Page 2 of 2 Embers of Syria reignite a vulnerable Iraq
By Derek Henry Flood
The leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi al-Hussaini, helped keep the ISI alive when the movement was under immense duress. Founded by the notorious Jordanian takfiri Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who was killed in an American targeted assassination in June 2006, the ISI was later Iraqi-fied as local Sunni tribes rebelled with their Sahwa militia movement against its indiscriminate slaughter. In order to thrive, ISI needed to address Iraqi anger toward them rather than impose a blanket ideological imprint which would lead the tribes to seek the total elimination of jihadi interlopers.
The inherent danger in the approach of ISIS is that it seeks to impose a monolithic Sunni ideology across what it is reality an
ancient cultural mosaic comprised of Alawites, Druze, Armenians, Syrian Arab Christians and more. For the ISIS to achieve its far-reaching goals it would require relentless, horrific denominational cleansing coupled with an even larger refugee exodus into the surrounding states. This conflicts with the notion held by Levant analysts and global military leaders that as Syria's war drags on, Bashar al-Assad may retreat with his entourage to the coastal cities of Tartous and Latakia.
During the depths of nihilism of the Iraqi insurgency in July 2006, ATol met with Sunni elders from Iraq's perennially troubled al-Anbar Governorate who were holed up in budget hotel in urban Latakia. The understandably bitter Anbaris told ATol they had fled to Syria with their families and whatever they could carry with them in flight from a mass indiscriminate killing that had made once relatively obscure places like Fallujah household names around the world. Being dislocated in Syria was a collective humiliation but the security provided by Bashar al-Assad's then iron grip on the country guaranteed their safety.
Latakia is a Syrian coastal governorate that is considered a bastion of Alawite power despite the eponymous provincial capital having a slim Sunni majority. As al-Jazeera blared an anti-Israel diatribe of Hassan Nasrallah during the middle of that summer's war in South Lebanon, sullen men in rumpled dishdashas parsed rings of worry beads through their tense fingers with the realization that they were trapped between two wars.
In the summer of 2006, in the wake of the killing of Zarqawi by the Americans and the ground invasion of Lebanon by the Israelis, Syria's police state became a safe haven for countless refugees fleeing both conflicts. At the same time, the Assad regime fueled both conflicts by allowing Iranian arms to transit its territory en route to Hezbollah while allowing jihadis from around the world to cross from its central Homs Governorate and the eastern Deir ez-Zor Governorate to wreak havoc against occupation troops, Shi'ite militias, pro-government forces, Kurdish peshmerga, Christians and countless others who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now the intricate human networks established at that time are functioning at high velocity but in a direction no one, particularly the Syrian government, had ever imagined. Refugees have been flowing into Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq while Salafi-jihadis and Shi'ite fighters are pouring into Syria. The Cold War concept of "stability" has evaporated like so many sparse rain drops in desert sands.
Concomitantly with the influx of ISIS and other foreign Sunni jihadis, after nearly two years of Hezbollah's leadership rhetorically backing Assad but not publicly admitting any formal military involvement inside Syria, the group's al-Manar television channel broadcast from inside the besieged city of al-Qusayr in early June. Al-Qusayr was a bloody battle sandwiched between Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and a beleaguered Homs where veteran Hezbollah members were instrumental in helping Syrian state forces re-take the embattled town due north of Damascus.
The entry of al-Qaeda-minded Iraqis and the formal participation of Lebanese Hezbollah into the Syrian war mean that it can no longer be labeled merely confined within a clearly delimited nation-state. It is now undeniably a regional conflict.
Factionalized Syrian rebels are at once fighting state forces, fighting Iranian-backed groups, attacking Shi'ite civilians, and fighting Kurdish militias. In the deadliest days of the American-led occupation of Iraq, Sunni jihadist groups fought foreign troops and Shi'ite groups like the Mahdi Army with seemingly equal fervor. In Syria, Salafi-jihadis from Jahbat al-Nusra and ISIS are fighting not only Assad's army and the Shabiha militia but have all been engaged in fierce battles in Ras al-Ain near the Turkish border with the PKK-affiliated People's Protection Units - the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party. There are myriad conflicting accounts of deep tensions between the FSA and jihadi outfits contrasting with talk of cooperation between them in Aleppo and several other contested cities. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that both strains have degrees of truth to them. The Syrian war is nothing if not incredibly convoluted.
And now Iraq has undeniably reignited into Sunni-Shi'ite inter-communal warfare. While all the internecine conflicts of the post-Ottoman Levant are certainly rooted in highly localized contexts often regarding state power versus community identity, the fits of cross border refugee outflows over the last several decades combined with business relationships, and theological bonds that do not concern themselves with imposed political boundaries have indeed enhanced a degree of regional group identity among sects and ethnic groups.
In the decade on following the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party in Iraq, the reverberations have been and continue to be felt far and wide across the region. When accompanying a group of Shi'ite pilgrims from central Iraq who had congregated in Baghdad in order to head south to Najaf just three weeks after the fall of the regime, Asia Times Online was informed by Najafis that Iranian devotees had already crossed the mined Iran-Iraq border and were busy swirling around the shrine of Imam Ali side by side with their Iraqi co-religionists.
The cultural and economic revival of Iraq's shrine cities was practically instantaneous. After years of Ba'athist isolation under Saddam, many optimistic Najafis and Karbalai'is, many of whom had fought Iranians as conscripts in the Iraqi military in horrific trench warfare in the 1980s, tentatively welcomed their Farsi-speaking neighbors. Even though Saddam Hussein's nemesis, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had been vilified by the powers that be in Baghdad for years following Iran's Shi'ite Islamic revolution of 1979 and eight years of war, one of the first acts of hotel staff in Karbala where this correspondent resided was to hang a portrait of Khoemeini above the reception desk in hopes of welcoming an onslaught of Iranian guests. It was then forecast that Shi'ite Lebanese, Saudis, Kuwaitis and Bahrainis would quickly follow.
The virulent animosity between the minoritarian governments in Damascus and Baghdad representing the two branches of the Hizb-ul Ba'ath (the Baath Party) which split bitterly in 19966 and entrenched the violent identity politics that are very much playing out today. Since the ascent of Hafez al-Assad in 1970, Syria has been ruled by an Alawite inner circle with acceptable Sunni and Christian elites often from the mercantile classes who kept a lid on politicized Sunni religiosity for decades. Baghdad has a somewhat similar, if inverse ethno-sectarian power arrangement. On July 12, 1979, Saddam Hussein became head of the Ba'ath Party's Revolutionary Command Council and was officially declared president of the Republic of Iraq.
Like Assad in Syria, the Arab Socialist regime in Iraq officially eschewed ethnic and sect-based politics in the name of pan-Arab nationalism and the anti-Zionism pervasive throughout the Levant region. In doing so though, the turbaned clerics in the Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf, Kufa, Samarra, Kadhimiya and Karbala - including those from Iran, Lebanon and Bahrain - were persecuted or made persona non grata. Shi'ism with its millenarian dogma and sub-state hierarchical nature was viewed as a threat to Ba'athist power. In Syria, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood movement was perceived with like suspicion by the Alawite-dominated regime and crushed accordingly during the period of 1976-1982 when the infamous "Hama solution" sent many of the Brothers into exile.
And while sectarianism and nationalism may be the bread and butter of ideologues seeking to dismantle the political frontiers demarcated by Great Britain and France in their Sykes-Picot treaty that followed the Great War, ordinary Iraqis and Syrians prioritize their own well being rather than that their neighbors out of sheer necessity. After a decade of war, Iraq has still not sorted itself out along purely sectarian or ethnic lines despite the Shi'ite political ascendancy coupled with continued Kurdish consolidation in the north. A post-Assad Syria will unlikely be controlled by a sole power group though it may become Sunni-dominated in the sense of the Maliki government in Baghdad is Shi'ite-dominated.
Perhaps the most vexing problem from the Arab Levant reaching north to the various Kurdish-majority areas strewn across four nation-states is the messy application of broad stroke Salafism, Shi'ite dominance, or Kurdish ethno-linguistic nationalism. These larger communities are actually quite fragmented across idealized sectarian or ethnic boundaries. These regions - be they Sunni Arab, Shi'ite Arab, Kurdish, Alawite, Turkmen, or Assyrian - are most often not contiguous in reality, which prohibits the formation of a new political order based solely on the interest of one specific group without massive amounts of bloodshed.
Derek Henry Flood is a freelance journalist focusing on the Africa, the Middle East and South and Central Asia. He has covered many of the world's conflicts-both major and minor-since 9/11 as a frontline reporter. He blogs at the-war-diaries.com. Follow Derek on Twitter @DerekHenryFlood
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