Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged
America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East,
entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew
dictatorships across the region.
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Iran’s Revolutionary Guard could be sent to Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad.
AFP/Getty images
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For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are
Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President
Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on
the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist
movements in the Middle East.
The Independent on Sunday
has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even
before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of
4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar
al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost
almost 100,000 lives in just over two years. Iran is now fully
committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources
which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security,
even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the
Golan Heights against Israel.
In years to come, historians will
ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating
withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 – could have so blithely
aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching
back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound
effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father
of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who
regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century
battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and
Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century
Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict
to that between “Papists and Protestants”.
America’s alliance now
includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni
territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile
British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded,
like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian
refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian
battle. Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in
Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by
Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a
‘hot’ war. So much for America’s ‘friends’.
Its enemies include
the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of
course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America
‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of
balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions –
itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power. Iraqi
Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s
forces.
Washington’s excuse for its new Middle East adventure –
that it must arm Assad’s enemies because the Damascus regime has used
sarin gas against them – convinces no-one in the Middle East. Final
proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as
nebulous as President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam’s Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction.
For the real reason why
America has thrown its military power behind Syria’s Sunni rebels is
because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad. The
Damascus regime’s victory this month in the central Syrian town of
Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government
forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to
humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power. Arab
dictators are supposed to be deposed – unless they are the friendly
kings or emirs of the Gulf – not to be sustained. Yet Russia has given
its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council
resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in
the civil war.
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A wounded Syrian waits for medical treatment.
AFP/Getty images
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In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at
the American contention that it can distribute arms – almost certainly
including anti-aircraft missiles – only to secular Sunni rebel forces in
Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army. The more powerful
al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the
rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of
Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy
for blasphemy. They will be able to take new American weapons from
their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.
From now on,
therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus - every war crime committed
by the rebels - will be regarded in the region as Washington’s
responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of
Americans on 11th September, 2011 – who are America’s greatest enemies
as well as Russia’s – are going to be proxy allies of the Obama
administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni
extremism. His experience in Chechenya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric – he
has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference
in Russian – and his belief that Russia’s old ally in Syria is facing
the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechenya, plays a far greater part
in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of
Russia’s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.
For
the Russians, of course, the ‘Middle East’ is not in the ‘east’ at all,
but to the south of Moscow; and statistics are all-important. The
Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian
frontier. Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim. Six of the Soviet
Union’s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom
were Sunni. And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of
all Muslims. For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land
mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of
the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.
Iranian
sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while
Hizballah’s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon
– with the maintenance of the militia’s ‘intelligence’ teams inside
Syria – Iran’s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither. They
point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks
in Tehran and that America will need Iran’s help in withdrawing from
Afghanistan. The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its
armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war
against the Taliban without Iran’s active assistance. One of the
sources claimed – not without some mirth -- that the French were forced
to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have
Tehran’s help.
It is a sign of the changing historical template in
the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries
between Washington and Moscow, Israel’s security has taken second place
to the conflict in Syria. Indeed, Israel’s policies in the region have
been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.
Only
once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities
committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to
wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist
caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad’s rule. One
former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as
“Israel’s man in Damascus”. Only days before President Mubarak was
overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called
Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator. In vain.
If
the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of
revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long
term more than the Palestinians. The land they wish to call their
future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it
can no longer be either secure or ‘viable’. ‘Peace’ envoy Tony Blair’s
attempts to create such a state have been laughable. A future
‘Palestine’ would be a Sunni nation. But today, Washington scarcely
mentions the Palestinians.
Another of the region’s supreme ironies
is that Hamas, supposedly the ‘super-terrorists’ of Gaza, have
abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs’ desire to crush
Assad. Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained
Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.
In
Arab eyes, Israel’s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt
to strike at the heart of Iran. The West’s support for Syrian rebels is a
strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the
offensive. Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against
this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues. -
The Independent.
