The Levant continues to be the battleground of regional rivalries, which destabilise the region and leave space for ISIL to stage a comeback. Right now Russia, Turkey and Iran, the key players in the Syrian conflict, all want the US to leave Syria but this consensus may not last after the US withdrawal.

Iran already feels that it is being excluded from the understandings between Russia and Turkey on one hand, and the US and Turkey, on the other hand.

In fact, Iran fears that the new arrangements in northern Syria, wherein Turkey and Russia try to fill in the vacuum resulting from the departure of US troops, will be at its expense. Ankara and Moscow may well be working towards preventing Tehran from establishing a “Shia crescent” across east Syria, which both the US and its closest ally Israel fear.

To complicate things even further, the Pentagon decided to keep the Syrian oil fields under US control. Oil income, according to Secretary of Defence Mark Esper, will help fund Kurdish fighters, including the ones guarding prisons that hold captured ISIL fighters. The Syrian regime cannot survive in a post-conflict environment without recovering the oil fields too.

Turkey will interpret the US move as a step towards creating a local economy for a possibly independent Kurdish entity in east Syria. Russia will not tolerate that either. This means renewed turmoil in northeast Syria is quite likely.

Second, the maladies which plague Arab countries and which ISIL exploited to recruit and expand, are still very much present. Sectarian politics in the Middle East are still raging across the Middle East, marginalising various communities; social-economic problems, like poverty, corruption, injustice, repression, etc have still not been resolved.

If these conditions are not dealt with, ISIL will no doubt make a comeback, just as al-Qaeda did in the past.

Trump may be making the same mistake Obama did | Syria | Al Jazeera

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