IS-linked/inspired cells plotting attacks against a range of targets in Israel and the West Bank. In 2024, five Israeli Arab men were arrested in October for allegedly planning a car bombing at the Azrieli mall in Tel Aviv. The two cell leaders were reportedly in contact with IS operatives abroad. In April, Israeli authorities arrested two men planning IS-linked bombing and shooting attacks in east Jerusalem and near the city’s Teddy Stadium. In this case, the suspects were recruited by an operative who IS members had trained abroad.  

Recycling Zionist conspiracies  

The current iterations of Zionist conspiracies over the Syrian insurgency are not especially innovative. They are a reversion to a familiar script that Israel acts in cahoots with Salafi-jihadist groups, or that these terrorist groups are creations of Zionism, the West and their regional allies. In  2014-15, senior Iranian leaders consistently said just this.

In August 2015, Ayatollah Khamenei declared that the US created takfiri groups and “set them against the Islamic ummah”. The same month, Ali Shamkhani, Iran’s Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, described ISIS as “a political scam that is trying to cause a rift on religious grounds and protect the interests of the Zionist regime”. 

In August 2014, then Iranian President Hassan Rouhani described the Islamic State in Iraq as “the mercenaries of Zionists”. Around that time, Ali Akbar Salehi, the then head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization and one of Iran’s primary negotiators with the West, also described jihadist groups as a “viper” created by “international Zionism” and the West: 

“The world arrogance [West] and the international Zionism are behind the Takfiris who attach Iraqi cities, because they [Takfiris] are unable to do this on their own…Takfiri terrorists are the child of the global arrogance and the International Zionism. This viper that they nurtured in their bosom will one day turn around and bite them hard”. 

These narratives are longstanding and widespread in Iranian regime discourse. In these pages, we wrote in 2012 that “Iran is the world’s primary state pusher of the antisemitism drug”, seeing Jewish-Zionist plots everywhere. These remain commonplace ideas that inform and guide the leadership’s worldview.

Conspiracies may seem irrational and divorced from reality to a Western audience. They may be part of a pathological need to find comfort in fantastical explanations. But they should not be dismissed purely as rhetoric for domestic consumption.

Zionist conspiracies are features of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s promotion of antisemitism as a component of its foreign policy. They play a role in Iran’s decades-long global terror operations against Jewish and Israeli targets. And they are invoked yet again in response to the shock rebellion in Syria.