Syria and Lebanon stare into the
abyss By Victor Kotsev
The Syrian infection is spreading. Whether
Lebanon will be fully set aflame by the violence
in its northern neighbor is as difficult to answer
as who precisely started the clashes which
engulfed at least two Lebanese cities over the
past week.
Regardless, the chaos in both
countries is growing, and the United Nations peace
plan for Syria (dubbed the "Kofi Annan plan" after
the former UN secretary general who spearheads the
initiative) has practically collapsed.
Indeed, the current UN secretary general,
Ban Ki-moon, said on Monday that Syria had reached
a "pivotal" moment and was teetering on the brink
of a full-blown civil war. Even the chief of the
unarmed UN peacekeeping mission in Syria -
numbering a little over 200 - has acknowledged
that his team alone could not stop
the violence. On Sunday,
a rocket-propelled grenade exploded not far from
him, in the latest of several incidents when
peacekeepers were caught in crossfire.
The
past few days saw a new spike in the violence in
Syria as well as Lebanon, with heavy fighting in
the capital Damascus and throughout the country.
Dozens were reportedly killed, and an unknown
number wounded. Though it is hard to verify the
reports, casualties included also regime officials
and troops.
The attacks in the capital, in
particular, seem to have come straight out of a
manual on guerrilla operations, and reportedly
relied heavily on guerrilla-style hit-and-run
tactics, rocket-propelled grenades and improvised
explosive devices. At the same time, the regime
conducted deadly raids and attacks of its own.
Over the weekend, a rebel group claimed to
have assassinated six high-ranking regime
officials, including the defense minister and the
brother-in-law of Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad. This rumor appears to be a gross
exaggeration at best - at least two of these
officials subsequently gave interviews to the
Syrian media - and was condemned by others in the
Syrian opposition, but it is nevertheless
significant. It conveys, at the very least, a
threat, and suggests that the rebels have grown
either bolder or more desperate (or both).
An alternative explanation is that the
announcement was a message designed to advance
narrow interests within the diverse opposition
camp. In a recent twist in the infighting that
plagues the rebels, Burhan Ghalioun, the leader of
the largest coalition of opposition groups (the
Syrian National Council), offered his resignation
days ago, shortly after being re-elected to the
leadership post.
Speaking to al-Jazeera on
Sunday, Syria expert Joshua Landis argued that the
Syrian National Council has probably run its
course and that the next Syrian leaders would
emerge in the street battles:
Syria doesn't have leaders with a
strong public following ... What's likely to
happen is that this Syrian National Council has
done its heavy lifting. It mobilized the
international community ... Its great skill is
attracting the West. The center of gravity of
the revolution has now shifted from the West to
the internal struggle, inside Syria, the fight
on the streets. And that the SNC cannot play a
big role in. We are seeing, already, that there
are going to be leaders that emerge off the
battlefield ...
[W]hat's happening now
is that the international community is beginning
to sidestep the SNC. We already have reports
that the United States intelligence is making
contact with militias and various leaders on the
streets in Syria directly. The Muslim
Brotherhood just the other day said that they
are getting donations and money directly from
Saudi Arabia and people in the Gulf, and they
are beginning to get weapons directly to their
people inside ... The SNC is becoming less and
less important as they squabble with each other
... [1]
The disarray in the
opposition ranks, however, does not spell a
victory for the regime whose support base beyond
several minorities (most notably the Alawite
religious minority to which Assad belongs) is
reportedly shrinking with every new round of
violence. Many experts, in fact, believe, that
Assad's days at the top are numbered, but disagree
on how long it would take to topple him. Reached
for comments by Asia Times Online, Landis
expressed his belief that "Syria faces a long
drawn out struggle".
A recent report from
the ground in northern Syria, published in the
German weekly Der Spiegel, describes a situation
in which the government has lost effective control
over much of the countryside, and a demoralized
army conducts periodic raids. This account could
loosely be compared, from a strategic point of
view, to the American "seek and destroy" missions
in Vietnam 40 years earlier:
The regime controls the cities, and
the world's attention is focused on what is
happening there…. The fear of the once
omnipresent government informants has
disappeared in the villages, where everyone now
speaks his mind and the drivers for the FSA
write "Free Army" on their dusty rear windows
...
Aziz, a chain-smoking cynic who,
despite having been arrested twice, managed to
escape and return to his village because many of
the sons and daughters of the intelligence
officers were his students, has collected the
villagers' accounts of the day of the attack.
"The soldiers were supposed to set an example.
One group slit a man's throat, and then they
tied another man to a car, then they burned down
everything they couldn't loot," he says.
"But then others came to the houses,
apologized and acted as if they didn't see the
Kalashnikovs hidden behind cushions. And two of
them left this behind," he says, unfolding a
page torn out of a notebook on which all the
names and ranks of the officers in the Brigade
of Death are carefully noted. "Assad's army is
like an iceberg that is slowly melting," says
Adjini. [2]
Other credible reports
suggest that rebel enclaves in the countryside are
interspersed with loyalist population centers, [3]
a situation that would bring up more parallels to
the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, or
even to the foreign-assisted civil war in Libya in
2011, than to the American war in Vietnam.
Among other similarities, an important
pattern from the Lebanese civil war - the flight
of the middle class and the business elites, and
the associated brain drain - seems to be already
in motion in Syria. "The loss has simultaneously
hollowed out the cultural, economic, and political
heart of the country," reads a report published in
Foreign Policy Magazine. "And however the uprising
plays out, this drain of expertise - in tandem
with economic sanctions that have pushed up prices
and resulted in shortages of fuel and gas for
cooking and heating - could set Syria back years."
[4]
In Lebanon, this sort of exodus
arguably eroded also the middle ground, many of
the people with ties to rival communities left,
and this contributed to a radicalization of the
population. We can expect a similar process to
take place in Syria, and if it is not interrupted
in time, a similar protracted civil war to follow.
The Lebanese paradigm, sadly, carries
additional weight given that Lebanon itself is
staring at a possible replay of the civil war - a
worst-case scenario - as a result of a spillover
of tensions from Syria. The clashes between Sunni
Muslims and Alawites that broke out last week in
the northern city of Tripoli were followed by an
explosion of violence in the capital, Beirut. In
total, over a dozen people were killed and many
more wounded.
In a particularly worrying
sign, the murder of Sheikh Ahmad Abdel Wahed, a
prominent Sunni cleric and a fierce critic of the
Syrian regime, at an army checkpoint on Sunday,
catalyzed popular anger against the army. Many,
especially in the Sunni Muslim community in the
country, perceive the government and the army to
be acting in the interests of the Syrian regime.
Fragmentation of the Lebanese army along
sectarian lines, in turn, is a chilling scenario
that also brings back echoes of the civil war.
Current Lebanese Prime Minister Najib
Mikati, though a Sunni, is allegedly a personal
friend of Assad, while a number of reports over
the past year concur that the Syrian regime has
redoubled its efforts to extend its long-standing
influence in the Lebanese security apparatus.
What is especially interesting is that the
Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hezbollah, the strongest
fighting force in the country and an ally of the
Syrian regime, has so far stayed away from the
clashes. Even after a group of Lebanese Shi'ite
pilgrims was abducted in Syria on Tuesday,
apparently by Sunni militiamen responding to the
violence in Lebanon, Hezbollah secretary general
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah urged calm.
Hezbollah is biding its time, and it is
hard to tell whether it expects the violence to
subside or is simply waiting for the most
opportune moment to join the fray. Its attempts to
keep a low profile may also have something to do
with the ongoing negotiations between its main
patron, Iran, and Western powers over the Iranian
nuclear program.
In general, there are
several ways to explain how and why the violence
spilled across the border. A year ago, Robert
Kaplan published an analysis in Foreign Policy
Magazine in which he wrote, "Were an Alawite
regime in Damascus to crumble, the Syria-Lebanon
border could be effectively erased as Sunnis from
both sides of the border united and Lebanon's
Shi'ites and Syria's Alawites formed pockets of
resistance." [5]
A broadly similar
argument can be made about the events in Lebanon
of the past days and weeks. "In Lebanon, Syria has
long been the arbiter and referee among Syrian
factions, helping the Shi'ites, led by Hezbollah
to become dominant," Landis wrote in an e-mail.
"As the Assad regime weakens and Sunnis gain
greater power and confidence, Lebanon's Sunnis are
likely to try to sway the balance of power back
into their favor."
An alternative
explanation of the violence in Lebanon also
exists. Syrian regime officials have long
threatened to "set fire to the Middle East" if
pushed too far, and traditionally this has been
interpreted as a threat to attack Israel. However,
a partial destabilization of Lebanon involves much
smaller risks for Assad, and at this stage could
bring much greater benefits.
As the
US-based intelligence analysis organization
Stratfor explains in a recent analysis, the
violence in northern Lebanon might choke crucial
supply routes of the Syrian rebels and "distract
foreign stakeholders trying to topple the Syrian
regime".
The question of who started the
clashes will only become relevant if they spiral
completely out of control, something that is not
certain yet, but the truth is likely more
complicated than either narrative allows. Local
dynamics - such as the relative poverty of the
Tripoli region - are being ignited by rising
tensions transmitted by kinship networks that
stretch across the Syrian-Lebanese border, and
diverse foreign interests are pouring fuel on the
proverbial fire.
Stratfor offers a
perspective into these complexities in the rest of
its analysis, arguing, "There is a deeper struggle
- between Syria on one side and Saudi Arabia and
the United States on the other - for control of
northern supply routes into Syria, which have
become lifelines for the Syrian insurgency."
It would appear that with the rise in
strategic significance of northern Lebanon
following the Syrian uprising, competition between
different groups, additionally energized with
sponsorship from abroad, increased, and this led
to a cascade of escalations which brought about
the violence. Whether the situation can be defused
or the violence will spread to the rest of the
country is uncertain.
For now, moreover,
Lebanon is the only country in the region where a
major spillover from the Syrian violence has
occurred (this is not the first instance, however,
since similar clashes on a smaller scale took
place last year as well). In many ways, it is the
most vulnerable one, since it has been plagued by
instability for decades and shares countless
social and cultural links with Syria; its
political system and security apparatus are
thoroughly penetrated by pro-Syrian elements.
Lebanon is not, however, the only state
that needs to be concerned. If the Syrian violence
spirals into a full-blown sectarian civil war, the
entire region could be destabilized.
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