Syria: Demystifying a quagmire that baffles almost everyone

Second, the Arab Spring revolutions, starting in 2011, inspired Syrian dissidents to rise up against that oppression. The protests became deadly in March 2011 when the Assad regime decided to use force against peaceful demonstrators. Armed violence erupted and spread, with no real sense of direction or coordination. 

Third, as the armed struggle increased and intensified, Syria saw a huge influx of Muslim extremists and radicals into the country, jamming up the already befuddling mutinous environment, making it difficult for outsiders to define who the “rebels” actually are. The homegrown dissenters also get support from outside, financially and militarily, for various purposes. As the civil war drags on, massacre follows massacre and it gets harder to point fingers at culprits. 

Fourth, Russia has been providing legal protection to the Assad regime by blocking the United Nations Security Council vote against Syria.  It does so because the Russian Orthodox Church needs to protect one of its own. The Syriac Orthodox Church, estimated to have 680,000 members in Syria – a big minority group – was allowed to exist unperturbed under Assad.

Fifth, Iran has been providing Assad – from the minority Alawite, Shi’ite sect – financial and military assistance, because Assad’s Syria is the only Arab country that cooperates with Iran in its resistance effort against Israeli occupation of Palestine. Syria allows Iran a route for arms shipments to its Shi’ite ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Iran has been open about its military support for Hezbollah but lately got careless, resulting in Israeli air strikes inside Syria aimed at destroying the shipments of those armaments. 

Sixth, while Iran is giving support to Assad, Saudi Arabia is providing financial, logistical and military assistance to the Syrian opposition. However, it is not particularly accurate to assume that the Saudi government chooses to support them primarily because they are Sunnis and Assad’s regime is Shi’ite. The Saudis and the Assads go back a long way, and the late Hafez al Assad enjoyed very close and friendly relations with Saudi Arabia. The relationship deteriorated with Bashar Assad – the son – who is known as someone who does not mean what he says or honour his pledges – and reached its nadir with the assassination of the late prime minister of Lebanon, Rafic Hariri, in 2005. Hariri was a moderate Sunni leader whom Saudi Arabia had nurtured over the years. The finger was pointed at Syria at that time, as it was tasked with security matters under the Saudi-brokered Taif Accord of 1989, which ended the 15-year civil war in Lebanon. But the uneasy relations between Assad and Saudi Arabia have lingered for the entire 42 years of the Assad regime. 

The problem with the Saudi role in the Syrian conflict is that a big portion of its financial and military support goes straight to groups directly linked to al-Qaeda. The Al Nusra Front, a group designated by the United Nations as a terrorist organisation, has been the major recipient of Saudi funds to fight a war by proxy with Assad’s Syria and Iran, and is the most effective rebel faction. Unfortunately, Al Nusra has its own agenda – to create a pan-Islamic state under sharia law – and wants to stop at nothing to achieve its goal. This highly radicalised group has been accused of crimes equally as heinous as those committed by Assad’s soldiers.

Seventh, Qatar has been a route for Saudi support to the rebels. The Saudi-Qatari arrangement is for Saudi Arabia to outsource the logistical and military support tasks to Qatar, while the former confines itself to just paying the bills.

Eighth, Lebanon became involved in the conflict as it borders Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south. The country has been the battleground for several religious and political factions involved in the Palestinian fight against Israel, as well as its own internal politics. As a nation whose government comprises 18 religious groups, its pivotal and fragile balance can be tipped in any direction, none of which bodes well for the peace-yearning Lebanese people, whose general election is due in June. Ironically, the Syrian war has emboldened both Sunnis and Shi’ites in Lebanon, the latter of whom sit in government after winning a majority in the last elections in 2009. 

Recently, Hezbollah’s statements have been more aggressive, as it pledges to provide more assistance to the resistance forces in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and says it will respond in kind to the Israeli air strikes on Damascus that took out sophisticated weaponry bound for them. The Sunis, on the other hand, declared that they were “coming out of chains” in Lebanon and vow to fight against the enemies of their community.

Ninth, Turkey and Jordan are channels where worldwide opponents of Assad send arms and money to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) – believed to be the most credible rebel faction. Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, Jordan has seen hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees spill over its border. This in addition to the massive number of Palestinian refugees already there. Both countries know that if the Syrian crisis is further prolonged, the spillover of conflict across the border would be inevitable. The most recent explosions that killed around 40 people in Turkey, on its border with Syria, are a case in point.

Tenth, the West, led by the US, has managed to bungle every chance to bring a speedy end to the Assad regime. Since the swift military operation that toppled the Saddam Hussein regime in less than a month in 2003, US administrations have adopted a series of failed strategies that have given Tehran more influence over its partly Shi’ite neighbours, Iraq and Syria. Bickering between US agencies, and between the White House and Congress, also contribute to The US’s ineffective responses to the Syrian conflict.  Meanwhile, the euro zone’s financial crisis took Europe’s focus off Syria.

As all the global players compete for geo-strategic influence within the extremely complex and often unspoken system of alliances, more than 70,000 have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. The prolonged Syrian civil war is a danger not only to the Syrian people, but to the stability of the wider Middle East. Lately, we have seen a special kind of “shuttle diplomacy” between the US, the UK, Russia, and other key players, to broker a workable solution to the conflict. Fingers are being crossed, for the sake of millions in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, where peace is as illusive as a dream.