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Stifling the flow on the Syria-Iraq
border
By Jonathan Feiser
Since the end of World War I, the very
nature of the porous borders of the Middle East
has remained a clear geopolitical threat to the
powers that sought to control the region. The
porous nature of these young political frontiers
has existed throughout the history of the Middle
East as a fundamental symptom of tribal and
smuggling routes, even before the movement of
Arabs from modern-day Saudi Arabia.
When
analyzing the 450 mile (724 kilometers) border
that divides Iraq from Syria, several realities on
the ground need to be understood. One of the
clearest threats that exists for United States
forces stationed within Iraq is how the porous
border situation provides active sanctuary for
insurgents who can crisscross the border.
Tactically, the existence of porous borders allows
insurgent forces not to have to rely on critical
bases of operation within Iraq itself, which stand
a higher chance of being discovered and destroyed
by US military forces.
Thus, the weak
border areas between Syria and Iraq become an
issue for US efforts to contain the many actors of
the Iraqi insurgency. That being said, however,
the Syrian-Iraqi border is only one facet of a
greater problem that entails all of the political
borders of Iraq. Nonetheless, it has gained
continual attention by both policy and military
leaders in their efforts to curb the momentum of
the Iraqi insurgency of late.
It is
important to analyze four components of the border
problem and how they relate to the security
situation for both US forces and the Ba'athist and
Alawite regime of Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad.
Questionable
intention
The regime of Assad is based on a
leadership model that is more tilted toward
consensus-based decision-making processes, with
the final decision itself being subject to Assad's
final approval. As in the Cold War, Assad must
play the same "diplomatic shuffle" that his
father, Hafez al-Assad, sought to achieve. In this
sense, the balancing of carrots and sticks,
ranging from threats and sanctions to diplomatic
concessions based on a "better behaved" Syria,
falls into both the internal decision making
processes of domestic as well as foreign policy
politics; where the former deals particularly with
the centers of gravity that exist within the
Syrian regime, ie Sunni "oligarchs" and Alawite
leadership, the latter concerns such issues as the
greater Middle East peace process and relations
within the Arab world. This category is even more
complicated when one attempts to attach complex
national security concerns that fall within the
scope of Lebanon as well as Palestinian rights.
Thus, while the Syrian government may
pledge to prevent the cross-border movement of
potential and real insurgents - as well as supply
and smuggling trades that, in one way or another,
likely fuel the insurgency - it is bound by the
internal players who are inherent members of the
government. For instance, the majority of Syrian
business members, who can be considered oligarchs,
are part of the majority Sunni community. The
Sunni attribute of Syrian society has remained
powerful since the days of the Ottoman Empire.
Assad's Alawite sect of Islam, which makes up 12%
of the Syrian population, has yet to gain a
serious foothold in Syria's economic and financial
sectors. The result is accommodation between Assad
and the Sunni community. Syria's powerful Sunni
community is a very real player in both the
economic and financial ventures that Syria holds
with Europe and Russia and, therefore, is a
faction from which Assad cannot afford to be
isolated.
Due to this balance of power
equation, Assad must abide by some of the central
unwritten rules that his father followed. Some
examples of these rules include the balancing of
domestic interests in foreign policies, saving
face to retain legitimacy within his own Alawite
sect, and seeking to increase economic, military
and political relations with great powers. Such
insider players like the Sunnis and Alawites
represent a status quo that places limits on
absolute decision-making that many assert with the
Syrian dictatorship.
Questionable
capability
The second issue is based on
capability. After the fall of the Soviet Union,
both Syria's technological and economic sustenance
evaporated. Although reports indicate that the
Syrian military is effective as a conventional
force, the border forces on the Syrian side of the
Iraqi border are likely ineffective either in
training or in support from the centralized
government.
A practical likelihood is that
the border forces are plagued by massive
corruption because they find themselves stationed
far from centralized oversight. Another inherent
inability is found within the field of physical
security. On the ground, the political borders
that separate Iraq from Syria are desolate tracts
of land with, in many parts, nothing more than a
security berm or makeshift roadblock separating
the two countries.
Such physical security
devices, especially unmonitored by an undermanned,
unresponsive, or corrupted border guard, are
tantamount to a boundless as well as lawless
frontier. This lack of attention in many portions
of the Syrian-Iraqi border makes crossing the
border a potentially inadvertent act.
Syria's geostrategic role
The
"war on terror" has become regionally
compartmentalized to the Middle East since the end
of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. But
the changing nature of the resistance to US
efforts in Iraq is only one part of the greater
conflict, a conflict that includes Syria's
involvement and linkages with Iran.
The
basis of Iran's influences and relations with
Syria, as in many cases with Lebanon, are just as
much historical and political as they are
ideological. As with all revolutions, including
the American Revolution, the actual
"revolutionization" of the Iranian Revolution
occurred before 1979 and was not completely
Iranian in nature, but Shi'ite in nature and,
therefore, also occurred for the Shi'ites of Syria
and Lebanon. Syria has historically shared many
mutual interests with Iran to include supporting
Shi'ite groups such as Hezbollah while balancing
the same groups with their rivals. Under Hafez
al-Assad, this relationship came at a high price
with the withdrawal of generous economic gifts
from Saudi Arabia. If September 11, 2001 had any
impact on this relationship, it deepened the
extent and depth of the two countries' ideological
and economic bond.
Syria, therefore, is
and remains the historic route for the movement of
groups from Iran via Iraq and Syria that
represents a human and supply pipeline. The
purpose of this pipeline before the fall of Saddam
Hussein's Iraq was to support the "resistance" via
such actors as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and
Hezbollah, groups that engaged in violent conflict
with Israel and that staged forces in Lebanon and
the Occupied Territories. This pipeline has not
been exclusively for human transit and supplies,
but also for ideological and religious
proliferation that has maintained links between
the Shi'ites in Syria and their counterparts in
Iran.
This pipeline, even with the
presence of US forces in Iraq, continues
relatively unabated. In other ways, it has
enhanced the efforts of both groups of insurgents
regarding where they derive from, flee to, and
operate. In this context, Syria continues to exist
as a central node in this pipeline. Syria, once a
transit point as well as a location of militant
training camps, has now picked up the additional
duty of being a crucial base of sanctuary for
Iraqi insurgents - something Assad has continued
to use to his advantage to aid his internal
balancing act.
Another variable to this
issue is the reality of geography. In retrospect,
the trans-border human and supply pipeline that
extends from Iran to Lebanon and the disputed
territories of Palestine are linked by Syria and
Iraq. The geographical role of Syria has augmented
the transnational nature of the present Iraqi
insurgency while Iraq has now evolved into a
center of conflict rather than merely a linkage
between Iran and the eastern regions of the Middle
East. The fall of Saddam removed a crucial player
of stability from this transnational pipeline. The
rise and fueling of the Iraqi insurgency has,
possibly inadvertently, become yet another
epicenter of the "civilizational", propagated
conflict zones of the Middle East that are
emerging as dangerous faultlines on the global
level.
The border issue is merely one
element of this developing reality. Until some
degree of reform and change is conducted on both
sides of this international border, the reality of
the insurgency and the crisscrossing of both
sponsored and un-sponsored passage of insurgents
will continue to be an innate deviation of the
current security environment.
Diffusion
Last, the current
Iraqi insurgency has become an attraction for both
the propagandist and guerrilla. In the case of
neighboring Syria, religious fundamentalists,
ardent nationalists, former Iraqi regime elements,
and Islamists have chosen to take on US forces in
Iraq. This reality, therefore, has allowed
President Assad to instigate some internal
housecleaning courtesy of the insurgency occurring
within Iraq.
President Assad may be
following the blueprint for domestic housecleaning
that was initiated by Pope Urban II when he
declared, on November 27, 1095, a call for a
crusade to retake the Christian Holy Land.
Regardless of the many reasons Urban II may have
called for a crusade, the key point in the context
of Assad's Syria today falls within the purging of
the domestic realm. By motivating a relocation of
emotional hostility - as well as cleaning out much
of the seedy elements of European society - Urban
II redirected a Europe at war with itself against
a foreign enemy. In 2005, President Assad and his
cohorts may be attempting to do the same.
Today, the irresistible option for
militant Muslims specifically residing in Syria is
- in one status or another - to fight on the front
line against the "infidel" enemy, namely the
United States, which is located right next door in
Iraq. To some degree this works out for Syria
since it is able to deflect Syrian Islamist
rhetoric away from Damascus and toward Baghdad,
and at least in the present moment provides a
chance worth taking in spite of international
pressure from the US.
Assad's balancing
act against Syrian Islamists has taken the
opposite course of his father - who, in response
to attacks from the Muslim Brotherhood, shelled
and devastated the city of Hama in 1982. Hence,
while Basher al-Assad's program retains the
specific despotic nature as his father's, it is
integrated with a more balanced approach that fits
the quest for a more balanced domestic situation
than ever existed during the Cold War.
At
this point, Syria exists as an active sanctuary
for Islamic fundamentalists, Islamists, and former
Iraqi Ba'athists alike. This cosmopolitan
composition, however, is more a product of
convenience as well as due to mutual concerns that
exist over US forces in Iraq and Israel's control
of the Occupied Territories.
Conclusion
Even before the
invasion of Iraq, security and regional experts
both inside and outside of the loop were well
aware of the intrinsic vulnerabilities that the
border issue would yield. At present, the
situation continues to represent a precarious
security situation that contributes to empowering
insurgents - regardless of the banner they fall
under - both within Iraq and throughout the
region.
Current events such as the Palestinian
elections, Iraqi elections, and Iranian elections
this summer threaten to disrupt the current status
quo that has allowed Syria to survive above and
beyond its assessments that it, too, would face
regime change under the same US-led forces that
invaded Iraq nearly two years ago. In the
meantime, Syria has come to accept the military
status quo of an occupied Iraq to its east by an
overextended US military force that has yet to
stabilize the country. It should be noted,
however, that such trends as these are never
permanent and neither is the course of the "war on
terror", either in the Middle East or Central
Asia.
The Syrian leadership understands
both the perceived and real threat that the United
States could inflict upon the balance of its
security disposition. The border situation,
therefore, remains a symptom of old empires that
the modern world has inherited yet again as a
region with continuous security weaknesses.
Moreover, in contrast to the past, the
globalization of the planet has facilitated the
spillover of regional concerns into the global
arena. Syria and the ruling style and vision of
Damascus are no exception to this phenomenon of
regional implication and global consequences.
Through the many events that have occurred
within the Middle East since September 11 and the
beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the
geopolitical realization of Syria's regional and
international role continues to metamorphose into
an agenda that may have implications on both the
US regional vision and the inherently globalized
"war on terror" that, in the end, will ultimately
be affected by events as they occur on the ground
rather than by a particular policy vision of
outside states attempting to control momentum
within the Middle East.
Published with
permission of the Power and Interest News
Report, an analysis-based
publication that seeks to provide insight into
various conflicts, regions and points of interest
around the globe. All comments should be directed
to content@pinr.com |
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