Prisoners of Assad: The dialectics of Russian and Iranian interaction with the Assad regime, 2015-24

This paper is structured in four sections, with the first one exploring Syrian regime views of Russia and Iran. The second discusses how the Assad regime first tried to reject Iranian penetration by direct confrontation. The third section discusses how the Assad regime learned to beat back unwanted Russian and Iranian policies by manipulating their differences. The fourth section, finally, looks at other aspects of the Syrian conflict that contributed to Russia and Iran getting trapped there.