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2 Unfolding the Syrian
paradox By Alastair Crooke
Can Syria properly be understood as an
example of a "pure" Arab popular revolution, an
uprising of non-violent, liberal protest against
tyranny that has been met only by repression? I
believe this narrative to be a complete
misreading, deliberately contrived to serve quite
separate ambitions. The consequences of turning a
blind eye to the reality of what is happening in
Syria entails huge risk: the potential of
sectarian conflict that would not be confined to
Syria alone.
One of the problems with
unfolding the Syria paradox is that there is
indeed a genuine, domestic demand for change. A
huge majority of Syrians want reform. They feel
the claustrophobia of the state's inert
heavy-handedness and of the bureaucracy's haughty
indifference toward their daily trials and
tribulations. Syrians resent the pervasive
corruption, and the arbitrary
tentacles of the security
authorities intruding into most areas of daily
life. But is the widespread demand for reform
itself the explanation for the violence in Syria,
as many claim?
There is this mass demand
for reform. But paradoxically - and contrary to
the "awakening" narrative - most Syrians also
believe that President Bashar al-Assad shares
their conviction for reform. The populations of
Damascus, Aleppo, the middle class, the merchant
class, and non-Sunni minorities (who amount to one
quarter of the population), among others,
including the leadership of the Sunni Muslim
Brotherhood, fall into this category. They also
believe there is no credible "other" that could
bring reform.
What then is going on? Why
has the conflict become so polarized and bitter,
if there is indeed such broad consensus?
I
believe the roots of the bitterness lie in Iraq,
rather than in Syria, in two distinct ways.
Firstly, they extend back into the thinking of the
Sunni jihadi trend, as advanced by Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, which evolved in Iraq, surfaced
violently in Lebanon, and was transposed into
Syria with the return of many Syrian Salafist
veterans at the "end" of the Iraq conflict.
Secondly, and separately, the bitterness
in Syria is also linked to a profound sense of
Sunni grievance felt by certain Arab states at
Sunni political disempowerment following Prime
Minister Nuri al-Malaki's rise to power in Iraq,
for which they hold Assad responsible.
In
a precursor to present events in Syria, the
Lebanese army too in 2007 battled with a group of
Sunni militants of diverse nationalities who had
all fought in Iraq. The group, Fateh al-Islam, had
infiltrated Naher al-Bared refugee camp in
northern Lebanon from Syria, and had married into
Palestinian families living there.
Although the core of foreign fighters was
quite small in number, they were well-armed and
experienced in urban combat. They attracted a
certain amount of local Lebanese support too. That
bloody conflict with Lebanon's army endured for
more than three months. At the end, Naher al-Bared
was in ruins; and 168 of the Lebanese army lay
dead.
That event was the culmination of a
pattern of movements from Afghanistan and across
the region into, and from, Iraq. Most of these
radicalized Sunnis coming to fight the United
States occupation had gravitated towards groups
loosely associated with Zarqawi. Zarqawi's
al-Qaeda affiliation is not of particular
significance to Syria today, but the Zarqawi
"Syria" doctrine that evolved in Iraq, is crucial.
Zarqawi, like other Salafists, rejected
the artificial frontiers and national divisions
inherited from colonialism. Instead, he insisted
on calling the aggregate of Lebanon, Syria,
Palestine and Jordan, and parts of Turkey and Iraq
by its old name: "Bilad a-Sham". Zarqawi and his
followers were virulently anti-Shi'ite - much more
so than early al-Qaeda - and asserted that a-Sham
was a core Sunni patrimony that had been overtaken
by the Shi'ites.
According to this
narrative, the Sunni heartland, Syria, had been
usurped for the last 40 years by the Shi'ite
al-Assads (Alawites are an orientation within
Shi'ism). The rise of Hezbollah, facilitated in
part by Assad, further eroded Lebanon's Sunni
character, too. Likewise, they point to Assad's
alleged undercutting of former Iraqi prime
minister Ayad Allawi as an act which had delivered
Iraq to the Shi'ites, namely to Malaki.
From this deep grievance at Sunni
disempowerment, Zarqawi allies developed a
doctrine in which Syria and Lebanon were no longer
platforms from which to launch jihad, but the
sites for jihad (against the Shi'ites as much as
others). The Syrian Salafists eventually were to
return home, nursing this grievance. Many of them
- Syrians and non-Syrians - settled in the rural
villages lying adjacent to Lebanon and Turkey, and
similarly to their confreres in Naher al-Barad,
they married locally.
It is these elements
- as in Lebanon in 2007 - who are the mainspring
of armed violence against the Syrian security
services. Unlike Egypt or Tunisia, Syria has
experienced hundreds of dead and many hundreds of
wounded members of the security forces and police.
(Daraa is different: the armed element consists of
Bedouin who migrate between Saudi Arabia, Jordan
and Syria).
It is difficult to establish
numbers, but perhaps 40,000-50,000 Syrians fought
in Iraq. With their marriage into local
communities, their support base is more extensive
than actual numbers that travelled to Iraq. Their
objective in Syria is similar to that in Iraq: to
establish the conditions for jihad in Syria
through exacerbating sectarian animosities - just
as Zarqawi did in Iraq through his attacks on the
Shi'ites and their shrines. Likewise, they seek a
foothold in north-eastern Syria for a Salafist
Islamic emirate, which would operate autonomously
from the state's authority.
This segment
to the opposition is not interested in "reform" or
democracy: They state clearly and publicly that if
it costs two million lives to overthrow the
"Shi'ite" Alawites the sacrifice will have been
worth the loss. Drafting of legislation permitting
new political parties or expanding press freedom
are matters of complete indifference for them. The
Zarqawi movement rejects Western politics
outright.
These Salafi groups are the
first side of the Syrian "box": they do not
conform to a single organization, but are
generally locally-led and autonomous. Loosely
inter-connected through a system of
communications, they are well-financed and are
externally linked.
The second side to the
Syrian box are some exile groups: they too are
well-financed by the US government and other
foreign sources, and have external connections
both in the region and the West. Some 2009 cables
from the US Embassy in Damascus reveal how a
number of these groups and TV stations linked to
them have received tens of millions of dollars for
their work from the State Department and US-based
foundations, along with training and technical
assistance. These exile movements believe they can
successfully use the Salafist insurgents for their
own ends.
The exiles hoped that a Salafist
insurrection against the state - albeit confined
initially to the periphery of Syria - would
provoke such a backlash from the Syrian government
that, in turn, a mass of people would be polarized
into hostility to the state, and ultimately
Western intervention in Syria would become
inevitable - ideally following the Libyan model in
Benghazi.
That has not happened, although
Western leaders, such as French Foreign Minister
Alain Juppe, have done much to keep this prospect
alive. It is the exiles, often secular and
leftist, that are trying to "fix" the Syria
narrative for the media. These expatriates have
coached the Salafists in "color" revolution
techniques in order to portray an unalloyed story
of massive and unprovoked repression by a regime
refusing reform, whilst the army disintegrates
under the pressure of being compelled to kill its
countrymen.
Al-Jazeera and al-Arabia have
cooperated in advancing this narrative by
broadcasting anonymous eyewitness accounts and
video footage, without asking questions (see
Ibrahim Al-Amine here,
for instance).
Yet the Salafists
understand that the exiles are using them to
provoke incidents, and then to corroborate a media
narrative of repression by the external
opposition; this might actually serve Salafist
interests, too.
These two components may
be relatively small in numbers, but the emotional
pull from the heightened voice of Sunni grievance
- and its need for redress has a much wider and
more significant constituency. It is easily fanned
into action, both in Syria and in the region as a
whole.
Saudi Arabia and Gulf states
explicitly trade on fears of Shi'ite
"expansionism" to justify Gulf Cooperation Council
repression in Bahrain and intervention in Yemen,
and the "voice" of assertive sectarianism is being
megaphoned into Syria too.
Sunni clerical
voices are touting the Arab "awakening" as the
"Sunni revolution" in riposte to the Shi'ite
revolution of Iran. In March, al-Jazeera broadcast
a sermon by Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, which
raised the banner of the restoration of Sunni
ascendency in Syria. Qaradawi, who is based in
Qatar, was joined by Saudi cleric Saleh
Al-Luhaidan who urged, "Kill a third of Syrians so
the other two-thirds may live."
Clearly
many of the protesters in traditional centers of
Sunni irredentism, such as Homs and Hama in Syria,
comprise of aggrieved Sunnis seeking the Alawites
ouster, and a return to Sunni ascendency. These
are not Salafists, but mainstream Syrians for whom
the elements of Sunni ascendency, irredentism and
reformism have conflated into a sole demand. This
is a very frightening prospect for the quarter of
the Syrians that form the non-Sunni minorities.
The marginalization of Sunnis in Iraq,
Syria and more recently in Lebanon has aggrieved
the Saudis and some Gulf states as much as it did
the Salafists. The perception that Assad betrayed
the Sunni interest in Iraq - although inaccurate -
does help account for the vehemence of the
Qatari-funded al-Jazeera's pre-prepared
information campaign against Assad.
The
French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur has reported
on one Stockholm media activist who paid an early
secret visit to Doha, where al-Jazeera executives
offered open access to the pan-Arab channel and
coached the person in how to make his videos
harder hitting: "Film women and children. Insist
that that they use pacificist slogans."
In
contrast, Arabic press reports have been plain
about the demands of Assad that Gulf states (the
"Arabs of America") and European envoys are
insisting on, in return for their support. Ibrahim
al-Amine, chief editor of the independent
newspaper al-Akhbar, listed reform steps, which
consist of disbanding the ruling party, initiating
new legislation on political parties and the
press, the dismissing certain officials,
withdrawing the army from the streets, and
beginning direct and intensive negotiations with
Israel.
The envoys also suggested that
such reforms might provide Assad with the pretext
to break his alliance with Hezbollah and Hamas, in
addition to severing the resistance aspect of
Damascus's relationship with Tehran.
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