Syria has been a loyal minion of Iran for a long time, supporting Iran in its long war with Iraq and providing a base to confront Israel in Lebanon and more recently in Gaza.
But Syria's Assad is obviously going down, and rather than risk a united Syria hostile to Iran, Iran is working on a Plan C to make sure that pro-Iranian elements can fight on after the state collapses and in recognition that Iran can't make friends with the eventual winners:
Tehran’s interest in preserving a Syrian base partly explains why the financially strapped Iranian government continues to lavish resources on groups such as Jaysh al-Sha’bi, an alliance of local Shiite and Alawite militias that receives weapons and cash from Iran, according to U.S. and Middle Eastern officials who have studied the organization. The groups are receiving military training from officers from Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
While ostensibly created to bolster Syria’s battered, overstretched army, Jaysh fighters — separate from Syria’s pro-regime shabiha, or “ghost,” units, which are notorious for reprisal killings of suspected rebel sympathizers — are predominantly a sectarian fighting force overseen by Iranian and Hezbollah commanders. ...
In a divided Syria, Iran’s natural allies would include Shiites and Alawites concentrated in provinces near Syria’s border with Lebanon and in the key port city of Latakia. Under the most likely scenarios, analysts say, remnants of Assad’s government — with or without Assad — would seek to establish a coastal enclave closely tied to Tehran, dependent on the Iranians for survival while helping Iran to retain its link to Hezbollah and thereby its leverage against Israel.
Experts said that Iran is less interested in preserving Assad in power than in maintaining levers of power, including transport hubs inside Syria. As long as Tehran could maintain control of an airport or seaport, it could also maintain a Hezbollah-controlled supply route into Lebanon and continue to manipulate Lebanese politics.
Iran has been able to live without controlling all of Lebanon, after all, and figures they can live with a smaller ally as long as that smaller ally holds a port on the Mediterranean and has land access to Lebanon.
Indeed, this Plan C has some advantages over the current situation. Iran gets to shed responsibility and the expense for most of Syria. And Iran gets chaos in the portions of Syria not dominated by Iranian militias aligned with Assad's Alawite mini-state. The West will be happy to leave the "island of stability" in the west alone as we are busy in the rest of Syria hunting jihadis and rounding up loose chemical weapons. Iran could stir the pot in the rest of Syria to keep it a big enough problem to deflect attention from their bastion
But this plan assumes Assad is desperate for the support of these Iranian-controlled militias to survive after resistance collapses around Damascus. Couldn't we undermine this Iranian effort to retain influence by preemptively splitting Syria and making Assad know he doesn't need Iran's militias to survive? Sure, Iran would retain some benefits from the geography of the Alawite homeland-based mini-state. But at least Assad would not need to tolerate a large Iranian-controlled militia that would become a state-within-a-state to threaten Assad's power--as Hezbollah did in Lebanon.
It would have been better to have helped non-jihadi rebels defeat Assad long ago by arming them, but that ship has sailed, no? Jihadis have gained in influence within the rebellion and Iran has used the time we granted them (don't I always drone on about the value of time?) to craft a Plan C based on their success in getting a bridgehead in Lebanon through their proxy Hezbollah.
UPDATE: Strategypage writes that the Iranian-organized militia is intended for Plan A--defending Assad's control of Syria:
There is a proposal that Iran select, train and equip a special street fighting force of 50,000 Iranians, Lebanese (Hezbollah) and loyal Syrians. This would provide the muscle to push the rebels out of the cities into the countryside, where the government can cut off foreign aid and literally starve them into submission. Most Iranian military leaders believe it is too late for this and that the Assads are near collapse.
If rebels are in the countryside, controlling access through the land borders and able to interdict roads, I'm not so sure the city dwellers would be better off than their rural brethren.
Different Iranians can have different objectives for the same force, of course.
