“Assad” didn’t win the war. Today, he has no power outside Tartous province. Iran won the war but it’s far from over.
The Assad regime went bankrupt in November 2011. Since then, it’s state budgets have consistently published losses of over 100% of revenue, with no willing foreign lenders and a junk credit rating.
Who’s been covering the deficit? The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which, in a very well documented relationship, has transferred over $120 billion dollars to “Assad” and affiliated militias.
Of course, this support comes at a price. Iran has reorganized the Syrian security apparatus and fired all who opposed them. They then channeled the funds they provided into militias controlled by their operatives, while underpaying the SAA, a process that one analyst called the “deliberate criminalization” of the regular army. As a result, today the “SAA” consists of no more than 10-20,000 regular army troops in elite divisions like the Presidential Guard and 4th armored. The rest are Iranian supplied and commanded militiamen calling themselves SAA. The state continues to repeat the lie that the SAA still exists, but nobody has been able to produce an order of battle since 2012.
Worse yet, some very thorough work has exposed the fact that, since 2016-17, most of the pro government forces have been foreign fighters - Shi’a jihadis imported by Iran, especially from Afghanistan.
So what really happened here? The same thing that happened in Iraq, and in Iran itself for that matter. The IRGC has perfected its “parallel state” model for taking over “allied” countries for decades. First, the regular army is sabotaged, as the Iranian army was sabotaged in the Battle of Dezful, as the Iraqi army was gutted after the American withdrawal, and as the Syrian army has been “criminalized”. Next, they create their own paramilitary forces to fill the void. Finally, they establish a widespread network of criminal enterprises - oil theft, opium growing - which contribute to their war chest and fund political candidates affiliated with them. Eventually, the “para state” becomes more powerful than the state itself. Syria had simply been added to the IRGC’s “collection”.
Today, the only place Assad still controls is Tartous, the only province where almost no fighting took place. We know this because the Iranians strongarmed him into signing an agreement that allowed their militias to occupy the city (revealing to foreign intelligence services that they weren’t there before), but Assad called the Russians to kick them out with force.
The IRGC really controls Syria. This all begs the question of why they don’t just annex Syria and Iraq. Two reasons. First, because that would trigger international panic in a way these covert annexations haven’t. Second and far more importantly, the IRGC is not Iran. Ironically, among the countries where the IRGC parastate exists, its influence is weakest in Iran itself, where moderate politicians have the support of most of the public. Since the downfall of Ahmadinejad, the hardliners the IRGC bankrolled were sidelined politically. The nature of the IRGC as a parastate, or, in Khomeini’s words, the hidden guardians of the revolution, ensures they are most comfortable in the dark. The moderates need the IRGC as long as it controls Iraq and Syria. Formal annexation would put the legal Iranian bureaucracy in charge of those countries, which would end the need for a parastate.
What are the long term implications? Well, it’s become clear this year that Turkey and Russia are beginning to see the IRGC’s expansionism as a threat, and are teaming up against a mutual rival. Despite continued incidents, Turkish Russian relations are at a decades long peak, with extensive cooperation in military, economic, and nuclear affairs.
Their most blatant anti Iranian action was their flimsy “ceasefire” agreement in the civil war. This ceasefire... wasn’t. What it was was carte blanche for Turkish troops to occupy rebel held Idlib, where they remain today. The agreement was signed by Russia and Turkey unilaterally, without Assad or Iran.
Its very clear that Russia now sees Iran as a rival, and is trying to sic Turkey on them and provoke a conflict between the two. The irony is spectacular. Iran was content to convey the illusion that Russia and Assad were the war leaders - thus, they were the ones responsible for all the atrocities in Syria and not the IRGC. Putin was all too happy to bask in the image of being a mastermind who humiliated the West and crushed ISIS, when in practice the Iranians did most of the fighting. However, he is now using that status to sign unilateral agreements with Turkey, handing over increasing bits of the country to Erdogan - Afrin, Manbij, and now Idlib - in hopes that the Turks and Iranians start shooting eachother.
TLDR: its not over. “Assad” didn’t survive the civil war and there is no scenario in which this ends well for him. Iran has made him a puppet, while the Turks would want him deposed. Putin is putting the real winner so far - Iran - against Turkey, and a new war is likely.