The year 2014 may see some profound changes in the Middle East. There are three major dynamics in play that have the potential to reshape the political landscape for decades to come:
the transformed war in Syria, a changed relationship between Iran and the West, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
This entry will focus on the war in Syria, subsequent entries will look at the thaw in Iranian relations with the U.S. and Europe, and the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
As the new year dawns, the most significant development in the ongoing battles in Syria is that the conflict is no longer a simple struggle by anti-regime forces to oust Bashir Assad and his government but has become a regional war in which most of the key players are from outside Syria.
The Arab Spring, the popular movement for the end of corrupt, authoritarian regimes that began in Tunisia and spread quickly to Egypt and other countries, arrived in Syria in March, 2011. In keeping with Tolstoy’s observation that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, the movement against the regime of Bashir Assad took on a unique dynamic.
All Politics is Local
The Syrian regime is rooted in the Alawite community. The most familiar division within Islam is between Sunni and Shi’a communities. But there are distinctions within those two overarching groups, typically far more deeply rooted in history and communal identities than the finer points of theology or proper religious observances. The Alawites emerged as a distinctive group within the larger Shi’a community in the 9th Century in the coastal region around Latakia. Many Sunni imams and scholars tend to regard all Shi’a as at best heterodox believers and at worst heretics and infidels. Other Shi’a communities in the region tended to regard the Alawites with suspicion because the community has a set of unique doctrines and mystical beliefs that is known only to the leaders of the community. The Alawites often had strained relations with their neighbors and suffered repression and persecution from time to time over the centuries. They came to dominate the military and civil administration under French colonial rule and when several years of instability ended with Hafez al-Assad’s military coup in Damascus, they came to dominate the government of Syria.
In both Tunisia and Egypt the protest movements were aimed at a particular family or ruling clique and very few people outside the regime’s inner circle felt that they were potential targets. But in Syria, because the regime was so strongly rooted in and identified with the Alawite community, many people outside the government and outside Damascus defined the protests as largely Sunni Muslims attacking not only Alawites but Shi’a Syrians in general. When Assad’s government reacted with brutal force against peaceful demonstrators in Damascus and other cities, an armed insurrection broke out, centered in parts of Syria with largely Sunni population. Instead of an isolated and unpopular regime whose own security forces were willing to sacrifice the politicians to protect their own status and position, the Assad regime became the lesser of two evils for a large portion of Syria’s citizens.
But Some Politics are More Local Than Others
The more Syrians defined their struggle in communal and sectarian terms, the more powerful forces outside the country began to dominate. The most important external players include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. Less important players include the U.S., Russia, and Europeans.
Saudi Arabia and Iran been involved in an historic battle over the future of Islam since the 1979 Iranian revolution. Iran sees itself as the embodiment of a Shi’a revolution that will counter the historic oppression of Shi’a by Sunni dominated regimes. Saudi Arabia sees itself, the Guardian of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, as the protector of true Islam against heretics, apostates and infidels. Thus Iran has provided moral, monetary and material support to Shi’a based movements in Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf States, the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia, and Palestine. Saudi Arabia has countered by training thousands of imams in a particularly conservative and fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam who serve not unlike missionaries throughout the world. The Saudis were the primary financiers and advocates for the guerrillas who waged war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Many of the fighters in Afghanistan were young men from Arab or other Muslim countries who returned home battle hardened and ready to continue the fight to protect the Saudi version of Islam.
Irony: Al-Qaeda was founded by veterans of the Afghan war from Saudi Arabia
whose initial target was the Saudi royal family whom they saw as having strayed
from the Saudi version of Islam.
So when the conflict erupted in Syria, Iran was more than willing to expand its continuing cooperation with the regime. And Saudi Arabia, along with other some of the Gulf States, especially Qatar, was ready to support the anti-Assad movement with money, weapons and armed fighters.
The conflict in Syria was never a simple clash between government forces and an organized resistance. The Syrian opposition was never unified around a particular set of leaders or organizations. Opposition groups within the country and emigre opposition groups in Paris or London had little contact with each other and no cooperative relationships. The opposition within the country, particularly the armed elements were, and are, very localized, crystalizing around local community leaders or the officers of a miliary unit that defected from the Syrian Armed Forces. While The Free Syrian Army emerged as a potential unifying force among rebellious troops and local militias and a bridge between internal and external regime opponents, it did not develop into anything more than a loose coalition among the various armed groups. As money, munitions and manpower flowed into Syria from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, the number of small fighting groups multiplied. Many of the new groups had a transnational outlook, motived less by opposition to the Assad regime than by a sense that Syria was becoming the new front in the struggle of righteous (Sunni) Muslims against the heretics, apostates and unbelievers.
What began as a Syrian narrative of a repressive and corrupt regime brutally resisting public demands for change quickly became a chapter in a decades long regional saga.
The Iran-Syria-Lebanon Connection
Late in the 19th Century France and other European powers pressured the Ottoman Empire to create a protective zone for Maronite Christians and other religious minorities around Mount Lebanon, which had until then been politically and administratively part of Syria. The separation was formalized after World War I when France created Lebanon as a mandated area under the League of Nations distinct from its colonial rule of Syria. But from the perspective of Damascus Lebanon was, and always would be, part of Greater Syria. When Syria gained independence from France in 1946 Lebanon was already an independent state and part of the United Nations. As much as Syrians might wish it, the combination of domestic political turmoil in Syria and explicit security guarantees to Lebanon from France made a simple reabsorption of Lebanon impossible. But Syria remained a major player in the convoluted Lebanese mosaic of communal and sectarian politics. Syria tended to promote the interests of the Shi’a Lebanese community against the dominant Christian and Sunni communities and to see Lebanon as a potential second front against Israel.
In the aftermath of the 1980 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a resistance movement calling itself Hezbollah emerged in the Shi’a heartland of southern Lebanon. Inspired and supported by the newly established Islamic Republic in Iran, Hezbollah was also supported by Syria since it was both dedicated to fighting the Israeli occupation and Shi’a. Over time Syria, Iran and Hezbollah developed a close relationship, with Iran supplying much of the funding and Syria delivering weapons and technical support.
Syria and Iran continued to develop close ties, beyond the shared support of Hezbollah. The contradiction between Iran’s vision of an Islamic state and Syria’s vision of a secular, nationalist country brought into modernity by socialism mattered far less than their mutual antipathy to Iraq, Israel, and to the West. The end of the Cold War and the apparent dominant role of the United States in the Middle East helped cement the bond.
It was not surprising, then, that when insurgents threatened the regime in Damascus, Iran lent monetary and material support. And when the ranks of opposition were swelled by foreign fighters espousing the conservative Sunni view that Shi’a Muslims were not real Muslims, Hezbollah sent thousands of its well trained and armed members to support the Assad regime.
The Latest Layer of Strife
The American invasion of Iraq created a regime dominated by Shi’a factions and politicians. Many of the key players, from the prime minister on down, seem to have adopted the attitude that Iraqi Sunnis oppressed the Shi’a community for decades; now it is their turn to get even. Despite the urging of the U.S., the people in power in Iraq since 2004 have systematically excluded Sunni from good jobs with the state (by far and away the largest source of jobs in Iraq), marginalized them in the military and police forces, and shifted government spending away from Sunni provinces. The Sunni local leaders who spearheaded the “Awakening Movement” in 2005-6 that shifted the focus of some 100,000 armed militiamen from fighting the American occupation to fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq and bolstering the new regime in Baghdad were promised larger share of the national budget and jobs for their young men, including posts in the Iraqi Army. Not all of those promises were kept and the situation got worse after the last American soldiers withdrew in 2011. Insurgents began fighting again in the Sunni provinces and Al Qaeda in Iraq renewed its campaign of suicide bombings against Shi’a civilians and the Iraqi security forces. The border between western Iraq, where Al Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni groups are active and eastern Syria where al Qaeda linked and other jihadist groups are fighting Damascus runs through hundreds of miles of barren and lonely desert. As the fighting has expanded in both Iraq and Syria, forces from Iraq have linked up with kindred sprits in Syria and declared the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and have succeeded in taking control of some towns, as well as defeating militias associated with the Free Syrian Army and seizing supplies and equipment provided by the United States.
Young men recruited from across the Arab world and areas like Chechnya or Bosnia where Muslims have been fighting outside forces, hardened by combat in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, and inspired by a vision of pure and simple world where strict traditional social norms are scrupulously followed make wonderful soldiers but terrible rulers. When the Al-Qaeda influenced fighters have captured a town or small city, they have instituted a draconian regime that outlaws all Western influences and anything that strikes their puritanical views as immoral, including television, dancing and singing.
But Syrians, particularly the half of the population that is 24 years old or younger, are not traditional peasants but largely literate, with at least an 8th grade education and wide exposure to the broader world via television, movies, and social media. The only way a group composed of people seen as unsophisticated outsiders and foreigners can impose a harsh new social order is through violence and intimidation. Areas captured by the jihadists have been marked by rebellions and the emergence of groups dedicated to ousting them. Some of the major assaults in ISIS forces are being led by al Nusra, a larger, better equipped group that claims to be the official Al Qaeda group in Syria. One issue in the struggle has been the ISIS insistence that the immediate goal is to establish an Islamic state, not to fight Assad’s forces. The other groups want to eliminate the Assad regime first, then create a new political and social order.
The Assad regime has benefitted from these internecine battles in two major ways. The regime has claimed all along the opposition is nothing but terrorists and thugs, not honest Syrians seeking political change. And the disarray among the opposition military forces has permitted the Syrian military to regain significant amounts of territory. The regime’s grip on power is firmer today than it was a year ago.
January 22 .... no big deal
The United States and Russia, under UN auspices, are sponsoring talks to resolve the crisis in Syria starting on January 22. The Assad government has said it will attend; some opposition groups have refused to participate. The Free Syrian Army probably will show up.
I don’t think the talks will bear any fruit. As much as the US, Russia, and Europe want an end to the terrible suffering of ordinary Syrians, as much as everyone prefers stability to chaos, the states we think of as world powers are helpless to change the facts on the ground. Negotiations are most likely to work when there are two sides to a dispute and both sides think they can improve their position by reaching an agreement. Having powerful external actors who can nudge both sides toward compromise helps.
But there aren’t two sides in Syria, there are multiple armed groups with only partially overlapping agendas. Some groups think they would be better off with a cease fire; others feel events are moving in their favor. Russia and Iran both have some influence in Damascus with cooperation going back to the 1970s and continuing weapons sales but (even if they wanted to) Russia could hardly persuade the Syrian government to dismantle itself. The US and European states like France and Britain have some influence with some opposition groups, notably the Free Syrian Army, but no contact, let alone leverage with the better equipped and more effective fighting forces supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others.
In the short run it is hard to see any positive development in Syria, though I certainly hope that when somebody reads that in a month or two they will be able to laugh at how far off that prediction was. The future of the Assad regime as a core issue has been overshadowed by what outside forces have defined as a Sunni-Shi’a conflict and struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for influence in the Middle East.
And all that means that the humanitarian catastrophe that is Syria today will only get worse. Tens of thousands more will die; hundreds of thousands will become refugees.
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