Aftermath of Syrian
Civil War (JR153)
Introduction
The unrest in Syria, part of a wider wave of the
2011 Arab Spring protests,
grew out of discontent with the Syrian government and escalated to an armed
conflict after protests calling for Assad's removal were
violently suppressed. The war, which began on 15 March with major
unrest in Damascus and Aleppo, is being
fought by several factions: The Syrian government's Armed Forces and its
international allies, a loose alliance of majorly Sunni opposition rebel
groups (including the Free Syrian Army), Salafi jihadist groups
(including al-Nusra Front), the mixed Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces(SDF), and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), with a number of countries in the region and beyond being either
directly involved or providing support to one or another
faction (Iran, Russia, Turkey, the United States, as well as others).
Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah support
the Syrian Arab Republic and the Syrian Armed Forces militarily, with Russia conducting airstrikes and other
military operations since September 2015. The U.S.-led
international coalition, established in 2014 with the declared purpose of
countering ISIL, has conducted airstrikes primarily
against ISIL as well as some against government
and pro-government targets. They have also deployed Special Forces and
artillery units to engage ISIL on the ground. Since 2015, the US has supported
the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria and its armed wing, the SDF, materially, financially, and logistically. Turkey, on the other hand,
has become deeply involved against the Syrian government since 2016, not only
participating in airstrikes against ISIL alongside the U.S.-led coalition, but
also actively supporting the Syrian opposition and occupying large swaths of northwestern Syria while
engaging in significant ground combat with ISIL, the SDF, and the Syrian
government. Between 2011 and 2017, fighting from the Syrian Civil War spilled over into Lebanon as
opponents and supporters of the Syrian government traveled to Lebanon to fight
and attack each other on Lebanese soil, with ISIL and Al-Nusra also engaging
the Lebanese Army. Furthermore, while officially neutral, Israel has conducted airstrikes against
Hezbollah and Iranian forces, whose presence in southwestern Syria it views as
a threat.
The total population in
July 2018 was estimated at 19,454,263 people; ethnic groups – approximately Arab
50%, Alawite
15%, Kurd
10%, Levantine
10%, other 15% (includes Druze, Ismaili, Imami, Nusairi, Assyrian, Turkmen, Armenian);
religions – Muslim
87% (official; includes Sunni
74% and Alawi, Ismaili, and Shia
13%), Christian 10%
(mainly of Eastern
Christian churches –
may be smaller as a result of Christians fleeing the country), Druze 3%,
Jewish (few
remaining in Damascus and Aleppo).
The Shape of
Syria to Come
After seven years of war in Syria, the
endgame is here. All major frontlines have been frozen by foreign intervention,
and military action now hinges on externally brokered political deals. The
result could be a de facto division of the country. Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad’s Russian-backed forces spent the past two years taking out isolated
rebel strongholds, like Eastern Aleppo and Ghouta. Recently, they recaptured
the area along the border with Jordan and territory near the Golan Heights—but
at that point; they ran out of low-hanging fruit.
Americans to ease Assad’s return to the
1967 cease-fire line in the Golan was a sign of things to come. Israel finally
relented, accepting a Russian-monitored restoration of the pre-2011 status quo,
but it’s not clear things will be as easy in the rest of Syria, where the three
remaining areas outside Assad’s control are shielded by soldiers from NATO
member states and wrapped up in complex diplomacy. The smallest area still
outside state control is Tanf. In this
55-kilometer bubble around a border crossing with Iraq, a few hundred U.S.
forces and allied Syrian rebels remain, ostensibly to hunt remnants of the
Islamic State. Russia has agreed not to challenge the American presence at
Tanf, but what the United States wants to do with the place is unclear. Tanf
has lost most of its relevance as the fight against the Islamic State has wound
down, but a strong strand of thought in Washington wants the U.S. military to
hang on to this pocket of territory simply to spite Damascus, Moscow and
Tehran. As long as the White House can convince itself that this is money well
spent, for one strategic reason or another, Tanf will remain outside central
government control.
In northeastern
Syria,
the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, have set up a semi independent, socialist
entity fighting the Islamic State, backed by some 2,000 American soldiers. The
SDF is made up of Kurds, Arabs and Syriacs, but it is not-so-secretly
controlled by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, an arch-foe of Turkey.
Over the past few years, U.S. envoys have struggled to dissuade the Turks—who
are about as comfortable with a PKK stronghold on their southern border as the
United States was with Soviet missiles in Cuba—from attacking.
The U.S. deployment doesn’t just keep the
Turks out; it also prevents Assad’s forces from entering SDF-controlled areas.
But the fact that U.S. President Donald Trump keeps saying he wants to bring
the troops home has spooked the SDF’s leaders. They have no air force, no
armor, no viable economy and no powerful friends apart from the United States.
Left alone, they couldn’t fend off Assad or Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. Of the two, however, they prefer Assad. Senior SDF representatives
recently visited Damascus to propose a system of decentralized rule in Syria,
integration of SDF units into the Syrian army, and an end to anti-Kurdish
discrimination by the government. Assad won’t accept genuine power-sharing, but
he may be willing to satisfy some of the SDF’s less intrusive demands and fudge
others, while offering protection against Turkey. In return, the SDF would be
asked to show America the door and hand Assad the keys. That sort of plot twist
might seem like a good fit with Trump’s desire to leave Syria, but U.S.
policymakers are also wary of a jihadist resurgence and unenthusiastic about
public humiliation at the hands of Damascus. Unless or until Trump says
otherwise some combination of inertia
and ideology is likely to keep the United States engaged in northeastern Syria,
making it off-limits to Assad.
Meanwhile, Syria’s
northwest
is dominated by Turkey, as part of the joint Russian- Turkish-Iranian Astana
Process that seeks to resolve or freeze the conflict on terms favorable to
those three nations. But Turkey can’t operate safely in the northwest without
Russian cooperation.
Seven years in, the Syrian war is no longer
a struggle over Assad’s future, but over the shape of the country he will
continue to rule. In the summer of 2016, Erdogan sent his army into the city of al-Bab outside Aleppo,
supporting a Syrian rebel coalition. Two years later, Turkish forces seized the
nearby Kurdish enclave of Afrin.
Moscow facilitated both interventions, allowing Erdogan to carve out a border
enclave as long as his rebel clients did not attack the Syrian government. It’s
a good deal for Russia, since it makes a key member of NATO dependent on
Moscow.
Assad seems less enthusiastic, having
watched with dismay as al-Bab and Afrin mutate into Turkish dependencies:
Electricity is now wired in over the border, Turkish is taught in schools,
Ankara pays rebel salaries, Turks oversee police and local administration, and
public squares are named after Erdogan instead of Assad. South of Afrin in
Idlib, the last remaining province in Syria outside of the regime’s control,
Turkish influence is more diluted. Erdogan has been trying to change that, but
Idlib is a hard nut to crack. The area is larger than Afrin and al-Bab
combined, and has absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians, many
under so-called evacuation deals that have transferred populations from
besieged areas near Damascus, Aleppo and other former rebel strongholds. U.N.
officials warn that an attack could trigger a mass exodus. Even so, the
presence of al-Qaida-inspired jihadists in Idlib is seen as unacceptable far
outside the pro-Assad camp.
Between October and May, some 1,300 Turkish
soldiers built a dozen outposts on the edges of the province, after Russia and
Iran green-lighted a plan hatched in Astana to freeze fighting between rebels
and the regime while Ankara tries to put more palatable, Turkey-friendly
Islamists in charge. For Erdogan, keeping Idlib calm is about preventing a
refugee crisis; Turkey already hosts 3.5 million Syrians. Fearing that Assad is
about to pivot north, Turkish officials are now signaling to Moscow that
attacking Idlib would cross a “red line” and violate the terms of the Astana
accord. Moscow wants Idlib’s jihadists gone, especially after a string of drone
attacks on the nearby Russian air base, south of Latakia. But the Russians also
have strong incentives to uphold the Astana-brokered status quo. They know
Assad can survive without Idlib, Afrin or al-Bab, and Russian diplomats see no
pressing reason to end a stalemate where both sides compete for Moscow’s favor.
A large-scale offensive on Idlib would be “out of the question,” Russia’s
special envoy for Syria, Alexander Lavrentyev, said on July 31, contradicting
his Syrian counterpart.
These Turkish-Russian understandings put
Assad in a tough spot. His army would have trouble retaking Idlib without
Russian support, and forcing the Kremlin to pick sides would not necessarily
work out in his favor. Still, Russia might want to throw Assad a bone, and
there’s a lot of gray area between total reconquest and doing nothing. Russia
could very well support an attack on outlying areas like the strategically
located town of Jisr al-Shughour, south of the Turkish border, or others near
Aleppo. If the fallout seems manageable, that kind of limited offensive could
even be acceptable to Turkey, as the coming days may reveal. With Syrian tanks
rolling north and tensions mounting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is
heading to Ankara this week. What he ends up agreeing to with his Turkish
counterpart will help determine many of these outcomes in Syria. Some pieces of
Idlib may be handed over to Assad, but if Russia then decides to put its thumb
on the scale in Turkey’s favor, large parts of Syria’s northwest could be out
of Assad’s reach for the foreseeable future. It wouldn’t be a clean end to the
war, but does Moscow really need that? From Moldova to South Ossetia and
eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin has a habit of letting messy situations linger to
its advantage. As seen in Cyprus, Turkey is also no stranger to the concept of
endless interim solutions.
Seven years in, the Syrian war is no longer
a struggle over Assad’s regime and his future, but over the shape of the
country he will continue to rule. The fate of the areas that still elude his
control is now in the hands of foreigners.
Socio Economic realties
An estimated 4 million children have been
born in Syria since 2011, according to UNICEF, which means that half of the
children in Syria today have grown up only knowing war. “Every 8-year-old in
Syria has been growing up amidst danger, destruction and death,” Henrietta
Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, said after a five-day visit to the
country in mid-December. Since the government first crushed a popular uprising
and precipitated the civil war that still shows little sign of ending, a third
of the schools in Syria have been destroyed or damaged, or they have been
turned into shelters for displaced families
We’re talking about a country where a large
part of the children on the scale of a whole society have not been going to
school for three years. This is something we’ll pay a price for, for years to
come. Half the country’s urban fabric has been destroyed; a large part of its
industrial base. This is not a country that’s going to recover. And we’re far
from seeing any movement towards a solution, so it’s going to be years of this.
Things have gotten even worse in Syria
since 2015, and with another year of war and suffering ahead, the country may
look to a casual observer like a never-ending story. Cities have been
“liberated” from the regime and then pounded into rubble and retaken. There are
intermittent peace talks in foreign cities while the fighting goes on.
Cease-fires are declared and soon broken. And what exactly are “de-escalation
zones
Reconciliation between Assad and his
neighbors would be the war’s denouement. An entire generation of children not
going to school may seem more concrete. So does being told that you’ve resigned
yourself to never going home, as one Syrian academic told me last month. He has
made his opposition to the Assad regime clear. But now that means he’ll
probably never return to Damascus. Yet the uproar in Washington over Trump’s
decision to remove the 2,000 or so American forces currently in Syria didn’t
touch on any of this, which wasn’t surprising. It was simply another reminder
of what the U.S. has hoped to salvage in Syria as Assad and his forces—regular
and irregular, Syrian and increasingly foreign—carried out a simple edict to
hold on to power: “Assad, or we burn the country down.”
Since 2011, the
conflict in Syria continues to take a heavy toll on the life of Syrian people
and on the Syrian economy. The death toll in Syria directly related to the
conflict as of early 2016 is estimated between 400,000 (UN, Apr 2016) and
470,000 (Syrian Center for Policy Research, Feb 2016), with many more injured,
and lives up heaved. More than 6.1 million people, including 2.5 million
children, are internally displaced and 5.6 million are officially registered as
refugees (UNHCR, September 2018).
The social and
economic impacts of the conflict are also large—and growing. The lack of
sustained access to health care, education, housing, and food have exacerbated
the impact of the conflict and pushed millions of people into unemployment and
poverty.
In addition, a severe
decline in oil receipts and disruptions of trade has placed even more pressure
on Syria’s external balances, resulting in the rapid depletion of its
international reserves.
The Toll of War report
assessed the economic and social impact of the conflict Syria-wide, including
its effects on physical and human capital, as well as its effects on the
aggregate well-being of Syrians. The World Bank study examines the drivers of
these impacts—physical destruction, losses in human lives, demographic
mobility, and economic disorganization—to assess the relative importance of the
impact on each. It found that:
·
The human toll of the
conflict (casualties and forced displacement) and damage to productive factors
and economic activity has been extensive, damaging capital stock (e.g. about
one-third of housing stock and one half of health and education facilities
damaged or destroyed), while disrupting economic activity. From 2011 to 2016,
cumulative GDP loss is estimated at $226 billion.
·
Disruptions in
economic organization are the most important driver of the economic impact,
superseding physical damage. Conflict has disrupted economic activity by
diminishing economic connectivity, reducing incentives to pursue productive
work, and disconnecting networks and supply chains. Cumulative GDP loss due to
disruptions in economic organization exceeds that of physical destruction by a
factor of 20. This contrast is explained by how the economy reacts to different
shocks. A “capital destruction only” is like some natural disasters: in a
well-functioning economy, its effects on investment are limited (-22% in
simulations) as capital can be rapidly rebuilt and repercussions contained. In
comparison, economic disorganization reduces investments significantly (-80% in
simulations); and effects propagated over time.
·
The longer the
conflict lasts, the more difficult recovery will be, as effects of economic
deterioration become more persistent over time. Should conflict end in its 6th
year, GDP is estimated to recoup about 41% of the gap with its pre-conflict
level within 4 years, with cumulated GDP losses 7.6 times 2010 GDP by the 20th
year. In comparison, GDP recoups only 28% of the gap in 4 years if it ends in
its 10th year, with cumulated GDP losses 13.2 times 2010 GDP by the 20th year.
Simulations also show that outmigration could double between the 6th and 20th
year of the conflict.
The assessment and
analysis together underscore the Bank’s ongoing dialogue with the UN, the EU,
and other development partners, and provide an important understanding of
Syria’s economy, infrastructure, service delivery, and institutions. The
assessment and analysis do not provide, however, a picture of the
reconstruction that will be needed once the conflicts in Syria stop.
The impact of the
Syrian crisis has been significant in Lebanon and Jordan, where conservative
estimates put the proportion of Syrian refugees at 25% and 10% of the
countries’ populations respectively. The Bank’s operational response in these
countries has included: (i) analytical work on the social and economic impact
of the conflict; (ii) the rapid preparation of projects to assist hosting
communities and refugees; and (iii) the mobilization of substantial grant
funding from donor partners to support the host countries.
To date, the World
Bank has supported around US$3 billion of projects in Jordan and Lebanon,
mostly on concessional terms, directly addressing the impact of the Syrian
refugee crisis and to help refugees and host communities. Such projects are
addressing jobs and economic opportunities, health, education, emergency
services and social resilience, and infrastructure.
The Bank also manages
the Lebanon Syria Crisis Trust Fund (LSCTF), established in 2014 to provide
grant financing to projects that mitigate the impact of the Syrian crisis. The
LCSTF is funded by the UK, France, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden,
Switzerland, and Denmark, and has supported emergency projects including
education, health, and municipal services.
Assad’s Rule
Assad won his
war to stay in power. Granted, he rules a challenging,
fragile, and fragmented Syria; one where violence will not cease in the coming
years nor will efforts to unseat him. Despite the emphasis on Syrian unity and
territorial integrity enshrined in the Geneva
Communiqué, in United National
Security Council Resolutions, and in statements by
numerous regional actors, zones of control are gradually solidifying across
Syria, making de facto partition more likely. Partition is not a stable end
state; it will be characterized by continued violence. Surely the regime in
Damascus will seek to regain control over all of Syria, but doing so will be a
difficult and costly effort. There exists a surfeit of worrisome implications
of Assad staying in power. Among them include the shattering of any lingering
expectations for a different, more open, and democratic Syria. Assad’s
continued use of chemical weapons demonstrates that he hasn’t been deterred
whatsoever from committing atrocities. And, opponents of Iran and Hezbollah
have warily realized that countering them cannot be a halfhearted affair. They
are not pushovers and, as the continued bloodshed in Syria underscores, are
willing to sacrifice mightily to protect their interests.
Russian bases in the Middle East; also
bought Moscow a permanent seat at the table in any negotiations to end the war,
and increased influence more broadly in the region. Just a few years ago, one
did not overwhelmingly focus on “whither Moscow” when analyzing regional
developments; today, it would be foolhardy not to do so. Nevertheless, as Assad
grows confident, Russia’s role in Syria may become knottier.
Iran, despite
profound and persistent domestic political and economic vulnerabilities, has
demonstrated an unwavering commitment to its mission in Syria, increasingly
purchasing another strategic border with Israel. Working by, with, and through
Hezbollah, Iranian power projection across the Middle East has skyrocketed.
Both Iran and Hezbollah are entrenched in Syria, which will make any U.S.
efforts to counter their regional influence that much harder.
Turkey, which has been turning away from the west for years, and
with whom U.S. views are increasingly diverging, further complicates the
picture in Syria. For a period of time, Turkey and the United States saw Syria
through a somewhat common frame: counter-ISIS. That frame is blurring as the
fight against ISIS winds down and with it comes serious questions about the
justification for future U.S. support to the Syrian Kurds. The conflict between
Turkey and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria threatens not
only to distract from efforts to conclusively y defeat ISIS; it also risks a confrontation with U.S.
forces that would be extremely dangerous for NATO. While debating the
circumstances under which two NATO allies may both invoke Article V is academic
for some, the increasing salience of that debate is troubling. Indeed, Turkey’s
drift toward Russia, particularly evidenced by its recent arms purchases,
highlights just how far this NATO ally has fallen.
The “easy” part is over. A number of disparate parties
involved in the Syria conflict—internal to Syria, regionally, and
globally—largely agreed that ISIS must be crushed. It’s difficult to list
another national security challenge that has brought together such radically
dissimilar entities like the United States, Russia, Iran, the Assad regime, and
Hezbollah, among many others. To be sure,
parochial interests for fighting ISIS varied among these actors. And, in some
ways, the next phase of countering ISIS—militarily as it goes underground and
politically to ensure a capable successor does not fill its place—will be
tougher. Nevertheless, this emphasis on militarily defeating ISIS enabled these
powers to put tricky issues like reconciliation, rebuilding, and governance on
the backburner. With ISIS largely routed militarily, this can no longer be the
case. A race to claim the last territory under ISIS control is now giving way
to jostling for influence over a potential settlement in the broader war. And
that’s very dangerous.
Refugees
In the
years since, Assad’s reign over much of Syria has continued, and he has lived
up to his reputation as a venal, vicious, and murderous thug. Civil war erupted
across the country—which outsiders have cynically manipulated and
destabilized—in addition to ISIS’s horrific emergence. With the support of
Tehran, Hezbollah, and in particular, Moscow, Assad’s rotten regime has stayed
entrenched. The ghastly humanitarian costs of the war keep rising, to include
the largest refugee crisis in the world emanating from a region already
suffering in a multitude of ways.
Russia intervened in Syria, but the war’s
overall status quo and what fueled it still didn’t really shift, even if
President Bashar al-Assad got a lifeline. 2015 was also the year that Europeans
were forced to reckon in some measure with the reality in Syria, given the
record number of Syrians seeking refuge and asylum at Europe’s borders any way
they could. In response, though, many European countries put up fences or
quotas and the European Union eventually cut a deal with Turkey to essentially
act as the gatehouse for asylum-seekers and migrants trying to reach the
continent.
Since the Syrian
civil war officially began March 15, 2011, families have suffered under a
brutal conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, torn the
nation apart, and set back the standard of living by decades. About 13.1
million people in the country need humanitarian assistance.
Healthcare centers
and hospitals, schools, utilities, and water and sanitation systems are damaged
or destroyed. Historic landmarks and once-busy marketplaces have been reduced
to rubble. War broke the social and business ties that bound neighbors to their
community. Millions scattered, creating the largest refugee and displacement crisis
of our time. More than 5.6 million Syrians have fled the
country as refugees,
and another 6.2 million people are displaced within Syria. Half of the people
affected are children.
The Syrian army and
various militant groups are fighting to control territory in the country’s
northeast and northwest. The civil war has become a sectarian conflict, with
religious groups opposing each other that affects the whole region and is
heavily influenced by international interventions.
Kurdish
enclave
American soldiers weren’t on a humanitarian
mission in Syria, although they were operating as the backstop for an
increasingly assertive Kurdish proto-state in the northeast of the country, in
the name of fighting the Islamic State. Abandoned by the U.S., Syria’s Kurds no
longer have their buffer between Assad, on one side, and Turkey on the other.
Syrian Kurdish leaders have already reached out to Assad for protection, at
least in some of the territories they control near the Syrian-Turkish border,
fearing an impending attack from the Turks. Retaking corners of the country
that have been under Kurdish control since the war’s early days would be
another milestone for Assad, at a time when there is growing diplomatic
outreach toward his regime from Arab states that once supported his opponents.
“The rebels’ former backers have not only given up on challenging his regime,
they now actively want to embrace it—whether in public or in private,” Hassan
Victory and Acceptance
The
United Arab Emirates and Bahrain reopened their embassies in Damascus. Seven
years after being expelled from the Arab League, it looks like Syria is about
to be let back in. On top of recent military advances in southern Syria,
including taking back the city of Daraa, the rebel stronghold where the popular
uprising began, these diplomatic overtures, leave no room for doubt: Assad has
decisively won the conflict
Reconciliation between Assad and his
neighbors would be the war’s denouement. Many of those neighbors are fellow
autocrats who are keen to see their brand of control consolidated across the
Middle East, as the hope and brief momentum of the 2011 Arab uprisings further
recede. Unlike the geopolitical winds
that buffeted Saddam Hussein in the 1990s after the first Gulf war, everything
is blowing strongly in Assad’s favor
That means just the opposite for many
Syrians, especially the most vulnerable, who have borne the brunt of the world
letting Syria slip this far. Amid ongoing talk of reconstruction, including
Trump’s seemingly bogus claim that Saudi Arabia would foot an unspecified
amount of the bill, there is little actual mention of another word for this
traumatized society: recovery.
Daesh
In Syria, the self-proclaimed Islamic
State, or ISIS, was always treated as a problem with an essentially military
solution. At least for the U.S.-led international coalition, there was no
positive end state or program of political change that could be joined to the
military campaign against the jihadi group. The general repulsiveness of the Syrian
regime of Bashar al-Assad meant that, unlike in neighboring Iraq, Washington
and its allies could not simply invest in the Syrian state. And none of Syria’s
nonstate armed factions represented a plausible governing alternative, at least
not for more than piece of the country. The result was a counter-ISIS military
campaign absent a coherent, viable political vision for a post-ISIS Syria. Now
that post-ISIS Syria has arrived, and the West still has no satisfactory answer
for what a good, stabilizing post-ISIS political order in Syria should actually
look like. So Syria will be defined not by what should be, but what is: a
political map that has been redrawn by the fight against the Islamic State.
But even that map is not indelible, and
Syria’s broader civil war goes on. And while the West lacks a compelling vision
for the country, Assad and his allies do not. The Islamic State lost its de
facto Syrian capital in Raqqa last month and, in short order, nearly all of its
remaining territory in the country’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour. What had
been the “Caliphate” in eastern Syria has been mostly divided between the Assad
regime and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, led by the Kurdish
People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG.
The regime availed itself this year of a
strategically timed “de-escalation” agreement covering western Syria and
critical support from its Russian and Iranian allies to launch its drive into
the Islamic State’s eastern territory. In doing so, it demonstrated its bona
fides against the Islamic State and reasserted itself as the only party to the
conflict operating on a truly national scope. The YPG, for its part, has proved
itself as a disciplined, effective military force and the U.S.-led coalition’s
preferred local partner against the Islamic State. The YPG has gone from a
leftist curio on the margins of Syria’s war to one of the conflict’s central
players and the dominant force in northeastern Syria.
Mar., 22, 2019: The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on
Tuesday announced full control over the remaining IS enclave of Baghuz in
eastern Syria after hundreds of IS militants surrendered overnight. The capture
was a significant step in the fight against IS, but not a complete victory over
the terror group as fighting continued with some jihadists along the Euphrates
River.
Some experts said the final push in Baghuz was the end of
Islamic State's self-declared caliphate, but IS and other radical Islamist
organizations will continue to attract new members because the West has made
little progress on the ideological battlefield. .
We will see this with ISIS going underground. We have seen this
with al-Qaida adapting and going underground. They will rationalize the loss …
in part because they have very long-term visions of their own movements in
history. So they will see this as just one chapter, whereas we in Washington
who are thinking in two-year cycles, maybe at most in four-year cycles, see
this as the end of [IS], or the killing of [Osama] bin Laden as the ending of
al-Qaida," Zarate said, speaking Tuesday at the Washington Institute. Zarate
said the defeat will most likely encourage IS to revisit its actions and
implement an al-Qaida-style strategy of insurgency while hiding among more
vulnerable Muslim communities."Part of the ideological clash between
al-Qaida and Islamic State was al-Qaida saying, 'Look, we've learned lessons of
how to go about doing these terrorist movements. We've learned some very hard
lessons that if you pop your head up too much, if you expose yourself too much,
you're going to get whacked by the American and the counterterrorism forces aligned
with them,' " he said.
Experts say the loss of IS territory or caliphate is likely to
prompt the terror group to step up efforts to spread its ideology and recruit
followers on the internet. That is because the lost caliphate was an effective
tool for inspiring prospective recruits and spreading ideas, and the IS
leadership will have to replace that if it is to survive. IS has shown
considerable skill in online recruiting, and Western powers have been
ineffective in countering IS propaganda, they say.
IS online communication and propaganda over the years has
declined as the group lost territory in Iraq and Syria. Nevertheless, the
jihadists have continued to recycle old propaganda messages and even create new
ones. IS on Monday released a 44-minute audio recording of its spokesman, Abu
Hassan al-Muhajir, calling followers to take revenge for the two attacks
targeting mosques in New Zealand that left 50 people dead last Friday."The
scenes of the massacres in the two mosques should wake up those who were fooled,
and should incite the supporters of the caliphate to avenge their
religion," he said.
Levitt said IS most likely would try to restore its image among
the vulnerable Muslim communities.
"As we get farther and farther away from what that [IS] caliphate
really was in terms of the barbarism, et cetera, they will continue and will
have a greater effect at presenting it as, 'Maybe we weren't perfect, but it
was a caliphate. Therefore, you need to come and join us again and get back in
line to be like the original followers of the Prophet Muhammad,' " he
said.
According to Farah Pandith, a former U.S. envoy to Muslim
communities, the U.S. and other Western powers need to make sure they step up
their efforts to fight back against IS and other extremist groups
ideologically.
Pandith said the counter terror strategy after the Sept. 11,
2001, al-Qaida attacks on the U.S. underestimated the importance of battling
extremism on the ideological front, leading in part to the emergence of groups
like IS.
Daesh:
Apr., 2019: On March 23: Kurdish-led SDF, backed primarily by American
fighter jets and British and French Special Forces, captured the last few
hundred square meters of the village of Baghouz in a godforsaken corner of
eastern Syria. Not since tribal leader
Ibn Saud's army of horsemen conquered what is now Saudi Arabia some 100 years
ago has a group of jihadis managed to seize, hold and administer a vast area.
In short: to govern. But IS did exactly that. Something al-Qaida and others
only dreamed of. It was a different story with IS, that Janus-faced monstrosity
that portrayed itself in its propaganda as the devout executor of God's will.
Meanwhile, it was being directed from within by engineers of power who placed
little trust in a supreme deity and instead relied on highly intelligent
planning, taking inspiration from the maze of tunnels built by the Viet Cong
and the army established by Zionist Israelis with recruits from around the
world. Thanks to their experience as military and intelligence officers --
nearly every top-ranking IS commander had been one or the other in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq until 2003 - as well as some astonishing creativity, IS was able
to conquer large swathes of eastern Syria by summer 2014. In June, it began a
blitzkrieg offensive, seizing Mosul, Tikrit and large parts of western Iraq. In
July 2014, IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stood in the pulpit of the Grand
al-Nuri mosque in Mosul and proclaimed the so-called caliphate. It was a
seemingly unfathomable triumph. At the height of its power, IS controlled an
area the size of Jordan and ruled over millions of subjects. Now, nearly five
years later, after countless battles and a seemingly endless reconquest, it's
over.
The battle over Baghouz was not the suicidal
finale that many expected. IS' disciples did not collectively don their suicide
belts and charge enemy lines in order to ascend to paradise in a sea of flames.
On the contrary: Tens of thousands of them emerged and allowed themselves to be
captured. In late February, IS began
getting rid of any extra mouths to feed, sending away anyone who couldn't or
wouldn't fight, thus leaving the remaining provisions to be divided among fewer
people. Women, children, the elderly and the wounded -- all the useless
stalwarts who until then hadn't wanted to leave their delusional paradise --
left.
Judging by those who stumbled by on the last
day that the Kurds allowed a few journalists in, it looked as if the gates of
hell had been opened. For hours, an exodus of hunched, filthy and mute escapees
lumbered up a narrow path to a low plateau, where they were searched with
hand-held metal detectors and brought to collection points before being
transported away.It was a surreal sight. Journalists with TV cameras and
telephoto lenses stood on rooftops and walls, while only 20 to 30 meters (65 to
100 feet) away, a stream of surrendering people shuffled by. Women laden with
luggage and plastic bags stumbled on the precipitous, rocky ground. The
one-legged man walked by. Injured people with blood-soaked bandages made their
way supported by others. Two men carried a battered cot with an inanimate body
on it. A girl, perhaps 13 years old, hair and face covered with the fine gray
dust of a bomb explosion at close range, lurched forward as if in a trance and
stared off into space. She stopped for a moment, walked back a few steps and
didn't respond when spoken to. Kurdish fighters moved in and out of the line,
lifted babies out of women's arms and carried them up the steepest stretches.
After much insistence, journalists were
allowed to get as close as 2 to 3 meters from the line of people. But they were
still not allowed to speak to any of the lurching escapees. "They're
dangerous!" the Kurdish squad leaders shouted. "Here come the fanatics!"
Even though nothing had happened yet. A day later, it became apparent just how
right they had been. Once again, hundreds of people passed through the
checkpoint at the base of the cliff, between palm trees and ruins. This time no
journalists were present. Around noon, a mother with two children blew herself
up. Seconds later, a man dressed in women's clothing ran toward the would-be
rescuers and detonated a second suicide bomb. A third attacker was shot and
killed before he could trigger his explosive belt.
"We thought a woman with two children
would be harmless," said one of the wounded SDF men, all of whom survived.
One of the two children died instantly, the other was evacuated with severe
burns. Were they even the woman's children, or was she taking care of them
because their parents were dead? And what moves a woman, who has already given
up, to want to kill herself, two small children and as many other people as
possible as a final statement?
DER SPIEGEL was able to speak with a number of
people who fled Baghouz in recent weeks. Their accounts paint a picture of
sheer madness -- or, more precisely, of a murderous struggle between two camps,
the "traitors" and the fanatics, those who intended to blow
themselves up after capitulating and the many others who cast aside their
suicide belts, which could be seen lying around everywhere. The conflict even
continued in the prisons and detainee camps, which explains why nearly everyone
who spoke with the "infidels" asked to remain anonymous for fear of
being attacked at night.
"The hard core are a sect, completely
insane," said one of the "traitors," a woman, describing the
others before adding: "they call us idol worshipers and refer to
themselves as Khawarij," a group whose members view themselves as the only
true, albeit misunderstood followers of the Prophet Muhammad in accordance with
early Islamic models. This deep divisions extend across all nationalities; men
and women from Tunisia are included, so are those from Iraq, though less so
those from Europe. A Swedish woman living with several children in an
internment camp was quoted as saying that it was better for a child to starve
in the Islamic State than "to be sent to the land of the infidels, where
it will be raised by homosexuals." They are immune to all logic. They have
walled themselves off in their utopia and the memories of the euphoric success
of 2014.
Back then, they wanted to declare war on the
entire world -- on the infidels, of course, but also on fellow Muslims who
would be forced to first submit to pass the test of faith. Everything went
according to plan, the gradual infiltration and conquest of northern Syria, the
rapid attacks on western Iraq. It was all God's plan, they said. The conquered
lands were predominantly inhabited by Sunni Muslims, the religious community
that also gave rise to the extremists of IS. Hence not everyone there fled; at
least part of the population remained. Without them, the self-declared state
would not have been able to function.
But the jihadi military campaign was only successful
as long as the world ignored this declaration of war. After the international
community idly watched in dismay as Mosul was seized in June 2014, this led IS
to make a decisive miscalculation two months later. In the northern Iraqi town
of Sinjar, the jihadis attacked the enclave of the Yazidis, an ancient
religious community that, in addition to God, reveres seven angels, including
one in the form of a peacock. In the eyes of IS, they fulfilled all the
conditions to be enslaved and annihilated. And this community had the
misfortune of living near the city of Tal Afar, where at least two of the most
powerful IS emirs originated.
If the world didn't care about Mosul, Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi and the other IS leaders reasoned that it probably wouldn't come to
the Yazidis' rescue either. But with this attack, IS had suddenly threatened
Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq. The almost
biblical scene of tens of thousands of Yazidis on the plateau of the Sinjar
Mountains, surrounded and dying of thirst, moved the hesitant U.S. government
under President Barack Obama to intervene. It launched airstrikes against IS
and forged an international coalition. The subsequent executions of American
and British hostages by IS, some of whom had been held for two years without
any signs of life, were intended to deter the aggressors, but had the opposite
effect.
It was the beginning of the end. In open
confrontation, IS stood no chance against sweeping phone surveillance, armed
drones and precision-guided bombs that could unleash enormous firepower with an
accuracy of several meters. The jihadis lost city after city, region after
region, until finally Baghouz had also fallen. There, a Kurdish field commander
gave a sober analysis: "They attacked us as a conventional force. That was
their mistake. As a guerrilla force it would have been far more difficult,
perhaps impossible, for us to beat them."
But why in the world did they choose Baghouz,
this village on the border with Iraq? Was it merely the topographical
consequence of an ongoing retreat, deeper and deeper to the south, to the most
far-flung corner of the country, where the Assad regime's area of control and
the Euphrates to the west ultimately run up against the Iraqi border? Where
tens of thousands who retreated here and parked their trucks, pickups, cars and
vans with all their possessions, dug trenches and transformed the final square
kilometers of the "caliphate" into a huge, chaotic parking lot?
Or was there, again, some plan behind it all?
SDF spokesman Adnan Afrin recounted how his people, approaching from the
desert, had attacked Baghouz once before in late September: "The
resistance was immense. We even lost some ground again. We retreated and from
then on, only advanced from the north." The version that IS gave its
supporters was the usual hocus-pocus: A small Iraqi boy reportedly dreamed the
"caliphate" would lose town after town, but never the mountain near
Baghouz. Here they would win their decisive victory, after all the hypocrites
and sinners had left.
The Many Tunnels of IS
There is another possible explanation. Baghouz
was once a smugglers' nest. Immediately behind the steeply rising hills at the
edge of town lies the border and the desert of the Iraqi province of Anbar
where, according to reports from multiple intelligence agencies, IS leader
al-Baghdadi headed after he left Baghouz in early January.
IS was a master of long-term planning and
tunnel construction. As early as 2014, the jihadis began digging sophisticated
networks of subterranean passageways, some as deep as five or six meters,
wherever they thought they might be attacked. They dug in towns like Raqqa,
Tabqa and around Mosul. The tunnels had electrical wiring, infirmaries, storage
warehouses, command centers, hidden exits and holes for sniper nests. The
excavated material was hidden in mosques and houses. In 2016, Iraqi soldiers in
Mosul even found specially designed tunnel drills: monstrous machines, several
meters long, with huge milling heads and multiple motors. In the hills of
Baghouz, the jihadis' final retreat, IS had also dug tunnels. By the middle of
last week, it was still unclear whether they had been completely discovered,
searched and cleared.
So far, the advancing forces have found none
of the group's leading emirs nor any trace of the last three Western hostages
held by IS. They also haven't found any gold or sign of the presumed reserves
of between $50 million and $300 million (between 44.5 million and 266.7 million
euros). According to an IS informant, some of the money is hidden in
refrigerators buried in the Iraqi desert.
Baghouz is apparently not only the site of the
"caliphate's" demise, the end of its territorial rule. It is also a
gateway back to the underworld, to invisibility, where the military superiority
of its opponents is meaningless. Terror attacks, murders, racketeering: All the
things IS was doing in Iraq before it suddenly overran Mosul -- it's all much
easier than maintaining control over an entire state.
IS has long since resumed its underground
existence; in some regions, it has returned, in others, it never really left.
Like the fertile district of Hawija, west of Mosul, an area crisscrossed by two
rivers with banks covered with thick vegetation, where IS fighters retreated in
2017. Here, they were never truly beaten and have been terrorizing the
population ever since. It helps that fighting between the central government in
Baghdad and Kurdish forces has flared up again, since the frontlines of that
conflict create a wide no man's land in which the jihadis can operate virtually
undisturbed.
In southern Syria, a region that dictator
Bashar al-Assad's troops recaptured last year, several IS groups seemed to
disappear into thin air. For years, roughly 1,200 IS fighters were entrenched
in the Yarmouk Valley in the southern province of Daraa. After Daraa was seized
last summer, more than 500 surrendered and, according to several sources, 80 of
them were recruited by the 4th Armored Division of the Syrian army. The
military intelligence agency brought the remaining IS fighters to the desert,
near the city of Sweida, in the Druze region.
For years, the Druze minority had refused to
allow their sons to serve in the army, endeavoring instead to remain as neutral
as possible and protect only their own region. In late July, the same IS
militants who had been transferred to the area took part in a devastating
attack on Druze villages that left nearly 240 dead, after which the Druze
leaders dropped their resistance to Assad's rule over their region.
After years of discreet collaboration and
hostility with Assad's intelligence services, IS remains a useful enemy for the
Syrian dictator, who presents himself to the West as a bulwark against the
beheaders. To this day, hundreds of IS combatants continue to operate
undisturbed in the desert region east of Sweida, and several emirs from Daraa
were released after being only briefly detained by the Syrian authorities.
In other countries, where IS has honored
affiliated terror groups with the coveted cachet of "wilayah,"
meaning an administrative division of a caliphate, a distinctive pattern can be
discerned despite the disparate nature of the various movements:
In Libya, probably IS' most important project
outside its core region, the group may have lost control over the city of
Sirte, but little is known about the number of sleeper cells that exist in the
cities along the coast and in the south of the country, where the government
has little influence.
In the Sinai, where in November 2014 most of
the already existing terrorist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis allied itself with
IS, Egyptian troops may not have been able to break the resistance, but they
did manage to keep it in check. It has helped Cairo that the former alliance
between Hamas in Gaza and the IS group in Sinai has descended into open
hostilities fueled by opposing interests. Hamas is now cooperating with the
Egyptian government to prevent the complete obstruction of its smuggling
tunnels. Meanwhile, IS has mobilized some 2,000 supporters to fight against the
Egyptian state, feeding rumors that Israel is using the jihadis as a tool
against Hamas.
In Afghanistan, the IS offshoot "Khorasan
Province" has occupied an unexpected political niche and operates
primarily in Nangarhar Province in the eastern part of the country, where it
fights not only U.S. troops and the Afghan army, but also the Taliban, who seek
to eliminate their ruthless rivals. The more the Taliban lean toward
negotiating a settlement, however, the more attractive IS becomes for those Taliban
who categorically reject all negotiations.
Most alarming of all, although it has gone
almost unnoticed by the world, is the situation in northeastern Nigeria and
neighboring countries. The Boko Haram terror group, under its unpredictable
leader Abubakar Shekau, was successfully fought with international assistance.
Even IS criticized the indiscriminate massacre of civilians by its offshoot in
2016 and revoked its "membership." But ever since IS gave its
blessing that same year to a faction that had split off under the more savvy
leadership of Abu Musab al-Barnawi, who now heads the "West Africa
Province," this new group has managed to massively expand the territory
under its control and now rules over it like a state -- without ever proclaiming
one. Markets and trade routes are taxed and protected, even large military
bases are attacked, and the government in Abuja appears powerless against this
enemy that is far more elusive than Boko Haram.
None of the countries concerned offer their
citizens a dignified existence in a society where everyone enjoys the same
basic rights, which would be the surest way to eliminate the breeding grounds
for groups like IS. But at least in places where a central state government
exists, such as in Egypt, it's possible to stop the further spread of IS, which
feeds on the loss of control, collapse and withdrawal of the state like a
parasite living off its host. Indeed, the jihadis first operated within the
Syrian rebellion clandestinely, then openly, as early as late 2012 -- ignored
by the West because they did not (yet) threaten it.
It's this narrow, shortsighted perspective
that poses a risk, especially with the demise of the so-called caliphate: the
belief that the Islamic State has been defeated merely because its visible manifestation
has disappeared. To wit, there are tens of thousands of jihadis from Baghouz,
and the villages that were captured shortly beforehand, who find themselves
indefinitely detained in camps and prisons run by a Kurdish administration that
is overburdened by the task. Roughly 70,000 women, children and elderly alone
are held in the Al Hawl refugee camp, while the fighters are detained in
prisons and military bases scattered across the region.
The ongoing threat has even been confirmed by
the U.S. regional commander in the Middle East, General Joseph Votel, a man who
sounds far more pessimistic than his president: "What we are seeing now is
not the surrender of ISIS as an organization," as Votel testified before
the House Armed Services Committee, "but a calculated decision to preserve
the safety of their families and the preservation of their capabilities by
taking their chances in camps for internally displaced persons and going to
ground in remote areas and waiting for the right time to resurge."
"Baqiya wa tatamaddad," Arabic meaning to remain and expand, has been
the organization's cryptic rallying cry for years -- and is just as applicable
to victories as defeats. IS supporters hastily graffitied the word
"baqiya" on numerous walls before they retreated. Two circles and
three dots in Arabic encapsulate the ultimate threat: to return as an
underground terror network and a source of endless fear.
Iraqis, especially those from Mosul, Tikrit
and Baghdad, have been familiar with this fear for a decade and a half. They
have been living a powerless existence with no protection against
indiscriminate terror and targeted murder because the police themselves are
threatened or have been bought off. It remains to be seen what consequences the
defeat in Baghouz will hold for IS. The actual existence of the
"caliphate" is already being romanticized by many in the internment
camps. Fictitious, dazzling prophecies are making the rounds with predictions
that the demise of this first "caliphate" was merely a test before it
returns -- and remains -- as an even greater power.
History has seen a number of devastating
militarily defeats that ultimately engendered tremendous power as myths for
centuries thereafter: Masada for the Jews of Palestine, Karbala for the
Shiites, the Alamo for the Texans. The logic of identity does not necessarily
follow the rational pattern of military successes and defeats. On the day of
the victory in Baghouz, it only took a few hours before the mood turned again
among the SDF fighters as well as the Kurdish interpreters and drivers. In the
early afternoon of March 23, the improvised "Comrade Rostom" media
center at the edge of the village was nearly deserted when the driver for the
U.S. broadcaster NBC entered the storage room on the ground floor. He was
killed on the spot by an explosion that even destroyed the floor above him and
the minibus he had parked outside.
In the weeks preceding this deadly attack,
boxes of potatoes, tomatoes and bread had been stored there, while uniformed
officials and members of the TV crews regularly entered the building to grab
something to eat. No believed in a coincidence or in the negligence of the
soldiers who assured that they had personally checked the empty room on the
ground floor in early March: "There was nothing inside, no wiring, no
cabinets, only walls, a window with no booby-traps, the floor."
Syrian Revolutionary
Opposition
Syria’s revolutionary opposition to the
Assad regime, meanwhile, played a tertiary part in the fight against the
Islamic State and will reap few of the political spoils. The mixed
nationalist-jihadi opposition could never be reliably motivated or organized to
fight the Islamic State, or made to interface effectively with a great power
military. They were sidelined as a result, while their local enemies proved
themselves more useful proxies for foreign powers concerned, mostly, with killing
jihadis. The case for involving these opposition factions in the fight against
the Islamic State was that they could claim to be a more resonant, locally
acceptable force in eastern Syria. The thinking was that these almost entirely
Sunni Arab rebels had unique authenticity that could rally Sunni Arab residents
in ISIS-held areas to their side, spurring defections and minimizing local
resistance. It could also, ideally, help them stabilize these areas with a
popular, representative political order.
Yet it is unclear that the opposition was
necessarily a superior force against the Islamic State, even on these terms.
Rebels’ factionalism, corruption and inability to police themselves for
extremists initially helped the Islamic State infiltrate areas before it defeated these rebels outright and scattered
them in exile. In the one large section of territory rebels captured from the
Islamic State—eastern Aleppo, taken in 2016 with extensive Turkish support—they
failed to attract mass defections that might have spared al-Bab, on the eastern
edges of Aleppo, from extensive destruction. In post-ISIS Aleppo, they have so
far mostly replicated old patterns of militia dysfunction, instead of creating
a rational, stabilizing political order.
For the Assad regime, the fight against the
Islamic State has only been a single episode in a longer struggle against
insurgency and terror. It seems impossible to say which of the combatant
parties to Syria’s war, if any, truly represent the Sunni Arab residents living
under the Islamic State in eastern Syria. It is not clear to what extent that
representativeness even really matters, as opposed to locals’ more prosaic
concerns like security and normal economic life. These easterners have now been
distributed between the Assad regime and the YPG-led SDF, each of which have
projects that are officially defined in broadly inclusive, ecumenical terms,
even if they have distinct sectarian or ethnic tones in practice. These
projects have little place for Islamism, Sunni Arab chauvinism or a post-2011
revolutionary identity. But are those identifiers, as political categories,
genuinely absolute and immutable, or are they something more transient? So long
as Sunni-sectarian grievance persists in Syria—defined in sectarian terms, as opposed
to Syrian disenfranchisement more generally—some manifestation of the Islamic
State seems likely to survive. As scholars such as Hassan Abu Hanieh have
pointed out, the Islamic State’s message is still the purest, most readily
understandable version of Sunni revanchism among the various militant
ideologies today. The Islamic State has a track record of spectacular violence
and conquest, and, for angry sectarians, it promises a fairly straight line to
revenge and death.
As for the actual organization of the
Islamic State—not its mass membership and symbolic appeal, but its individual
commanders, its structures and institutional knowledge—that too will persist in
some form. The circumstances of its rapid collapse in Deir el-Zour are still
unclear. It is not obvious whether the group’s cadres deliberately melted away,
or if it was just terminally depleted by a multiyear war of attrition. But the
group has survived underground before, and it has had time to prepare for a
stretch of militant austerity. Its future in Syria is also inseparable from its
prospects across the border in Iraq, its real home, which will remain restive
and unsettled. Still, the Islamic State will inevitably be much reduced. The
Assad regime and the SDF may not have perfect local legitimacy, but they both
have effective security apparatuses that can mostly control a brutalized,
fatigued populace and suppress jihadi insurgents.
The Islamic State is unlikely to really
roar back or to recover the sort of strength it had in 2015. The group’s rise
to proto-statehood was the product of exceptional circumstances: the sudden
collapse of Syrian state authority, wide-open borders and a sluice of material
support and foreign manpower for an unruly insurgency. These conditions are not
replicable, at least not any time soon. Syria’s war will go on, though, even as
the Islamic State becomes an insurgent phantom. Once it has sufficiently
pacified Syria’s east, the Assad regime will turn back west and, with Russia
and Iran’s help, resume crushing the revolutionary opposition. Eventually, it
will also come after the SDF, although likely not before the Americans and
their coalition partners withdraw. There still is no clarity about the extent
and duration of the U.S. commitment to the SDF, but, presumably, it is not
unlimited. The Islamic State’s defeat only returns to the fore the central
political question of Syria today: How to reconcile Syria’s periphery with the
Damascus-centered Syrian state, which, under the regime, emanates destabilizing
resentment and grievance. The West has no way forward for Syria other than a
U.N.-sponsored peace process based on a binary regime-opposition dynamic that
is now defunct. The West is still holding onto a panacea political solution
that is basically unreal. Damascus and its allies have a different goal: a
restoration of central state authority through mostly unilateral, nonconsensual
means. It is an uglier course, but one that at least makes sense on its own
terms.
Status Quo
The Associated Press noted the new welcome
signs in a cautiously optimistic report from Damascus late last month, where
“many of the checkpoints that for years have snarled traffic are gone.” The
outlying suburbs held by various rebel factions, recently retaken by the regime
at a staggering cost, are again connected to the city center. “There’s a new
feeling of hope that an end is near to Syria’s seven-year civil war,” the AP
explained. What does “an end”—not the end—mean? For one thing, it means that
the government is issuing hundreds of death notices to families whose detained
and missing relatives, it now says, have been dead for years. They are “the
first public acknowledgment by the government that hundreds if not thousands of
prisoners died in state custody,” according to The New York Times. Some of the
notices suggest mass executions; others indicate torture in prison. The release
of information has been unexpected and haphazard. “In some towns, the
government has posted names of the deceased so their relatives can get death
certificates,” Ben Hubbard and Karam Shoumali reported. “In other cases,
families have obtained documents that attest to their relatives’ deaths. In
some cases, security officers have informed families personally.”
It’s an exceedingly grim and cynical
attempt by the regime at closure. “The regime is closing one chapter and
starting a new one,” Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International
Institute for Strategic Studies, told the Times. “It is telling the rebels and
the activists that this chapter is gone, that whatever hopes in some surviving
revolutionary spirit has been crushed.”
As Sam Dagher wrote in The Atlantic this
week, reporting from Lebanon, many Syrians “believe the regime wants the lists
of the dead to serve as a cruel, macabre epilogue for all those who rose up
more than seven years ago.” He interviewed Syrian refugees from the town of
Daraya, outside Damascus, who were starved and besieged until the rebels there
surrendered in 2016. Dagher says the message to the survivors of Daraya from
Assad “is loud and clear: You must lose everything for having challenged me.
Nobody is going to hold me accountable for punishing you.”
“For Syrian society itself, there must be a
reckoning with these abuses if there is to be any prospect of a stable future.”
There are other demonstrations of Assad’s renewed confidence and strength. In
July, his forces, backed by Russia and Iran, retook the dusty town of Daraa,
where the 2011 uprising essentially began, and the rest of southwestern Syria,
which had been under the sway of different opposition and jihadist groups since
the early days of the civil war.
A new offensive looms in the northwestern
province of Idlib, along the Turkish border. The last Syrian province outside
regime control, Idlib has been, in the words of the United Nations, a “dumping
ground” for rebel fighters and their families, given the terms of so-called
evacuation deals imposed by the regime on Homs, Aleppo, the Damascus suburbs
and other devastated battlegrounds once declared “liberated.” There is nowhere
else for the displaced of Idlib to go. In his big picture briefing for WPR this
week on the current landscape of Syria’s war and what’s to come, Aron Lund
explains why the fate of Idlib, like two other pockets of the country that
Assad’s forces have not retaken, “is now in the hands of foreigners.” In Idlib,
that means Turkey, which now has some 1,300 troops stationed in a dozen
outposts on the edge of the province, and Russia. They have competing interests,
between Moscow’s aim of eliminating the sizable jihadist presence in Idlib and
Ankara’s worry of another exodus of refugees into Turkey if there’s a
full-blown military offensive. “Some pieces of Idlib may be handed over to
Assad,” Lund writes, “but if Russia then decides to put its thumb on the scale
in Turkey’s favor, large parts of Syria’s northwest could be out of Assad’s
reach for the foreseeable future.”
“It wouldn’t be a clean end to the war, but
does Moscow really need that?” Lund adds. “From Moldova to South Ossetia and
eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin has a habit of letting messy situations linger to
its advantage. As seen in Cyprus, Turkey is also no stranger to the concept of
endless interim solutions.” The future of Syria, as the war winds down, could
be a series of more localized, semi-frozen conflicts—a Turkish dependency in
the northwest, and a Kurdish proto-republic in the northeast, tepidly backed by
the United States.
All this geopolitical wrangling, and how it
may or may not be resolved, pushes other questions out of the picture, as the
regime’s sudden release of death notifications makes clear. Four years ago,
before Russia’s military intervention all but saved Assad, and at a time when a
regime defector was sharing thousands of images in Washington of torture in
Assad’s prisons, the question of accountability and justice—of a Syria without
Assad—was at least open to debate. “If Assad stays in power, I don’t see a possibility
for transitional justice,” Mohammad Al Abdallah, the executive director of the
Syria Justice and Accountability Center in Washington, told me in 2014. David
Tolbert, the president of the International Center for Transitional Justice,
added: “For Syrian society itself, there must be a reckoning with these abuses
if there is to be any prospect of a stable future.”
What does the future of the Islamic State
look like in the wake of its battlefield setbacks in Iraq and Syria, from the
fall of Mosul last summer to Raqqa last month? Will it revert to a low-level
insurgency, or lash out with the kinds of terrorist attacks more associated
with its predecessors, like al-Qaida? Can it sustain itself as a movement
drawing in sympathizers and recruits from around the world? A member of the
U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces walks inside a prison built by Islamic
State fighters, Raqqa, argued that the
Islamic State’s “enormous losses … will cripple the effectiveness of its
previous approach to recruitment” since “it has lost far more than territory.
It has lost the living, beating heart of its appeal.” They highlighted a
fundamental factor behind the Islamic State’s success: its ties to a broader
social movement of jihadi extremism. As they pointed out, a shared sense of
identity among its adherents manifested itself in the concept of
“entitativity,” or groupness, that is essential for mobilization. The crumbling
caliphate and the resulting demise of the Islamic State’s propaganda output
will certainly make it a less attractive outfit to join for sympathizers to its
cause. Although the Islamic State will strive to mitigate these negative
effects by emphasizing a new “post-caliphate” narrative to draw in supporters,
the setbacks will be evident. But they will be setbacks for the Islamic State
itself, the specific organization, and not necessarily for the broader jihadi
movement that fed it. In the study of social movements, scholars have
introduced an important distinction between social movement “organizations” and
social movement “families.” The social
movement family is “a set of coexisting movements, which,regardless of their
specific goals, have similar basic values and organizational overlaps, and
sometimes may even join for common campaigns.” The Islamic State is thus just
one movement within a broader jihadi family, albeit the most prominent one over
the past three years.
This jihadi family, often wrongly referred
to as the jihadi-Salafi movement or ideology, has managed to attract
sympathizers for more than three decades. That jihadi-Salafi label is misplaced
since far from all jihadis are in fact Salafis—ultraconservative Sunni Muslims
who adhere to a strict, puritanical form of Islam—so the notion overestimates
the Salafi influence on the jihadi movement. The movement’s success in
mobilization reached new heights after the eruption of the Syrian civil war.
But even as the role of jihadis may dwindle in Syria and Iraq as the Islamic
State’s caliphate falls, the diverse but related ideologies of jihadi groups
will continue to attract followers, for three main reasons.
First, since Syria’s civil war broke out,
the vast number of people either actively fighting for the jihadi cause on the
battlefield or following and promoting it behind their computer and smart-phone
screens implies that a generation has become embedded in jihadi ideology and
accustomed to the normality of violence as a legitimate method of political
expression. A major but often overlooked challenge here is the high number of
children of foreign fighters who have grown up under the Islamic State.
According to new figures from the French Ministry of Interior, for example, as
many as 500 French children under the age of 12 are currently residing in the
Islamic State’s remaining territory in
Syria or Iraq with their jihadi father or mother. What happens if or when such
indoctrinated youth return to their home countries in Europe?
There is little to suggest that the
fragmentation of the Islamic State will cause jihadism to lose its position as
the most attractive radical ideology on offer.
Second, the immense amount of jihadi
material, including propaganda, that has been produced and disseminated in the
past decade, but especially since the Islamic State declared its caliphate in
2014, is still widely available online. As evident in the popularity of the
material of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemen-based cleric who was killed in a
U.S. drone strike in 2011, this material will prove essential for jihadi
sympathizers in years to come. Add to this the recent years of high-intensity
jihadi activity that have entailed the indoctrination of young cadres of jihadi
ideologues, disseminators and recruiters who will not necessarily put down
their pen or leave the keyboard because of the organizational demise of the
Islamic State.
Third, the underlying factors initially
leading to the radicalization and popularity of jihadi groups are still
prevalent. Sectarianism is only getting worse; many Middle Eastern states
remain in the hands of autocratic regimes that leave little space for political
opposition; and external actors, including Western states, continue to either
uphold such regimes or in other ways interfere counterproductively, for example
through drone strikes that inflame anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. On
several occasions . These on-the ground accounts confirm what has been widely
established in reporting and other studies on Yemen and Pakistan: that such
assassination programs benefit jihadis more than they harm them, by stoking
anti-Americanism. Nevertheless, as Berger and Amarasingam noted, the Islamic
State was unique in several ways, including its declaration of a physical
caliphate and emphasis on governance, not just terrorism, as appeals to its
followers. This uniqueness will likely have the effect of pushing Islamic State
adherents, especially youth, to search for another radical ideology to vent
their frustrations, rather than shop around for a new jihadi outfit to join.
However, there is little to suggest that the organizational fragmentation of
the Islamic State will cause jihadism to lose its position as the most
attractive radical ideology currently on offer.
In fact, the broader jihadi movement—in the
form of country-specific and globally focused organizational expressions—stands
ready to take over. For some jihadi
sympathizers, these known entities, such as Hayat Tahrir
al-Sham—formerly the Nusra Front—or al-Qaida, will not be enough, and they will
either establish new groups or operate outside any organizational framework. Others
will favor the prospect of joining another well-established and less radical
group with a similar level of entitativity or groupness.
In either case, the broader jihadi movement
will learn from the experience of the Islamic State, both the positive and
negative. The past four years leave other groups with a list of “do’s” and
“don’ts” for the future. This especially concerns methods of mobilization, but
also warnings about not engaging everyone else as the enemy.
In attempting to forecast what will follow
the collapse of the caliphate, the focus should not be limited to the appeal of
a specific group, but instead the appeal of the broader jihadi movement. After
all, there is little indication that jihad as a method of political
mobilization has lost support among those who are disaffected and radicalized.
The Islamic State’s fall will emphatically
change global jihadism and its organizational and ideological expressions, but
not necessarily its prospects for mobilization and success. There is still a
long way to go to ensure that.
American Syria Policy
America’s Syria Policy Is Incoherent, and
There’s No Sign It Will Change As the
tragic civil war in Syria grinds through its eighth year, it is impossible to
make sense of the Trump administration’s strategy as it moves in one direction
and then shifts in another, again and again. American policy is utterly
incoherent, and there is no sign that will change.
President Donald Trump’s position on Syria,
expressed more often in tweets than in formal policy statements, vacillated
wildly even before he was elected president. In June 2013, for instance, he
contended that the United States should “stay the hell out of Syria.” But two
months later, after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons
against his own people, Trump advocated for a U.S. military strike and
vociferously criticized then-President Barack Obama for not ordering one. Once
in the White House, Trump initially focused on defeating the Islamic State,
which by that time controlled a miniature, self-proclaimed “caliphate” based in
the northern Syrian city of Raqqa. He expanded support for local militias
fighting the extremists and increased direct U.S. air and artillery strikes.
But after Raqqa fell and the Islamic State dispersed, the Trump administration
appeared to have no clear idea how to turn battlefield success into strategic
victory. By March 2017, administration officials were saying that the U.S.
would not be involved in determining Syria’s long-term future. But a month later,
after another chemical attack by the Assad regime, Trump ordered a cruise
missile strike on a Syrian airbase. “Steps are underway,” then-Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson even suggested, to create an international coalition to
remove Assad. A bit later, Tillerson said the U.S. might broker a cease-fire
that included Assad, while Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United
Nations, and H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser at the time, both
expressed skepticism about a political solution that left Assad in power.
In the late summer of 2018, the confusion
escalated. The president indicated that the U.S. would not play a role in
Syria’s reconstruction despite reports that U.S. military leaders felt that was
necessary to prevent an Islamic State revival. While Trump had indicated that
he wanted to “get out of” Syria, administration officials like James Jeffrey, a
retired diplomat whom Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently named U.S.
special representative for Syrian engagement, said earlier this month that
American military forces would remain for some unspecified time. Then, this
week, National Security Adviser John Bolton switched to a different objective,
announcing that U.S. troops are not leaving Syria “as long as Iranian troops
are outside Iranian borders.”
All of this is incoherence, not
flexibility. In part, it reflects the broader incoherence of the Trump policy
formulation process, where a presidential tweet or off-the-cuff remark can
change everything. With no experience at foreign or national security policy,
no overarching concept about the purpose of American power, and a personal
style focused on disaggregated responses to immediate problems rather than a
long-term approach to various challenges, Trump is the antithesis of a strategist.
He operates without a discernible vision for the Middle East or American
security writ large in the coming decades, or for how to balance security
benefits against costs and risks.
Trump’s senior advisers do have more
strategic mindsets but are sometimes themselves at odds and, after staking out
a public position, often are contradicted or undercut by the president.
In the absence of a clear objective in
Syria, the best the U.S. can hope for is avoiding an outright fiasco. American
policy in Syria is also incoherent because the U.S., out of all the nations and
non state groups involved there, has the least clear sense of its strategic
priorities. Assad, Turkey, Iran and Russia all know what they want and what
price they are willing to pay to get it; America does not. For a while, the
defeat of the Islamic State was paramount, although neither the Obama nor Trump
administration fully explained why that was vital for U.S. national security.
Then America’s objective was to deter chemical attacks, although it was never
clear why those were unacceptable while conventional violence was acceptable.
At other times, Washington seems concerned by the humanitarian disaster in
Syria yet is unwilling to take in refugees. Sometimes the U.S. wants to limit
Russian influence, but at other times it doesn’t seem to care. Most recently,
Bolton linked the presence of American troops in Syria to containing Iran. But
no one in the administration has explained how a small U.S. troop deployment
will thwart broader Iranian aspirations or deter Tehran from supporting Assad,
which it considers a vital national interest.
At this point, there is no indication that
any of this will change and that a coherent Syria policy will emerge. Past
American presidents who assumed office with limited national security
expertise, like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, eventually
developed a feel for strategy. There is no sign that Trump will. Yet he is
unwilling to delegate control of national security policy to one of his senior
advisers, in essence making them “strategist in chief.”
With so little chance of the Trump
administration setting clear priorities in Syria, questions abound. Is
preventing the return of the Islamic State the most important U.S. objective in
Syria? Or is it containing Iran? Perhaps preserving regional order? Or maybe
maintaining limitations on what dictators can do to their own people? Is it
sustaining a security relationship with Turkey, a NATO ally—or helping defend
Israel?. But in the face of continuing policy incoherence, there is no
guarantee of avoiding an outright fiasco
Assessment
of US policy under Trump:
Trump is not diminishing America's
military footprint; if anything, he's expanding it. As evidence for their
position, the president's boosters cite his pullouts from Afghanistan and
Syria, as well as his willingness to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong
Un to negotiate his country's nuclear disarmament. But the latter diplomatic
overture is shaping up to be a complete bust, and the former pullouts are just
as partial as former President Obama's was from Iraq. Just as Obama ended up
succumbing and leaving a rump American force in Iraq, Trump too, for all his
tough talk, has flipped on his original promise to fully withdraw from Syria.
He is saying now that he's 100 percent"
on board with a residual troop presence. Likewise in Afghanistan, he's talking
only about withdrawing half the American troops
— not all.
Trump's supporters are also ecstatic
that he is questioning the NATO alliance—except that he's not. All he wants is
that NATO countries reimburse America for its costs, not take responsibility
for their own defense. In fact, The
New York Times'
Ross Douthat believes that
Trump wants these countries to bear their military burden so that America's
resources are freed up to deal with China, a country that for some reason has
always rubbed Trump the wrong way.
Trump doesn't want to pull out even from disputes such as Saudi Arabia's
offensive against Houthi insurgents in Yemen where there is widespread
consensus that America has no business getting involved. The Senate even passed
a resolution 54-47 last week
demanding that Trump stop using American forces to assist Saudis with midair
refueling and target assistance, especially since he has no Congressional
authorization to do so. Trump's response? A pledge to
veto the bill.
But why
exactly is Trump so gung-ho about helping Saudi Arabia Apparently because Houthis are Shia Muslims
like most Iranians — and Trump's hawkish advisers are telling him that if the
Houthis take over Yemen they would ally with Iran against Israel, America's
ally. But these are exactly the kind of geo-political considerations that
"America First" was supposed to reject.
At least in Saudi Arabia's case
Trump is providing "only" indirect military assistance. Not so in
Somalia. The administration has escalated America's
three-decade long military campaign against al-Shabab, an inconsequential
Somali terrorist group whose less than 500 hard-core members pose virtually no
threat to America.
The saving
grace, if there is one, is that the administration at least designated Somalia
as an "active area of hostilities," which will force Pentagon to
disclose how many casualties its drone attacks cause. However, CIA drones bomb
countries covertly all over the world without such a designation. President
Obama at the tail end of his presidency issued an executive order requiring the
agency to report these strikes along with assessments of the combatants and
non-combatants it killed. But Trump last week scrapped this requirement so that
the CIA can once again kill with impunity without worrying about bad publicity.
One reason
why the American empire is on an unbroken growth trajectory is that a giant
behemoth like the Pentagon has to justify its existence by inventing or
exaggerating threats. Only a president determined to starve the beast would
ultimately be able to shrink America's military presence around the world. And
during his campaign, Trump lamented that if America had spent $6 trillion at
home instead of the Middle East, "we could have rebuilt our country twice."
However, now that Trump is in office he is doing the opposite.
His most
recent budget proposed to cut domestic spending by 5 percent and boost defense
spending by the same amount, never mind that America already spends more than
the next seven powers combined on defense. To add insult to injury, Trump is
boosting America's defensive capabilities less and offensive ones more, given
that his budget seeks to cut spending on defensive missile systems by $500
million while increasing it on offensive systems such as hypersonic weapons by
$2.6 billion.
Worst of
all, Trump doesn't just want to use the American military to accomplish his
foreign policy objectives; he is also enlisting the American economy, wielding
sanctions and tariffs like weapons.
He tore up Obama's nuclear deal with
Iran, re-imposing sanctions on the country and anyone that does business with
it. And it's not just Iran. In 2017, Trump imposed a record 944 sanctions on
foreign entities and individuals. And then he topped his own record
and imposed over 1,000 sanctions last year. The Guardian's Simon Tisdall notes that soon any
country not under economic attack by Trump will be the exception rather than
the rule.
Using
America's economy as a handmaiden of its foreign policy was always a
neoconservative goal. Back in the 1990s, neocons vehemently opposed permanently
normalizing trade ties with China because they wanted to make access to America's
markets subject to China doing their bidding.
Trump's
"America First," thus, isn't so much a departure from
neo-conservatism as a different—and worse—version of it. In its zeal to impose
America's will on the rest of the world, it is just as meddlesome and
aggressive—but with less consensus-building abroad and accountability at home.
Expecting Trump to rollback the American empire is a fool's dream.
Golan
Heights
Golan Heights : Mar.,: Mar,22,2019: After 52
years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty
over the Golan Heights,” Trump said in a tweet. Trump called the territory “of
critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional
Stability!”This is the second recent diplomatic bombshell dropped by
Washington, which is Israel’s main backer, in seeking to redraw the fraught
Middle East map.In 2017, Trump went against decades of practice by recognizing
the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, rather than the previously
accepted Tel Aviv. Trump will host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu at the White House next Monday and Tuesday. The Israeli leader, who
is running for reelection, will be in Washington for the annual conference of
the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) pro-Israel
lobbying group.
The Golan Heights move was hinted at a week
ago when the State Department changed its usual description of the area as
“occupied” to “Israeli-controlled.”The Trump State Department has also dropped
previous definitions of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip as being “occupied” by Israel. Israel occupied the Golan Heights, West
Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War. It later
annexed the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem in moves never recognized by the
international community. Trump’s latest shakeup comes ahead of the expected
unveiling of a White House plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Palestinian
leaders, who broke off contact with Washington after the recognition of
Jerusalem by Trump, say they expect the plan to be blatantly biased in favor of
Israel.
On Thursday, March 21, President Trump
introduced yet another sea change to U.S. policy towards the Arab-Israeli
conflict—this time by tweet. “After 52 years,” Trump wrote, “it
is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s [s]overeignty over
the Golan Heights.” Left unclear was whether the president was merely calling
for U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights or actually
implementing it. National security adviser John Bolton later tweeted out his
agreement on top of the president’s statement a few hours later, but the
government otherwise failed to provide further information: The State
Department referred reporters’ questions to the White House, where officials
declined to elaborate on what the president had tweeted. For most of the
afternoon, the closest thing to an official statement came from the State
Department’s Twitter account, which simply retweeted Bolton without further
comment.
Instead, the first person to confirm the change in U.S.
policy was none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Speaking
next to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from the prime minister’s residence in
Jerusalem, Netanyahu claimed to have discussed
the decision with President Trump. Speaking in both English and Hebrew, he
described the decision as a “miracle of Purim” and tied it to Israel’s ongoing
conflict with Iran, stating:
President Trump made history. He recognized Israeli
sovereignty over the Golan Heights, at a time when Iran is trying to use the
Golan Heights as a platform for the destruction of Israel. We are commemorating
the miracle of Purim, when, 2,500 years ago, the Jewish people triumphed over
the other Persians who tried to exterminate it. They will fail today, as they
failed then, amongst other things thanks to the immense support of the United
States and a president that is the greatest friend Israel ever had in our
entire history.
Only then did Netanyahu turn the stage over to Pompeo, who,
in a rambling statement, seemed to confirm
that the president’s tweet had not been merely hortatory: U.S. policy toward
the Golan Heights had in fact changed. “President Trump made the decision to
recognize that that hard-fought real estate, that important place,” he said,
“is proper to be a sovereign part of the state of Israel.”
The apparently slapdash rollout of this decision is an
uncomfortable fit with the complex and hotly contested political history of
the Golan Heights. A strategically significant plateau along Israel’s northeast
border with Syria, the Golan Heights provide a vantage point into neighboring
parts of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, and—in at least some formulations—border
the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The status of the territory has been
in dispute since the state of Israel was founded, as the 1949 armistice line
that was ultimately reached between Israeli and Syrian forces did not align
with the borders of the pre-1948 British mandates of Palestine and Syria, which
Israel maintains should have been the starting point for the border between the
two countries.
Regardless, Israel seized control of the entirety of the
Golan Heights in the Six Day War of 1967. In response to that conflict, the
U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 242, which (in its
English version) called for the “[w]ithdrawal of Israel armed forces from
territories occupied in the recent conflict” and “acknowledgement of the
sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in
the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized
boundaries.” Israel, however, retained control of the Golan Heights, an act it justified in part by pointing
to linguistic
ambiguities
across the English and French versions of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242
and its endorsement of “secure ... boundaries.” After Syria tried
unsuccessfully to reclaim the Golan Heights in the 1973 October War, the two
parties agreed to a ceasefire line through U.N.-sponsored negotiations, which
was secured by a demilitarized zone and a U.N. Disengagement
Observer Force,
both of which remain in place to this day. In
effect, this left most of the Golan Heights under Israeli control. (Notably,
Lebanon also claims ownership over the Shebaa farms area of the Golan Heights,
which remains in Israeli control.)
Israeli settlement activity in the Golan Heights began in
earnest in the 1970s and has continued since that time. In 1981, Israel’s
Knesset adopted a law that sought to
formally annex the Golan Heights and incorporate them into the Israeli state.
Again acting unanimously, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 497 declaring such
action “null and void and without international legal effect,” on the grounds
that the acquisition of territory by force is inadmissible under the U.N.
Charter and that the Golan Heights remained subject to the international law
governing military occupation, which prohibits such annexation. In spite of
this opposition by the international community, the de facto incorporation
of the Golan Heights into the state of Israel has largely continued unabated,
to the point that the region has become a center for Israeli-oriented tourism, wine-making, and even skiing. And while the
native Syrian Arab and Druze populations have mostly retained their Syrian
identity, a growing minority of the latter have pursued Israeli
nationality—despite concerns that legislation
recently adopted by Israel’s Knesset will render them and other non-Jewish
Israelis secondary to Israel’s Jewish citizens.
Until yesterday, the United States had maintained a consistent position on the Golan Heights
across Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, declining to
recognize any fixed borders absent negotiations between Israel and Syria while
promising to give weight to Israeli territorial claims and demands for a secure
border. Trump’s announcement not only disrupts this policy but arguably runs
counter to the international law principle that informed U.N. Security Council
Resolutions 242 and 497: Namely, the obligation to “refrain ... from the threat
or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of
any state” embedded in Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter.
The Trump administration’s unorthodox roll-out suggests that
the motivation for this decision was primarily political. Netanyahu, a fellow
traveler with close ties to many of Trump’s own supporters, is facing indictment on an array of
corruption-related criminal charges. This has severely weakened his standing
headed into Israel’s upcoming April 9 parliamentary elections, which may
deprive him of power if he loses—or allow him to weather the criminal charges
against him if he wins. The fact that the president made his decision during
Pompeo’s visit makes clear that Netanyahu has the support of the Trump
administration, which is widely popular in Israel due to Trump’s 2017
recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. President Trump may also see some
domestic political advantage in the move, as members of his Republican Party
have increasingly used Israel-related statements and policies to drive a wedge between those
Democrats who have traditionally been strong supporters of Israel and the
increasing proportion that are openly critical of certainly Israeli policies,
painting the latter--and in some cases the broader Democratic Party itself--as
anti-Israel or even anti-semitic. President Trump has himself engaged in such rhetoric in recent
weeks, and may well see his Golan Heights decision as rowing in the same
direction as these efforts.
Whatever the international response, there is no doubt that
Trump has the constitutional authority to make recognition decisions regarding
a foreign state’s territorial boundaries as a matter of U.S. law. The Supreme
Court affirmed as much in its 2015 decision in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, which upheld the
Obama administration’s authority to disregard a statute that sought to compel
U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. Yet the fact that the
president’s Golan Heights decision appears to be in such clear tension with the
U.N. Charter does at least raise the question as to whether it is
consistent with his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be
faithfully executed[,]” particularly as the Constitution expressly includes
such treaties as part of the “Supreme Law of the Land.” Regardless, it’s highly
unlikely that a U.S. court will ever take up this issue, leaving Trump’s new
policy in place--at least until one of his successors changes it. Some members
of Congress have indicated that they
intend to introduce legislation that would hedge against this possibility,
prevent future presidents from doing so, but this would almost certainly be
unconstitutional under Zivotofsky. That said, alternate measures
that rely on authorities that are more clearly within Congress’s constitutional
control—including one proposal that would
statutorily mandate that the Golan Heights be treated as part of Israel for
purposes of foreign commerce—may be more legally defensible and thus harder for
future presidents to reverse without congressional cooperation.
The international response to the president’s decision,
meanwhile, has been almost overwhelmingly negative. The Arab League condemned the move as unlawful
under international law, as did Turkey and Iran. The Assad regime in
Syria went further, proclaiming its intent to
recover the Golan Heights from Israel’s unlawful occupation “through all
available means.” The European Union did not condemn the president’s decision
but confirmed that its own
longstanding policy—one that views the Golan Heights as occupied territories
under international law—has not changed. Russia, meanwhile, noted that such an
action would violate various U.N. Security Council decisions and could destabilize
the region. “It is just a call for now,” a Russian spokesman said, raising doubts
about whether the president’s statement truly reflected a change in U.S.
policy. “Let’s hope it will remain a call.”
And the Russian spokesperson has a point: The exact contours
of the Trump administration’s new policy remain unknown, and there is ample
room for obfuscation. This was the tack that the Trump
administration took with its Jerusalem decision, which recognized that city as
Israel’s capital to much fanfare but ultimately declined to identify the
“specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty,” leaving them “subject to final
status negotiations” with the Palestinians. Trump administration officials are reportedly working on a written
statement to clarify the new U.S. policy towards the Golan Heights, which Trump
will sign at a meeting with Netanyahu next week in Washington. No one should be
surprised if that statement embraces similar ambiguity in an effort to salvage
whatever is left of the policy equities that the prior longstanding U.S. policy
had attempted to preserve. And there are at least three, all of which seem
likely to be negatively affected by the Trump administration’s decision.
First and foremost is the U.S. commitment to the prohibition
on the use of force embedded in the U.N. Charter, which—despite being stretched
in sometimes uncomfortable ways—remains a keystone of the post-World War II
international order. Banning territorial expansion by conquest was one of the
signature purposes of the U.N. Charter, and endorsing the Israeli accession of
“hard-fought real estate” in the Golan Heights, in Pompeo’s words, runs
contrary to this purpose. No doubt the situation in the Golan is complicated,
and there are arguments that U.S. and Israeli international lawyers will pursue
in an effort to square this circle somehow. But the effect within the
international community will almost certainly be a weakening of this principle,
and the international order that is structured on it. Moreover, this principal
has been the primary basis on which the United States has rallied international
support against various questionable actions by other states, including the
Russian annexation of Crimea and China’s claims in the South China Sea. After
Trump’s recognition of Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights, these efforts may
be seen as increasingly hypocritical and thus warranting less support.
Second is the effective detente that has existed between
Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights since the 1970s. This has been to the
substantial benefit of Israel, which has been able to exercise control over the
Golan Heights in relative security and de facto incorporate the area into the
Israeli economy, society and state apparatus. Trump’s announcement seems likely
to reinvigorate this dispute, as the Assad regime’s strident response makes
clear. Moreover, a confluence of factors make a Syrian response more likely:
Assad is currently intent on recovering territorial control, concerned about
possible secession by the U.S.-backed Kurds and already irked at Israeli
strikes against Iran-affiliated targets in its territory. The latter is also
the most likely area in which Israel will suffer repercussions, as its
anti-Iran military campaign is reliant on the tacit cooperation of Assad’s
Russian allies, who effectively control Syrian airspace and could restrict or
oppose their operations in retaliation. Israeli relations with Lebanon—where
Hezbollah, another Iranian ally, continues to exercise substantial
influence—may also take a hit, as the president’s decision appears to affirm
Israeli claims over the Shebaa farms region. All told, by aggravating these old
conflicts and putting Israel’s current military operations at risk, it’s
unclear whether the president’s decision will help or hurt Israel’s strategic
position vis-a-vis Iran in the long run.
Finally, Trump’s decision is almost certain to seriously
compromise hopes for a negotiated solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict,
including his own supposedly forthcoming peace plan. For several decades, these
negotiations have relied on Resolution 242 and its endorsement of the 1967
borders as a starting point for negotiations. Israel has repeatedly accepted
this premise, including in its peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan as well as in the Oslo Accords it signed with the
Palestinians—and has done so despite its de facto annexation of East Jerusalem
and the Golan Heights, which most of the international community continues to
view as illegal. Public U.S. endorsements of these activities not only adds
fuel to widespread Arab objections over the illegality of these actions but
undermines any remaining U.S. ability to act as a credible mediator, though the
Trump administration’s increasingly open hostility towards the Palestinian
leadership may have already dealt the latter a fatal blow.
When Trump recognized Israel’s claims to Jerusalem as its
capital, he described his action as
“nothing more, or less, than a recognition of reality”—namely, the fact that
Israeli ties to Jerusalem were real and unlikely to be unwound in any future
scenario. The administration may well argue much the same in regard to the
Golan Heights. And there is some truth to this claim, particularly given that
Syria’s broader future remains very much in doubt. Whatever practical validity
Israeli claims may have, however, they cannot be confirmed by fiat. To the
contrary, such declarations, if anything, have a tendency to result in feelings
of opposition and resentment—not to mention legal claims—that can come to
threaten whatever status quo may emerge. The only sustainable resolution is
negotiation towards some mutually agreeable outcome, one whose legitimacy both
sides can accept in perpetuity.
This is the approach that has produced Israel’s current
borders with Egypt and Jordan. And it was the same approach that the United
States and the international community were attempting in regard to Israel’s
border with Syria as well, however slowly. Trump’s decision to recognize
Israeli claims in the Golan Heights promises to disrupt this process, perhaps
fatally. The decision may be in the interest of the president and some of his
political allies. But the same is not true of Israelis and the many others whose lives and
livelihoods ultimately depend on long-term peace and stability in the region.
Israel and
Hezbollah, Lebanon
As Syria’s Civil War Winds Down, Israel,
Iran and Hezbollah Pivot to Lebanon After seven years of civil war, Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad looks set to emerge victorious thanks to the support
he received from Russia, from his patrons in Iran and from Iran’s Lebanese ally
Hezbollah. The war is not over, but the focus on what comes next is already
underway, and one change is now plainly visible: Iran, Damascus and Hezbollah
are pivoting their attention to Lebanon’s future—and so is Israel. Lebanese
Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil leaves a stadium after a tour organized for
diplomats and journalists, Beirut, Oct. 1, 2018
In recent days, a flurry of military and
political activity has shifted to Lebanon, confirming that the tiny
country—which has for so long been caught in the vice of regional tensions, often with disastrous
consequences—is once again feeling the pressure. Lebanon has been listening to
the threats and counter threats exchanged by Hezbollah and Israel, watching
military activities along its borders, tracking mysterious flights by Iranian
aircraft, and following a fraught political drama that shows no end in sight.
The latest chapter in Lebanon’s struggles
is unfolding as the quest to form a new government in Beirut remains stalled
more than six months after the latest elections. Lebanon remains vulnerable as
ever, with President Michel Aoun warning that if an agreement on a new
government is not reached soon, “the risks are greater than we can bear.”
Lebanon’s dire economic problems are only one of the reasons why the country’s
stability remains so fragile.
With Assad now reinvigorated by battlefield
victories and his gradual emergence from the tent of ignominy back into the
Arab fold, Damascus, in coordination with Iran, is again aiming to rebuild its
dominance in Lebanon. Observers have noted that one of the reasons Prime
Minister-designate Saad Hariri’s efforts to form a new government have proven
so daunting is Damascus’ involvement.
The Syrians, according to the scholar
Joseph Bahout, have made it clear to Hariri that he will not be confirmed by
parliament unless he commits to “reestablishing the ‘privileged relationship’”
between the two countries. That relationship started to unravel in 2005, even
before the Syrian war, after Rafik Hariri—Saad’s father, a former prime
minister and a determined foe of Damascus—was assassinated, most likely by
Hezbollah agents working on Syria’s orders.
While the younger Hariri wrestles with
pressure to hand powerful ministries to Hezbollah loyalists, tensions are
escalating along Lebanon’s southern border. Last week, Israel launched an
operation to destroy tunnels it said Hezbollah had been building beneath the
border and into Israeli territory, advising Lebanese residents in Arabic to
temporarily leave their homes while the demolition unfolded, lest the collapse
of the tunnels and the possible ammunition within them trigger uncontrolled
explosions.
For years Israelis living near the border
had complained that they were hearing ominous sounds of activity under their
homes. Israeli authorities had downplayed the threat, concealing the fact that
they knew of and were monitoring Hezbollah’s tunnel construction. But this time
they made no effort to conceal the information, in an apparent push to deter
more construction. They even released photographs and videos apparently showing
Hezbollah operatives caught by surprise by the Israelis while working inside
what the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, called “attack tunnels.”
Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are
particularly keen on going to war right now, but circumstances could easily
escalate. Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are particularly keen on going to war
right now, but circumstances could easily escalate. The demolitions, according
to the Israeli Defense Forces, could take weeks, as the IDF reported finding
tunnels going deep inside Israel. Israel protested what it described as a
flagrant violation of the United Nations Security Council resolution that ended
the most recent war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006. Some questioned the
timing of the campaign, claiming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched it
in an effort to protect himself from his growing legal troubles. But the
general consensus among security experts in Israel is that the Hezbollah threat
is real and must be challenged. The IDF said the decision to destroy the
tunnels was made now because the tunnel construction, which it had been
monitoring for months, had crossed into Israeli territory but had not yet
become fully functional.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has
threatened that the next war between the two bitter enemies will be fought in
Israel, with the entirety of Israel’s territory within the reach of Hezbollah
rockets and the “the boots of resistance fighters.” Israel takes the threat
seriously and is trying to crush the underground paths so that there will be no
Hezbollah boots on Israeli soil the next time the two sides go to war an
eventuality that seems all but assured. The operation to destroy the tunnels
continues, but the IDF says it intends to remain on the Israeli side of the
border.
Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are
particularly keen on going to war right now, but circumstances could easily
escalate. After sending his Lebanese militia to fight and die to save the
Syrian dictator, Nasrallah needs to maintain his credibility as the protector
of Lebanon. And however embattled Netanyahu is, Israelis across the political
spectrum agree with the country’s security red lines.
Israel articulated those red lines with
respect to Syria, saying it would not allow Iran to establish a permanent base
there, nor would it allow Tehran to significantly upgrade Hezbollah’s arsenal.
The IDF acknowledged striking Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria when they
crossed those lines. So far, Israel has not attacked Lebanon as part of that
doctrine.
Iran’s pivot to Lebanon may include a
potential escalation in its arming of Hezbollah, a shift that could also
trigger fighting inside Lebanon. Media reports claim that an Iranian plane with ties to the Revolutionary Guards
recently landed at the Beirut airport, carrying advanced rockets destined for
Hezbollah. Israel has longed worried about what it calls the “Precision
Project,” Hezbollah and Iran’s efforts to upgrade Hezbollah’s vast rocket arsenal
to include GPS-guided missiles, which would be much more accurate at striking
civilian populations than Hezbollah’s current munitions.
Israel’s security Cabinet, the inner circle
of ministers with decision-making ability on national security affairs, has
reportedly designated the Precision Project as an indelible red line for
Israel, one that would warrant military action. As Tehran, Damascus and their
Hezbollah allies, now battle-hardened after years of fighting in Syria, start
turning their attention to what happens in Lebanon after the . Syrian war is
finally over, Israel is also focused on preventing the trio from building a
more formidable threat—even if that means another war.
Conclusions
Week by week, month by month, the horrific war in Syria grinds on,
killing Syrian civil war combatants from many countries and, most tragic of
all, Syrian civilians—the unintended or, in many cases, intended victims of the
warring parties. It’s easy to look at the Syrian war as uniquely horrible, the
catastrophic result of geography, Bashar al-Assad’s craven brutality, the
spread of jihadism and its malignant ideology, and foreign intervention. But in
reality, Syria represents a frightening window into the future of war. If, in
fact, Syria is the model, future wars are likely to have several defining
characteristic
The first and perhaps most defining characteristic of the Syrian war
is its intricate and deadly complexity. Rather than two nations or alliances
pitted against each other, multiple interconnected fight occupy the same space
and time. Second, the Syrian war suggests that future conflicts will involve a
situation-specific configuration of forces, rather than enduring alliances, as
one insurgency blends into the next. Third, the conflict shows that despite the
massive and well-publicized human costs of contemporary wars, the international
community has lost its stomach for humanitarian intervention. Fourth, Syria
demonstrates something that has been evident for decades: The United Nations is
unsuited to play a major role in complex, modern wars, particularly when
permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, each with a veto over its
actions, are involved.
Wars resembling Syria’s civil war will share other attributes both on
and off the battlefield, with profound and troubling implications for the
United States. As is all too clear today, the World. is unequipped to fight or
resolve insurgency-style conflicts. World may be unsurpassed at waging a traditional,
unambiguous war where the antagonists and battlefield are clear. But it is a
different story for operations that are not defined by the law of armed
conflict, where battlefield victory not does equal strategic success, and when
the conflict doesn’t last a relatively short time with a clear beginning and
end: in other words, the war in Syria, and the future wars it signals.
Warfare has always been both physical and psychological. In the modern
era, militaries turned to communication technology and psychology to weaken the
will of their adversaries and anyone who might support them. Soldiers were
trained to craft and transmit messages and propaganda, while psychological
operations became a particular military specialization but now, much has changed.
Technology gives individuals the ability to share images of or information
about a conflict with global audiences, potentially shaping perceptions more
than any traditional psychological operations specialist ever could.
Psychological warfare has become dispersed and democratized, and the target
audience for psychological warfare has expanded globally. Social media is the
linchpin of this seismic change in the character of conflict, and to remain
effective in this new environment, the Armed Forces need a new capability to
shape the narrative of conflict.
Update :
Dawn. 28, 2019: Golan Heights: REACTING to
Donald Trump’s recognition of the Golan Heights as Israel’s territory, the
Zionist state’s overjoyed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his
country “never had a better friend”. There is good reason for the Israeli
leader’s adulation for the man in the White House; while US administrations
over the decades have always gone the extra mile to protect Israel —
particularly its blatant human rights abuses and barbaric treatment of
Palestinians — perhaps no other American president has been so unabashedly pro
Tel Aviv. Whether it is the ‘recognition’ of the disputed holy city of
Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, granting carte blanche to illegal Jewish
settlements on Palestinian land, or now recognising the unlawful Israeli
occupation of Syrian land, Mr Trump has pulled out all the stops to accommodate
Tel Aviv, particularly Mr Netanyahu. And these convenient facts certainly won’t
hurt the incumbent Israeli leader, who will be fending off several challenges
to himself in the general elections due early next month.
However,
while Mr Trump’s actions may help Benjamin Netanyahu electorally and nudge up
his own ratings with his evangelical supporters, the American leader is playing
with fire by trying to redraw the map of the Middle East in an imperial
fashion. The Golan was lost in the disastrous Arab-Israeli War of 1967, along
with the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While Egypt
eventually won back the Sinai after a peace treaty with Israel — denounced by
the Arab world — the rest of the aforementioned Arab land remains under Tel
Aviv’s control. Only Lebanon, through Hezbollah, has managed to liberate Arab
land from Israel’s clutches. Donald Trump has rewarded Israel’s illegal
occupation and encouraged its never-ending desire to devour Arab land. However,
the meekness and acquiescence of the Arabs in front of both Israel and the US
over these moves is depressing. Perhaps if major Arab powers — especially Egypt
and Saudi Arabia — had sent clear signals that illegal occupation of Arab land
was unacceptable, Washington would have thought twice about going ahead with
this audacious move. The OIC has been similarly ineffectual in resisting the
encroachment of Arab and Muslim land.
The US
‘recognition’ of Israeli control over the occupied Golan may be farcical — Mr
Trump has in effect endorsed Israel’s occupation of land that belongs to
neither of them. However, the move is bound to have far-reaching implications.
Currently, the Middle East is in a state of flux with great uncertainty. If
Israel — under American patronage — undertakes any further adventures in the
region, the reaction may result in a wider conflict. For example, Jewish
extremists have threatened to desecrate Al Aqsa; Israel continues to brutalise
the Palestinians; and Tel Aviv has struck both Hezbollah and Iranian targets
inside Syria. Should any of these parties choose to respond to Israeli
provocations, a new conflagration is bound to erupt in the Middle East.
Trump
and the Golan: what it could mean, from Crimea to Kashmir
When President
Donald Trump reversed 50 years of U.S. policy Monday to proclaim U.S.
recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights – strategic
territory seized from Syria in the 1967 war and occupied by Israel ever since –
the move was both hailed and condemned.
Some of Israel’s
most ardent supporters cheered the move, citing Iran’s presence in Syria and
the security risks that poses. But critics said it dimmed the prospects of
getting Arabs on board the long-awaited Middle East peace plan Mr. Trump could
unveil in the coming weeks.
Still others
labeled it a purely political gesture with no international validity, designed
to boost the fortunes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces a
tough election April 9.
But at a deeper
level, the move shook U.S. allies, seasoned American diplomats, and experts in
international relations who see in Mr. Trump’s action further erosion in the
U.S.-led international order that has been at the foundation of postwar global
stability.
“If the liberal
hegemon says we’re no longer going to use our moral power to prevent some
things from happening, and in fact we’re going to disregard the rule of law
that we have led and protected since World War II, it sanctions others to do
the same,” says Edward Goldberg, an assistant professor at New York
University’s Center for Global Affairs.
“The Golan
Heights may seem like a little thing,” he adds, “but we may look back on this
as one of the historical straws that can break the camel’s back.”
QUESTION OF
PRECEDENT
Indeed, what
worries some most is the example the action sets.
Perhaps the
biggest drawback to a decision with a number of downsides is the “question of
precedent,” William Burns, a former deputy secretary of state, said this week.
The former U.S. ambassador to Russia was speaking at a Washington event where
he discussed his new diplomatic memoir, “The Back Channel.”
“International
law gets pilloried sometimes … but an important principle is that territorial
questions like this have to be solved peacefully through negotiations,” Ambassador
Burns said. “This kind of decision is going to get used by the Vladimir Putins
of the world to say ‘What’s wrong with the annexation of Crimea if the
Israelis’ unilateral annexation of the Golan can be recognized?’”
If it’s OK for
Israel to annex the Golan Heights, many experts say, what’s to stop China from
one day seizing Taiwan, which it considers its territory, or Pakistan from
seizing the disputed Kashmir region, which recently was the focus of renewed
tensions between Pakistan and India?
Those examples
are hypotheticals. But to get a good idea of just how starkly Mr. Trump’s Golan
decision contrasts with traditional postwar American action, some say, it’s
enough to look back to President George H.W. Bush’s decision to wage war to
reverse Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in
1990.
The U.S.-led Gulf
War had the legal backing of numerous United Nations resolutions and a
coalition of more than 35 countries, all supporting the notion that the seizure
of territory through conflict could not be allowed to stand. Otherwise, the
kind of territorial occupations in both Europe and Asia that led to World War
II could be unleashed. (Of particular concern to the U.S. was Mr. Hussein’s
publicly stated intention to move on to invade Saudi Arabia as well.)
Mr. Burns, who
was serving as a diplomat during the Gulf War, says the George H.W. Bush
administration was keenly aware of the potential consequences of allowing
Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait to stand – not least for Europe, where the Soviet
Union had recently crumbled.
IN EUROPE, ALARM
Europeans, who
know all too well the devastation that in past centuries has resulted from
unilateral land grabs and border redrawing, were quick to declare Mr. Trump’s
action unacceptable.
The French
Foreign Ministry issued a statement after Mr. Trump’s announcement that “the
recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, occupied territory, would be
contrary to international law, in particular the obligation for states not to
recognize an illegal situation.”
The German
government said in a statement that it “rejects unilateral steps,” adding that
“If national borders should be changed it must be done through peaceful means
between all those involved.”
Most alarming to
European leaders was what Mr. Trump’s action suggests about U.S. global
leadership, some experts say.
“For the
Europeans, this is really about upholding international law, which they see as
such an important pillar of the current international system and critical to
discouraging future territorial wars,” says Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former
deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National
Intelligence Council. “And now for the first time they see the United States,
one of the key architects of this order, undermining its principles and one of
the threats.”
Some supporters
of Mr. Trump’s action say Israel’s case is different from the Gulf War or World
War II examples because Israel did not invade the Golan to annex it, but
captured the strategic plateau in a defensive war. Moreover, the Trump
administration says the situation is different now because Iran, Israel’s sworn
enemy, has a foothold in war-torn Syria.
But for much of
the international community, such justifications merely put the U.S. on the wrong
side of an international order that has underpinned rising global prosperity
and discouraged conflicts for 70 years.
Indeed, Ms.
Kendall-Taylor, a Russia expert now at Washington’s Center for a New American
Security, says Moscow is using U.S. actions like the Golan Heights recognition
to promote a picture of the U.S. as an agent of disorder.
“They’re using
the announcement to feed the narrative that the U.S. is a unilateral actor –
and one who’s actions are destabilizing the world order,” she says.
AT TIMES, GOLAN
WAS IN PLAY
NYU’s Professor
Goldberg recognizes that Israel has security concerns along its border with
Syria, but he also notes that since Israel passed a law annexing the Golan in
1981, it had not made it a fixture of its security strategy.
“Don’t forget
that it was not so much of a problem that it stopped Netanyahu from wanting to
negotiate the Golan Heights” with Syria, he says.
As for Iran, Mr.
Burns says he actually sees a Golan annexation and U.S. recognition of it as a
“gift” to Iran, because the Iranians are “always looking for an excuse” to
capitalize on Israel’s “occupation” of territory.
Of particular
concern to Ms. Kendall-Taylor is how Russia, despite the glaring contradictions
of its annexation of Crimea and actions in the Ukraine, seems to be
successfully advancing the notion that it, and not the U.S., is the power the
world can rely on.
“Putin is
advancing this perspective that Russia is the responsible global actor that
acts according to international law, and the U.S. is not,” she says. “And he is
adding this [Golan] U.S. action to the growing list of areas of agreement for
Russia and the Europeans and even China – a list that includes the JCPOA [Iran
nuclear deal] and climate change, where the U.S. is standing alone on the other
side.”
Iranian Proxies: Apr.,2,2109: US imposes fresh Iran-related sanctions
against Shia militias in Syria, airline companies The US Treasury Department
has issued a new batch of sanctions against four entities that it says have
ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and airlines that are already on
Washington’s black list. The new ‘Iran-related’ sanctions list published by the
Treasury on Thursday contains only one Iranian entity – a cargo airline based
in the southern town of Qeshm – Qeshm Fars Air. The company was subjected to US
punitive measures over its ties to another Iranian airline, Mahan Air, which
was already sanctioned by the US. Armenia-based Flight Travel LLC also landed
on Washington’s list for the same reason. Two more entities added to the
blacklist are both Shia militias, which are fighting in Syria on the
government‘s side. Known as the Fatemiyoun Brigade and Zainebiyoun Brigade, the
groups were formed by Afghan and Pakistani Shiites, and are trained and
equipped by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – a fact that landed them
both on the sanctions list.
Iranian imperialism: Apr., 2, 2109: Tens of
thousands of Afghans recruited, paid and trained under the Fatemiyoun Liwa
(Fatemiyoun Brigade) by Iran to fight in support of Tehran’s ally President
Bashar Assad are returning to their homeland, as the 8-year war in Syria winds
down. Afghan veterans returning from Syria are threatened from
multiple sides. They face arrest by security agencies that view them as
traitors. According to some statistics, Iran has sent over 50,000 Afghan
fighters under the Fatemiyoun Brigade to fight in Syria.
Russia: Apr., 15, 2019: When the Syrian civil war began,
Russia and the United States backed opposing sides.Moscow’s military effort—in
conjunction with support from Iran and Hezbollah—was a great success. Assad now
controls most of the country, and the United States, which even at its peak had
a limited military presence in Syria, has announced a major drawdown of troops.
On Dec. 19, 2018, President Trump tweeted, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my
only reason for being there in the Trump presidency.” Russia’s President
Vladimir Putin praised
the announcement, saying, “[I]f the decision to withdraw was made, then it is
the correct one.” At the very least, Trump’s decision has clear implications
for Russia’s calculations. many observers argue that the U.S. drawdown in Syria
is a major win for Moscow. Within hours of Trump’s announcement, Russian
foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova suggested
that the Syrian-Jordanian border “can now return to peaceful life, as did
Aleppo. There was no such hope as long as American troops were there.”
Zakharova argued that the U.S. presence was a major obstacle to a peaceful
resolution of the long-fought Syrian civil war. Many Western analysts also argue
that the U.S. withdrawal favors both Russia and Iran. The Kremlin has long had trouble managing its
erstwhile allies in Syria. Turkey and Russia have disagreed over the fate of
Kurdish forces, and, in many respects, Iran and Russia have contained their
differences in the name of the fight to protect Assad. As long as U.S. forces
were involved, these differences were largely secondary. Now Russia is the sole
global power still in the game, and it will have to confront several crucial
issues: Who will control the territory scheduled to be vacated by the United
States? Will Ankara invade? Will the Kurds accept Syrian government control
over their autonomy? Can the Kremlin reconcile Tehran’s long-term presence in
Syria with Israeli demands for a complete Iranian withdrawal? Despite being
co-conveners of the Astana Process, Turkey and Russia disagree over the future
of Idlib province and the fate of Kurdish forces along the border. At issue in
Idlib, the last remaining rebel stronghold in Syria, is the presence of
approximately 10,000 fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, often seen as the
Syrian offshoot of al-Qaeda. In September 2018, Putin and Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan approved a demilitarized zone, coupled with a Turkish
promise to rid the region of jihadis. During the February 2019 Sochi meeting of
the Astana trio, Erdogan took credit for
“keep[ing] calamity from Idlib,” but the Russian president pushed back, saying
that “we do [not] have to accept the presence of terrorist groups in Idlib.”
The next month, Turkey initiated
patrols of the cease-fire zone. The situation around Idlib remains unstable,
which has raised the specter of an all-out assault by the Syrian
government—presumably backed by Russian air cover. Erdogan and Putin also
differ on the future of Kurdish forces operating further east, in the area to
be vacated by U.S. troops. Ankara is pushing for a 20-mile-deep safe zone along
the border, in which no Kurdish presence would be permitted. In contrast, not
only has the Kremlin not offered support for a Turkish incursion to clear the
area, but instead it recommended that the Syrian regime open diplomatic channels
with the Kurds. Zakharova summed up
the Russian perspective in December 2018: “[W]ho will inherit control of the
territories vacated by the Americans?” she asked. “Obviously, that should be
the Syrian government.” Putin’s chosen mechanism for resolving Ankara’s and
Damascus’s separate visions for postwar Syria is the Adana accord. The
agreement, which was signed by Syria and Turkey in 1998 but eventually
disregarded, guaranteed security along the Turkish-Syrian border and, most
importantly, declared the Kurdistan Workers’ Party a terrorist organization.
Damascus has offered qualified agreement, but it is unlikely that Erdogan would
agree. The Turkish president fears
that even if the Kurdish Peoples’ Protection Group is incorporated into the
Syrian army, it would remain semiautonomous. Additionally, this solution would
require the restoration of communication between Erdogan and Assad. Despite
some intelligence cooperation, Turkey remains—at least for now—committed to
pushing Assad from power. In January, Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu
stated
that Moscow and Ankara continue to disagree over “whether President Bashar al
Assad should stay in office.” And Moscow’s relations with the other Astana
co-convener, Iran, are replete with suspicions. Initially, there seemed to be a
division of
labor between the two: Russia provided air support, while Iran and
Hezbollah assisted Syrian government forces on the ground. Now, as the war
seems to be winding down, Russia appears intent on facilitating a peace with
buy-in from many stakeholders, while Iran is committed
to solidifying its gains in Syria. It’s not clear how the other players, most
notably Turkey and even the Syrian government, would react to the permanent
Iranian presence Tehran would like to secure. Iran’s efforts to further
entrench itself in Syria will be exceedingly difficult for Russia to handle.
Over the years, Moscow has developed good relations with Tel Aviv, based in
large measure on trade and the fact that more than 20 percent of the Israeli
population is Russian speaking. During the Syrian civil war, Russia has for all
practical purposes given Israel a green light to attack Iranian and Hezbollah
targets in Syria and to prevent the transshipment of Iranian equipment and
munitions to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Additionally, Russia negotiated
to keep Iranian forces 85 kilometers away from the Israeli border. Yet, in
September 2018, when Syrian forces accidentally shot down a Russian jet during
an Israeli attack, Moscow blamed
Israel for instigating the attack. Israel expressed regret for the
accident—even though it was not directly responsible—but it took almost six
months for relations to improve. Iran is also being proactive. Just days before
Netanyahu traveled to Moscow, Syrian President Assad flew to Tehran, where he
was warmly welcomed by Iranian leaders. Many analysts speculated that by
courting Assad, Iran not only showed its displeasure with the Russian-Israeli
relationship but also made clear
that it intends to stay in Syria. Moscow’s conflicting interests in finding a
resolution to the civil war that can satisfy both countries places it right in
the center of the Israeli-Iranian rivalry. Can it offer security guarantees to
Israel at the same time that it continues to cooperate with Iran? Moscow is
equivocating. Russia has criticized Israeli attacks on targets in Syria; in
January, Zakharova said
that “[t]he practice of arbitrary strikes on the territory of a sovereign state
… [that is, Syria] should be ruled out.” But Russia has also distanced itself
from its Iranian partners. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybov, in response to
a question from CNN about whether Russia and Iran were allies, stated
that he “wouldn’t use this type of word to describe where we are with Iran.”This
balancing act can lead to miscommunication. Netanyahu told
a weekly cabinet meeting on March 3 that he and Putin had agreed on “the
withdrawal of foreign forces that arrived in Syria after the outbreak of the
civil war.” Did Russia mean the United States? Did Israel mean Iran? Neither
side offered a clarification.
Fresh killings: July, 29, 2019: At least 130 children were among the
544 people killed in a Russian-led assault on the last rebel-held area of
northwestern Syria over the
last two months, according to an independent monitoring group. Aided by Russian
air power, the Syrian army launched an offensive on the rebel-held Idlib province and the
nearby provinces on 26 April – and fighting has continued since then. The
Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a London-based group with a number of
monitors on the ground, said the area had been hit with cluster bombs and
incendiary weapons. More than 2,000 people had been injured, the organisation
that briefs United Nations (UN) agencies added. “The Russian military and its
Syrian ally are deliberately targeting civilians with a record number of
medical facilities bombed,”
US Syria withdrawal: Oct., 17, 2019:
President Donald Trump has upended American policy in Syria, and
possibly in the entire Middle East, in one stroke. His unilateral decision to
withdraw American troops from the Kurdish region of northern Syria, and thus
give a green light for the Turkish invasion of the Kurdish enclave, has put all
American goals in Syria in grave jeopardy. These included protecting the
autonomous Kurdish enclave as a quid pro quo for the Kurdish militia’s singular
military contribution in liquidating Islamic State and capturing its capital
Raqqa at the cost of thousands of lives. They also included preventing the
regime of Bashar al-Assad from reasserting control in northern Syria (a very
important US objective in Syria was to circumscribe Russia’s and Iran’s reach
and influence in the country). Finally, one of the principal aims of American
policy in both Syria and Iraq has been to prevent the resurgence of the IS. All
of these objectives now lie in tatters.
The YPG, having been let down by the US, has in desperation
entered into an alliance with the Assad regime to counter the Turkish invasion.
Syrian government forces are reported to be rapidly moving into the Kurdish
enclave and towards the Turkish border. The Kurds have justified their decision
by declaring that it is the duty of the Syrian government to protect the
territorial integrity of the state. This is a major reversal of the YPG’s
earlier stance that was anchored in gaining autonomy from Damascus and, as a
corollary, preventing the intrusion of regime troops into the Kurdish
proto-state.
The YPG had
bargained that an American military presence in the area would not only deter a
Turkish attack but also discourage the Assad regime from sending its troops
into Kurdish territory. The YPG and its political arm, the PYD, seem to have
given up their goal of autonomy from Damascus in return for ensuring the
survival of the Kurdish people in the face of the Turkish assault that they
fear could take on genocidal proportions.
The YPG and
the umbrella force that it led, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), were until
recently perceived by decision-makers in Washington as a barrier to the
intrusion of Russian and Iranian military and political influence in northern Syria.
Now, with the YPG allied with the Assad regime, it’s only a matter of time
before Russian military advisers and Iran-backed Shia militias start operating
in the Kurdish enclave. Russia and Iran are the Assad regime’s principal
supporters, and Damascus was able to turn the tide in the Syrian civil war
largely due to the aid of Russian airpower and the military prowess of
battle-hardened Hezbollah fighters supported by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps and its Quds Force.
Both Russia
and Iran are interested in attaining footholds in northern Syria. Both would
like to see the Assad regime consolidate its control in all of Syria. Russia is
also interested in gaining access to territory close to the Turkish border in
order to enhance its bargaining power with Ankara over the Idlib enclave in
northwestern Syria. While the Idlib region is under the nominal protection of
Turkey, several hardline Islamist factions that Turkey finds difficult to
control infest it.
These
Islamist groups are inveterate enemies of both the Assad regime and Russia.
Moscow would like to either eliminate them completely or drive them out of
Syrian territory. To that end, it has conducted several air attacks on the
Idlib enclave in contravention of the Sochi agreement it signed with Turkey in
September 2018. Russia has claimed, with a great deal of justification, that
Ankara hasn’t been able to keep its part of the bargain by not disarming
Islamist factions and being unable to impose order in Idlib. Russia’s strategic
position vis-à-vis Idlib is likely to be buttressed once it gains access to the
Kurdish region of northern Syria that borders Idlib.
Iran will
also make major political gains through the reassertion of the Assad regime’s
control of the Kurdish enclave. Iran itself is faced with its own problem of
Kurdish secessionist aspirations: the Kurdish proto-state in Syria was a source
of inspiration not only for the Kurds in southeastern Turkey, but also the
Kurds in northwestern Iran who have been in a state of an on-again, off-again
rebellion against Tehran. Eliminating Kurdish autonomy and bringing the Kurdish
enclave under the control of Damascus therefore redounds to Iran’s benefit as
well by eradicating this source of attraction for Iranian Kurds. The extension
of the Assad regime’s control into the Kurdish areas would also mean the
indirect spread of Iran’s influence and presence in a region of Syria, and that
also bordering Turkey, from which Iran had been excluded. This would give Iran
greater leverage within Syria as well as in relation to Turkey, with which its
relations have been ambivalent.
Finally, the
mayhem created by the Turkish invasion, combined with the withdrawal of the
American military presence from northern Syria, will be a boon for Islamic
State. IS not only has sleeper cells in the region, but also had thousands of
fighters who were incarcerated in the Kurdish enclave and guarded by YPG/SDF
forces. These forces are now required to fight the Turkish invasion and so are
unable to guard IS fighters and their dependents, many of whom have already
escaped from the compounds where they were housed. It’s almost certain that
these fighters will regroup and could well form the kernel of a resurrected IS.
Several terrorist attacks attributed to IS have already been reported from
northern Syria, and instances of such attacks are likely to increase in the
near future.
This could
lead to a repetition of the situation in Iraq after the American invasion of
2003, which left large swathes of territory ungoverned and in chaos, allowing
terrorist groups to mushroom. The Turkish invasion of the Kurdish enclave in
northern Syria and the American complicity in this act could very well usher in
a rerun of the Iraqi scenario that created al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia that
eventually morphed into IS.
Even if a
fraction of this scenario turns out to be true, it will mean further suffering
and turmoil in a region that has already had more than its share of both.
What’s absolutely clear is that the hasty decision to withdraw American troops
from the Kurdish region of Syria, thus paving the way for the Turkish invasion,
has not only left the Kurds with a tremendous sense of betrayal but also
overturned most of the goals that Washington had set for itself in Syria and
the rest of the Middle East.
The betrayal
of the Syrian Kurds has sent a clear message to America’s allies in the region
and beyond that they can no longer depend on Washington’s assurances regarding
their security, and that they should search for other options to ensure their
own safety.
