SYRIA BETWEEN THE LIBYAN AND AFGHAN MODELS
Al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem), London, UK
March 16 2013
by Chief Editor Abd-al-Bari Atwan
Syrian President Bashar al-Asad was not far from the truth when he
told the US newspaper Wall Street Journal that Syria is completely
different from Egypt and Tunisia, in which two revolutions broke
out against the two ruling dictatorial regimes. Two years after
the eruption of an armed revolt against his regime, the country
seems to be drowning in bloodbaths, almost completely destroyed,
and dismembered. Yes, Syria is different from Egypt and Tunisia and
much closer to the Libyan model. President Mubarak stepped down, or
was made to step down, within 18 days, and Tunisian President Zine El
Abidine Ben Ali chose to flee after six weeks, while the resistance
of Colonel Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi in the face of NATO and its raids and
the forces of the Interim Transitional National Council lasted only
a few months, which ended up with the hideous mutilation of his body.
President Al-Asad has wagered on security and military solutions. He
believes, or, more accurately, someone came to convince him, that
these solutions can crush the revolution and bring the rebels under his
control once again, as his father did in 1982 in Hamah. However, he,
being the first to speak about a conspiracy against his rule, did not
realize the scope of opposition to his regime and the Western and Arab
countries that support it. Russia and Iran are arming and supporting
the Syrian regime, while France and Britain are completing what some
Gulf states started by arming the Syrian opposition and its Free Army,
whether directly, as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia did when it sent a
Ukrainian deal, or as Qatar, Kuwait, and other countries are doing by
sending money to buy weapons from the black market. In both cases,
the blood of the Syrian people is being shed, whether they stand in
the trench of the opposition or the regime. There is no glimmer of
hope on the horizon that the bloodshed will stop anytime soon. The
efforts being made to reach a political solution have reached a dead
end because of the wide gap between the positions of the regime and
the opposition, the demise of the mission of the international envoy,
Lakhdar Brahimi, and the political bankruptcy of the Arab League.
The United States, which does not want to get involved in a third war
in the Middle East after its defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan, has left
the Syrian crisis to its two European allies, France and Britain,
exactly as it did in Libya, to carry out the tasks of armament. It
is hiding behind the talk about a peaceful settlement on the basis
of the vague Geneva Protocol.
There are several key developments that can constitute the identity
of the Syrian scene with the start of the third year of the revolution
and the continuing standoff on the level of a military victory:
First, after the division of Syria into several geographic units and
independent emirates, a new process, which is not less serious, will
begin. The armed opposition in Syria, which is fighting the regime
on the ground, will be divided as follows:
A. Division on the basis of moderate Islam, represented by the Muslim
Brotherhood movement, versus an extremist Islam represented by the
jihadist groups.
B. Geographic and ethnic division, which means areas for the Kurds in
the north and others for the Arabs in the south. It is not unlikely
that we will see Kurdish self-rule, as happened and is still happening
in Iraq.
C. Division on a sectarian and religious basis: Sunni Arabs, Alawite
Arabs, Shi’i Arabs, Isma’ilis, Druze, and among all of those Christian
Arabs and non-Arabs (Armenians and Assyrians).
Second, Syria will drown in a sectarian war between the regime, which
is considered Alawite, and the opposition, which is mostly Sunni,
to be followed by a Sunni-Sunni war between the jihadist groups on
the one hand and the Free Army, which represents a mix of “moderate”
Islam and some secular groups that are demanding the creation of a
civil state.
Third, there is a frenzied race to arm new military units, which
will represent a thir d force to be similar to the Palestinian
security forces, which were trained and armed by US General Dayton,
to be the strike force of any new regime to emerge over the ruins
of the current one. These forces will turn into awakening groups,
like the Iraqi awakening groups, to liquidate all the other jihadist
groups. It is ironic that the new Syrian “Dayton” forces are being
trained at the same military bases in Jordan where their Palestinian
counterpart forces were trained, and perhaps by the same US and
Jordanian instructors.
Fourth, it is not unlikely to see clashes between the rebel groups,
whether they are extremist Islamic or moderate, over areas of influence
and territories in the areas where the official Syrian forces were
driven out.
Fifth, there are two conflicting political and ideological projects
within the ranks of the Syrian opposition at present. One calls for a
civil, democratic state, and another looks forward to establishing an
Islamic state that applies Islamic sharia in a strict fashion. The
clash between the two projects is inevitable in the end, whether
while Al-Asad’s regime is in power or after its inevitable departure,
as both sides believe.
France and Britain want to intensify arming the opposition and the Free
Army with advanced and modern weapons, including antiaircraft missiles,
to decide the situation militarily in a quick way. By this, they are
committing the same catastrophic mistake that the regime has committed
and that led to the miserable situation it is currently experiencing.
It is true that providing the mujahidin with antiaircraft Stinger
missiles paralysed the Soviet air force and led to Moscow’s defeat and
pushed it to withdraw from Afghanistan. However, it is also true that
these “moderate” forces that received these missiles could not rule
Afghanistan and their central government was too weak to control the
country because of its internal differences and corruption. This pushed
the country into civil war and the control of warlords over it and
handed the country over on a silver platter to the Taleban Movement.
Many in Syria and the Western world hold a firm conviction that the
Syrian regime will inevitably fall, but no one can draw a picture of
what Syria will be like after this fall. The war on the Al-Nusrah
Front and its sisters will begin as soon as the British and French
weapons reach the moderate forces and a good number of the new Syrian
awakening brigades have been trained in Jordan.
The frightening scenario that America fears, which is that the modern
weapons will reach the Al-Nusrah Front, is the most probable one
because the front has established itself firmly within a broad sector
of Syrian society. Just as many officers and soldiers have defected
from the regular army and joined the opposition for various reasons,
mostly patriotic, we will not find it strange, or unlikely, for the
“moderate” opposition forces to defect, with their weapons, and to
join the jihadist groups for the same reasons.
Syria has offered two major precedents in the Middle East, the first
is the military coups that brought the military to power in 1949
(the coup of Husni al-Za’im), while the second is bequeathing rule
and turning republics into monarchies. The third precedent is taking
shape now. It concerns the spread of the virus of sectarianism in the
region and setting up warring sectarian mini-states or emirates that
are controlled by external Arab or foreign countries or powers. We
hope that our predictions will prove to be wrong, but what we are
certain of is that a strong and unified Arab and Muslim Syria where
sects and ethnicities coexist is over and will not be back, at least
not during our generation.
[Translated from Arabic]