Turkish-backed Arab jihadists have taken Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and are moving on Hama, the former capital of the Muslim Brotherhood-led revolt in 1981-1982. Here is my bottom line upfront – the realistic best option for Syria is survival of the Assad regime, with further weakening of its Iranian support – and following are three observations.
Expect the Unexpected
Israel’s two-month offensive against Lebanon’s Hizbullah achieved the intended result of gravely weakening that terrorist group in Lebanon, but it also had the unexpected result of revealing the fragility of the Assad regime next door in Syria. Hizbullah fighters have provided much of the muscle for Assad for years. No writer on the Middle East predicted this result, to my knowledge, except one: JST contributing editor Ksenia Svetlova. She wrote this in October: “If the war between Israel and Hizbullah drags on, restive areas of Syria like Suwayda in the south, and rebels in Idlib in the north, might seize the opportunity to act against the Assad regime.”
The lesson for Middle East hands is that efforts in one country often produce unexpected results elsewhere. Another example: In June 2009 newly elected President Obama went to Cairo to give a speech entitled “A New Beginning.” Obama intended to reset relations with the Muslim world after the US occupation of Iraq and he spoke, among other things, of American support for women’s rights, religious freedom and democratic aspirations more generally. Within one week, protests erupted on the streets of Iran in what became the Green Revolution. While their proximate cause was outrage over the re-election of President Ahmedinejad, the protests were directly inspired by Obama’s speech. His administration was caught flat-footed and had no intention of supporting protests in Iran (and in fact had no follow-up action plans at all from the speech). Even US rhetorical support for Iranian protestors was muted, and the Iranian regime killed and imprisoned thousands of them.
Turks Have Proxies Too
Maybe Erdoğan was sick and tired of hearing about the kilt-clad, qat-chewing Houthi tribesmen of Yemen or the Shi’ite militiamen from the Baghdad slums. In any case, we all may have forgotten some underlying realities of the region. Among them is this: The Middle East still has a patchwork of ethnic Turkic communities, nomadic Turkmen who long ago settled down, founded cities like Kirkuk in Iraq and Afrin in Syria and survived (with much assimilation) decades of Arabization in the 20th century. These Turks once built Levantine kingdoms based in Aleppo and Mosul. And modern Turkish leaders haven’t forgotten. When Ottoman Turkey signed an armistice in 1918, General Kemal Mustafa (later named Atatürk) still controlled Mosul. He had planned to wrest it back from the British mandate of Iraq before he died prematurely in 1938.
More important as Turkish proxies than the Turkmen of Iraq and Syria are the Arab Sunni jihadists. Turkey (with Qatari finance) trains, equips and provides air support to the group which took Aleppo called the “Committee to Liberate Syria” or in Arabic Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, known formerly as al-Nusra Front and before that the Syrian branch of al-Qa’ida). This group shares the ideology of ISIS, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood: a universal Islamic state under a rightly-guided caliph; liberating Syria and Palestine are only first steps. If HTS also shares military tactics with Islamist terrorists, such as targeting civilians in newly conquered Aleppo with its Armenian Christian population, then Turkey and Qatar could potentially qualify as state sponsors of terrorism.
Fascist, Maoist or Jihadist
Sadly, these are the only three ideological forces at play in Syria, each with different ethnic backing. We already discussed the Sunni Arab jihadist rebel groups, which include some allied Turkic fellow travelers.
The US backs a Maoist group. It is the YPG (Kurdish acronym for People’s Protection Unit), which is the Syrian branch of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party). The PKK, founded in 1971 with Soviet support, espouses a Maoist ideological focus on peasant uprisings and, given attacks on US officials in Turkey, it remains on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations. In order to form a tactical alliance with the YPG against ISIS in Syria, the US exempted the YPG from its terrorist list, though its PKK ties remain. The group promptly renamed themselves the Syrian Democratic Forces. The YPG is limited to the Kurdish community in north central and northeast Syria. Its heroic women fighters in the Kurdish town of Kobani gained worldwide fame in the fight against Turkish proxies.
The Assad regime’s political base is in the Syrian Ba’ath (“renaissance” in Arabic) Party, firmly rooted in Syria’s military. The Ba’ath Party espouses pan-Arab nationalism and was founded by Syrians in the 1930s on the model of Italian fascism. It promoted a version of militant, modernizing nationalism that attracted Syria’s religious minorities, including Druze and Alawite officers recruited into the Syrian army during and after the French mandate. Its chief ideologue was a Greek Orthodox Christian. The Syrian Ba’ath party was once derisively known by Sunni Arabs by the Arabic acronym ’ads which means “lentils” and stands for Alawites, Druze and [I]smailis (the last are a minority Shi’ite sect found in Syria). This regime’s support lately among the Druze in southwest Syria is eroding, as Ehud Yaari wrote in the JST, partly because Assad’s clan is focused on smuggling captagon across the border into Jordan and other criminal activity. The Alawite community in the coastal mountain range of northwest Syria remains the regime’s heartland, though the merchants of Damascus seem steadfast as well.
Conclusion: The Devil You Know
Syria’s neighbors to the south, Israel and Jordan, are not disinterested in this renewed civil war between Sunni Arab jihadist rebels, led by a former al-Qa’ida branch, and a fascist regime which has used chemical weapons against its own citizens. The devil that Israel and Jordan know and can manage is Assad; the greater risk for them is a new Hamas-like jihadist enemy on their borders. But there is no safe option. With Assad comes an aggressive Iranian presence which is also an imminent risk.
Thus the realistic best option is for the Assad regime to survive but for Iran’s presence in Syria to continue to be weakened. This is probably the best option not only for the Western alliance of Israel, Jordan, their regional allies in the Gulf and the US, but also for the other major international player interested in Syria, Russia.
