Assad opens regional Pandora's
box By Victor Kotsev
Several days after the United Nations
ended its observer mission in the country in
failure, the killing in Syria continues unabated -
200 dead Wednesday, 100 Thursday, over 20,000 in
total since last year (at least 18,000, according
to conservative UN estimates). Though the Syrian
army boasts achievements such as the capture of
three predominantly Christian neighborhoods in the
main commercial hub Aleppo on Thursday, clashes
both there and in the capital Damascus - two key
battlegrounds - continue for over a month now.
By all accounts, Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad is in serious trouble - confirmation of
this is found, among other places, in a statement
by his vice-prime minister who suggested on
Tuesday that the regime would be willing to
discuss Assad's resignation. The Syrian president
is facing extreme pressure on all fronts - even
his closest international allies such as Russia
and Iran have
hinted that they could
reconcile themselves to his downfall under certain
conditions.
Yet Assad's rule is not quite
over yet, and his current overtures toward the
exit are unlikely to prove more than tricks
designed to win time. Meanwhile, he seems
hell-bent on exporting the conflict to his
neighbors - if not Israel for now, which is known
to have little patience for such adventures, then
at least Lebanon and Turkey - in hopes of
demonstrating to his enemies just how much trouble
he is capable of stirring.
It would appear
that he was inspired to do this in part by
studying the downfall of Libya's former dictator
Muammar Gaddafi, who put up a tough fight inside
his country but failed to take any of it to his
enemies' territory, thus greatly reducing his
chances of survival. Both Lebanon and Turkey serve
as key bases for resupply of the Syrian rebels.
In any case, clashes between Sunni Muslims
and Alawites - members of the same religious sect
to which Assad belongs - in the Lebanese city of
Tripoli claimed at least 13 dead and 100 wounded
this week, and so far the Lebanese army has been
unable to impose a ceasefire. In separate
incidents last week, around 50 Syrians were
kidnapped in Lebanon by Shi'ite clans whose
members had in turn been abducted in Syria by
elements of the Free Syrian Army.
The
situation in Lebanon has been particularly tense
since a prominent Lebanese politician and ally of
Assad, Michel Samaha (a former minister of
information), was arrested with explosives and
charged with plotting to destabilize the country
earlier this month. According to a number of
authoritative reports, the evidence against him is
substantial.
It seems that, as a
pro-Western member of the Lebanese parliament who
barely escaped an assassination attempt recently
told The New York Times, "Assad is trying to say
to the world, when Syria is destabilized, the
region will be, too ... It's him asking: Are you
capable of handling this regional chaos? And if
you're not, protect my regime."
Over to
Syria's north, Turkey is also pointing a finger at
both Damascus and its patron, Tehran, for a
bombing near a police station in the city of
Gaziantep on Monday which killed nine and wounded
over 60 [1]. A convoluted intrigue is emerging
around the Kurdish issue between Syrians, Turks,
Iraqis, and Iranians (incidentally the four
regional countries with significant Kurdish
populations). A recent discussion on the blog of
the prominent Syria expert at the University of
Oklahoma, Joshua Landis, captures the complexities
of this issue.
The Syrian regime has long
been a patron of the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers'
Party, which has waged a violent low-intensity
campaign against Turkey for decades). Recently, it
has let the PYD, a Kurdish organization that is
closely related to the PKK, take over a number of
Syrian cities in the north. As Landis put it,
"Assad's Kurdish strategy appears to be to help
the PKK to take control of the Kurdish regions of
Syria in the North East. His aim is to hurt both
the Free Syrian Army and Turkey, which are leading
the opposition against him. In general, his
strategy is to weaken the Sunni Arabs of Syria."
[2]
Iran is helping Assad; Turkey, on the
other hand, has been trying to leverage its
relationship with Iraq's Kurds and to set up a
parallel Kurdish organization in Syria, the
Kurdish National Council (KNC), in order to rally
the anti-Assad elements among the Kurds and to
neutralize the PKK in the country. It has not been
very successful: the KNC remains fairly
disorganized and marginalized, much like the
Syrian opposition as a whole.
The role of
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in this
set-up is the least clear of all, and he could
prove to be the wild card. Maliki, a Shi'ite, is
engaged in power struggles with both Sunni Arab
groups and with Massoud Barzani, the president of
the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. He is widely perceived
as a close ally of Iran and of Assad, but whether
he sees eye-to-eye with them on the Kurdish issue
is uncertain.
In an exchange published on
the Syria Comment blog, an anonymous "Iraq
intelligence specialist" challenges Landis'
analysis:
I was reading your post on Syrian
Kurdistan and noted that you judged that the
regional Shia will probably support Syrian
Kurdish aspirations. I think this will not be
the case for the Iraqi Shia parties. ... [I[f
Barzani and the KRG were able to jump Iraq's
borders and become part of a broader regional
Kurdish alliance, it would be a disaster for the
Malikiyoun. So Baghdad is going to have to walk
a very fine line where Syria's Kurds are
concerned: they can't denounce Bashar's strategy
of giving the PYD control of Kurdish areas, but
neither can they countenance an autonomous,
free-floating Syrian Kurdistan that could
someday join up with Barzanistan ...
Landis responds, essentially, that
this is a legitimate concern for Maliki, but that
the Iraqi prime minister may not be as worried
about the Kurds in the long term as he is about
the Sunni Arabs in his country. In the short term,
moreover, a PKK domination of the Syrian Kurdish
arena could hurt Barzani's strategic relationship
with Turkey:
If he [Maliki] can hurt Barzani by
forcing him to link up with the PKK, he will
ruin Barzani's delicate understanding with the
Turks. Should the PKK come out the winner in
Eastern Syria, rather than the more moderate
KNC, Barzani will be forced into a very
difficult and embarrassing position. He will
have to chose between his fellow Kurds in Syria,
led by the PKK , and Turkey. For this reason, I
suspect that Prime Minister Maliki will
devilishly refuse to stand in the way of the PKK
in Syrian Kurdistan in order to scuttle Iraqi
Kurdistan's pro-Turkish gambit and saddle
Barzani with a "terrorist" partner. [3]
The Kurdish issue is a major thorn in
the Turkish side, and if Landis is right about
Maliki's calculations, with his help Assad could
unravel years of Ankara's efforts to court the
Iraqi Kurds. Besides, other minorities in Turkey,
such as Turkish Alawites and Alevis (another
off-shoot of Shi'ite Islam), are reportedly
sympathetic toward Assad and could cause trouble
if Ankara decides to intervene more forcefully in
its southern neighbor.
All this comes amid
a new round of saber-rattling by the United
States, whose President Barack Obama issued a
harsh warning to Assad that any use - or even
moving around - of chemical weapons would cross a
"red line" and would prompt an American
intervention in Syria. According to several
reports, the Pentagon's preparations for such a
scenario have reached advanced stages, with "small
teams of special operations troops" on stand-by.
This rhetoric has echoes of former US
president George W Bush's campaign against Iraq in
2003 (which was initially billed as an operation
against weapons of mass destruction), as Russia
and China were quick to point out. Russia, in
particular, publicly assured Obama that Assad had
no intention of using his chemical stockpiles, and
used the occasion also to preach against repeating
the Libyan scenario of last year. In the course of
the debates, Russian President Vladimir Putin
reportedly likened the UN resolution which
authorized the international campaign against
former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to "medieval
calls for crusades".
However, despite
their unwavering public support for Assad - or
perhaps precisely because of it - the Russians are
clearly nervous. This is evidenced, for example,
by reports in the Russian press that Russian
military personnel in the naval base near the
Syrian city of Tartus is prepared for imminent
evacuation. (Tartus is the only Russian naval base
on the Mediterranean and a major reason for
Russia's support for Assad.)
Moreover,
Putin's reference to the crusades can be seen as a
belated attempt to woo Sunni Muslim sensitivities,
which have started to turn against Russia due to
the Kremlin's support of the Syrian regime.
Most importantly, despite Assad's military
ability to hold out for now, his long-term
prospects if facing a hostile majority of the
Syrian population are bleak. Without financial
injections from his foreign friends - some of
whom, such as the Iranians, are feeling the
pressure of international sanctions themselves -
Assad could hardly keep the Syrian economy afloat
for more than a few months.
Militarily, too, the
situation is far from great for his regime. After
a Syrian fighter plane was shot down by the rebels
last week - Damascus claims it crashed due to a
technical malfunction - even Syrian aircraft have
reportedly started to undertake evasive maneuvers
when approaching rebel targets. (The
American-based intelligence analysis organization
Stratfor speculates that this may be the reason
for a Syrian incursion into Iraqi air space on
Thursday.)
On the ground, meanwhile,
large swathes of the countryside are in rebel
hands, and the Syrian army faces significant
challenges when trying to move even armored forces
around (as evidenced also by the increased
reliance on air power).
Not to mention that
the damage to Assad's inner circle sustained by
the July 18 bombing in Damascus was apparently
greater than initially acknowledged, and may take
longer to repair than anticipated.
Recent
reports claim, for example, that the president's
infamous brother, Maher Assad, commander of the
feared Fourth Division of the Syrian army, was
incapacitated or even killed in the attack.
(Incidentally, I had reported on an attempt to
poison high-ranking officials and speculated on
these pages that a major decapitation attack might
happen some time before it did. See Syrian
violence invites foreign intervention, Asia
Times Online, June 12, 2012).
While there
has been no confirmation of Maher's condition,
other reports note his and his troops' absence
from key battle grounds such as Aleppo.[4]
Given this and the growing international
momentum against him - specifically the American
threats in the last days - it makes sense for
Assad to swallow his pride and offer to discuss
his resignation in order to win time. If he can
start negotiating, he would be able to regroup,
rehabilitate his forces, and wait for regional
dynamics to turn against his enemies. Many
analysts have described Lebanon, which endured a
long civil war in the 1970s and 80s, as a
tinderbox waiting for a match, and even Turkey,
which has enjoyed relative overall stability in
the last decades, is far from safe.
Given
the lawlessness that has taken hold in much of
Syria and the increasing presence among the rebels
of foreign jihadists ranging from Afghanis to
Libyans to Iraqis to Chechen rebels (to name a few
nationalities), hardly anyone in the neighborhood
is safe. Even more distant countries such as
Russia are looking on nervously.
It is
highly doubtful whether Assad's tricks can save
his rule in the long run. For now, however,
despite the regime weakening by the day, there is
hardly an end in sight for the bloodshed - and
even should he depart, bloody conflict in the
country will not necessarily end.
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