The geopolitical interests of regional and global actors in the recent Syrian crisis

The geostrategic and geopolitical region of West Asia is one of the most critical regions in the world, and developments within this region have always seriously affected the equations. The developments in Syria are among the developments that turned this country into a camp for strategic competition. With the formation of the political crisis in Syria, regional and trans-regional actors based on their interests and interests have adopted different orientations in relation to this country, which has a special geopolitical and geostrategic importance in the West Asian region. Meanwhile, the continuous efforts of some governments to put pressure on and overthrow the Assad regime are considered as obvious manifestations of the developments in Syria, which have added to the complexity of the situation in this country. This research tries to study the geopolitical interests of the actors in the Syrian crisis through a descriptive-analytical method and to answer the question: What are the geopolitical interests of the most important foreign political actors in the Syrian crisis? The results of the research show that the starting point of the Syrian crisis in 2011 was of internal origin and was due to the inappropriate response of the government to the protests, which then turned into a full-blown crisis with the intervention of domestic, regional and global actors. They cast actors based on their geopolitical interests in the crisis. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia, despite having their own geopolitical interests, have some common interests in maintaining Bashar al-Assad's regime, fighting the Takfiri terrorists of ISIS, and countering the expansion of US influence in the West Asian region. The common denominator of US and Zionist interests is countering the growing influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the region, overthrowing Bashar al-Assad's government, and destroying the Resistance Front.