President Rouhani, bolstered by the nuclear accord, wants Iran to be a western ally in the fight against Isis – but the differences over Assad remain a big hurdle

The attacks in Paris may have postponed Hassan Rouhani’s highly-anticipated visit to the Élysée Palace, which was scheduled for this week, but the Iranian president will soon travel to France with a better bargaining position over Syria.



Iran, an ally of Bashar al-Assad’s regime since the conflict started in 2011, has been arguing that the west should prioritise the fight against Islamic State (Isis) and step aside from the position that the Syrian leader, considered by them to be a part of the problem, must leave.



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Critics say Tehran is trying to shield Assad behind a bigger evil and is doing whatever it can to protect its strategic ally while many others believe that the invasion of Iraq and the oustings of Saddam Hussein, and more recently Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, are signs that power vacuums in such a volatile region have proved to be a major challenge.



Ali Alfoneh, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, said: “President François Hollande, who cannot count on Washington deploying ground forces in Syria, is now reaching out to Iran and Russia to form an alliance in the fight against Daesh [Isis].



“This in turn legitimises Iran’s military engagement in Syria, which Washington considers as one of the root causes of emergence of Daesh in that country. In that sense, the terrorist attacks in Paris came as manna from heaven for Tehran.”

The Franco-Iranian alliance is likely to prove fragile, Alfoneh argued, because Paris and Tehran pursue opposing goals. “While Paris is committed to annihilation of Daesh, survival of the Assad regime is Tehran’s goal,” he said. In Syria, some analysts say, Tehran is itself prioritising the fight against the Syrian opposition over the fight against Isis.



The terrorist attacks in Paris came as manna from heaven for Tehran Ali Alfoneh, Foundation for the Defence of Democracies

“To this end, Tehran keeps alive Daesh as a useful enemy, which not only makes Bashar al-Assad appear as the lesser evil, but also legitimises Iran’s military intervention in Syria and provides president Rouhani with access to European capitals as a key player in the conflict.”

Mohammad Marandi, a Tehran University professor who is close to senior officials at the Iranian establishment, disagrees with Alfoneh over Iranian motives. He blames the US and its European allies for the deteriorating situation in Syria and the rise of Isis but said the west could find a suitable partner in Tehran if it “corrected” its policy in the Middle East.

“The issue is that Iran has been predicting that this would happen for five years,” Marandi told the Guardian. “From the very start of the Syrian crisis, Iranians have been saying that the militants are being funded by the Wahabi regimes, and that they are extremist in nature and this will lead to blowback.” The Wahabi regimes is the Shia Iran’s terminology in reference to Saudi Arabia and its Sunni Arab regional allies.



“Iran believes that the bigger evil has been coalition between the western governments and Wahabis dictatorships in the Persian Gulf and Turkey and Israel,” Marandi said. “This was the great evil, otherwise the unrest in Syria and even the casualties were far less than that which we saw in Egypt, for example. Iran believes that the Americans and the Europeans chose allies that ultimately fed this extremism not only in Syria, but also in Libya and in Yemen and as a result we are seeing the whole region moving towards destabilisation.”



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Rouhani was due in Paris this week on a major European trip, the first such visit to the continent by an Iranian president in more than a decade. It has been postponed. The Iranian president, bolstered by the landmark nuclear agreement in July, particularly wanted to present his country as a key regional player with an influential role in determining the fate of Syria and the fight against Isis, a common enemy.



Rouhani told Hollande in a phone conversation after the attacks that Tehran was prepared to cooperate with France in security and intelligence matters to fight terrorism. The Paris attacks are likely to strengthen Rouhani’s bargaining position over Syria when he ultimately travels to Paris but it is not clear if the dynamics will change in practice.



Iran was previously rejected by the west as a major stakeholder in Syria but following the nuclear accord, that perception seems to have changed, with Tehran now sitting at high-level Syria talks in Vienna for the first time.



Iran has invested heavily in protecting Syria’s Assad, dispatching some of its most experienced Revolutionary Guard commanders to the country to plan and oversee operations and moreso recruiting its Afghan refugees to be sent to the conflict for combat purposes. The rising number of funerals in Iran for senior Iranian commanders killed in Syria in recent months is a tangible sign of a greater involvement in the Syrian conflict after the Russian airstrikes.



Dina Esfandiary, a MacArthur fellow at King’s College London, said: “I think Iran might think that the Paris attacks give it an upper hand over Syria because naturally it gives a little bit more credibility to the rhetoric that combating Isis is more important than combating Assad.

“Iran will think that its position will be strengthened as the result of the attack but I am not sure it necessarily will. The only thing that the Paris attacks will really change is rhetoric in the west but I’m not sure if it changes much on the ground. France is going to say that the focus is going to be on attacking Isis. To be fair, that’s always been the focus but that hasn’t detracted away [from] trying to get rid of Assad.”



Esfandiary added: “You can work with Iran to a certain extent on pushing Isis back in Iraq, because the goals are the same, but the problem is you can try and work with Iran on pushing Isis back in Syria but the goals are different, so there is a point when both sides are going at loggerheads. I think, as before, there’s going to be distinction between the fight against Isis in Iraq and the fight against Isis in Syria.”

