How they must be cursing the memory of Yahya Sinwar in Tehran’s corridors of power.

Occasionally in history, one individual tilts the course of events through a single incident: think of Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 or George Washington firing the first shots of the Seven Years’ War with his ambush on French forces in the Ohio Valley in 1754.

The atrocity ordered and masterminded by Sinwar, the late leader of Hamas, on Oct 7 last year has proved similarly momentous, its consequences reverberating well beyond the slaughter grounds of the kibbutzim on Gaza’s borders.

Each wave has weakened Iran, hurting its regional ambitions of dominance, diminishing its stature and prising loose its network of proxies and clients across the Middle East.

The latest, of greater magnitude than most expected, is washing over Syria so fast that it has triggered headlong panic in Tehran, where the government has ordered the evacuation of its diplomats and military officials from Damascus.

So undignified and frenzied has the scramble for the exits been that seasoned Middle Eastern observers believe Iran may be preparing to scuttle its decade-long mission to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad and abandon the Syrian dictator to his fate.