by Tim Marshall
When the French ruled the region they followed the British example of divide and rule. At that time the Alawites were known as Nusayris. Many Sunnis do not count them as Muslims, and such was the hostility towards them they rebranded themselves as Alawites (as in ‘followers of Ali’) to reinforce their Islamic credentials. They were a backward hill people, at the bottom of the social strata in Syrian society. The French took them and put them into the police force and military, from where over the years they established themselves as a major power in the land.
Fundamentally, everyone was aware of the tension of having leaders from a small minority of the population ruling the majority. The Assad clan, from which President Bashar al-Assad comes, is Alawite, a group that comprises approximately 12 per cent of the population. The family has ruled the country since Bashar’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’état in 1970. In 1982 Hafez crushed a Muslim Brotherhood Sunni uprising in Hama, killing perhaps 30,000 people over several days. The Brotherhood never forgave or forgot, and when the nationwide uprising began in 2011 there were scores to be settled. In some respects the ensuing civil war was simply Hama, Part Two.
The final shape and make-up of Syria is now in question, but there is one scenario in which, if Damascus falls (although that is far from probable), the Alawites retreat to their ancient coastal and hill strongholds and form a mini-statelet such as existed in the 1920s and 1930s. It is theoretically possible, but hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims would remain in the region and were a new Sunni-dominated government to be formed in Damascus, one of its priorities would be to secure a route to the Syrian coast and defeat the last pockets of resistance.
In the near future Syria looks as if it is destined to be ruled as a number of fiefdoms with various warlords holding sway. At the time of writing, President Assad is simply the most powerful warlord of many. Lebanon’s most recent civil war lasted for fifteen years and at times it remains perilously close to another one. Syria may suffer a similar fate.
Syria has also become, like Lebanon, a place used by outside powers to further their own aims. Russia, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah support the Syrian government forces. The Arab countries support the opposition, but different states support different opposition groups: the Saudis and Qataris, for example, are both vying for influence, but each backs a different proxy to achieve it.
It will require skill, courage and an element so often lacking – compromise – to hold many of these regions together as a single, governable space. Especially as Sunni jihadist fighters are trying to pull them apart in order to widen their ‘caliphate’.
Groups such as Al Qaeda and, more recently, Islamic State have garnered what support they have partially because of the humiliation caused by colonialism and then the failure of pan-Arab nationalism – and to an extent the Arab nation state. Arab leaders have failed to deliver prosperity or freedom, and the siren call of Islamism, which promises to solve all problems, has proved attractive to many in a region marked by a toxic mix of piety, unemployment and repression. The Islamists hark back to a golden age when Islam ruled an empire and was at the cutting edge of technology, art, medicine and government. They have helped bring to the surface the ancient suspicions of ‘the other’ throughout the Middle East.
Islamic State grew out of the ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’ franchise group in the late 2000s, which nominally was directed by the remnants of the Al Qaeda leadership. By the time the Syrian Civil War was in full flow the group had split from Al Qaeda and renamed itself. At first it was known by the outside world as ISIL (‘Islamic State In the Levant’) but as the Arabic word for the Levant is Al Sham, gradually it became ISIS. In the summer of 2014 the group began calling itself Islamic State, having proclaimed such an entity in large parts of Iraq and Syria.
It quickly became the ‘go to’ jihadist group, drawing thousands of foreign Muslims to the cause, partially due to its pious romanticism and partially for its brutality. Its main attraction, though, was its success in creating a caliphate; where Al Qaeda murdered people and captured headlines, IS murdered people and captured territory.
IS also seized upon an area that is increasingly important in the internet age – psychological space. It built on the pioneering work of Al Qaeda in social media and took it to new heights of sophistication and brutality. By 2015 IS was ahead of any government in levels of public messaging using jihadists brought up on the sometimes brutalising effects of the internet and its obsession with violence and sex. They are Generation Jackass Jihadis and they are ahead of the deadly game.
By the summer of 2015, many Arabs across the Middle East, including most of the regional media, were calling IS by another name, one which encapsulated how repulsive many ordinary people felt the organization to be – Daesh.
It is an acronym of sorts formed from the group’s previous name in Arabic, Dawlat al Islamiya Iraq Wa al Shams, but the reason people tend to use the name is because IS members hate the term. It sounds similar to the verb daes (one who is underhand and sews dissent); it rhymes with negative words such as fahish (a sinner); and best of all for those who despise the organisation’s particular brand of Islam, is that it rhymes with and sounds a bit like jahesh, meaning ‘stupid ass’. In Arabic culture, this is quite a serious insult, one which simultaneously demeans the subject and reduces its power to instil fear.
In 2015, the war raged back and forth across parts of Iraq with IS losing the town of Tikrit, but taking Ramadi. Suddenly the US Air force found itself in the odd position of flying reconnaissance missions, and limited air strikes, which assisted Iranian Republican Guard commanders. IS wanted Tikrit, partially to guard against the Iraqi government trying to retake Mosul to the north, but Ramadi was far more important to them. It is in Anbar province, which is an overwhelmingly Sunni region of Iraq and links through to the Syrian border. Holding the territory strengthened their claim to be a ‘state’.
August 2015 marked the first anniversary of the American led bombings missions against IS in both Iraq and Syria. There have been thousands of airstrikes with many of the US planes flying from the USS George H.W. Bush and USS Carl Vinson aircraft carriers in the Gulf, and others from Kuwait and a base in the UAE, including the F-22 Raptor Stealth jet fighter which was also introduced to the fight in 2015, attacking Islamic State’s oil facilities. The US pilots, who flew the majority of the missions, suffered from not having American Special Forces forward air controllers calling in the coordinates for the strikes. As targets were frequently in the urban areas, the ‘rules of engagement’ meant many planes returned to their bases without firing their weapons.
Since late summer in 2015, IS has been steadily losing territory. Significant losses include the Syrian town of Kobane, recaptured by Kurdish fighters, and in January 2016 the major Iraqi city of Ramadi was retaken by the Iraqi Army. At the same time IS has come under enormous pressure from an increase in air strikes.
The Russians have become even more involved, striking both Free Syrian Army and IS targets in Syria, following the alleged IS attack on one of its passenger airliners in Egypt. The French responded to the terror attacks on Paris in November 2015 with massive airstrikes on IS, and then asked the UK for assistance. The British Parliament voted to extend its air strikes in Iraq to include Syria.
The result has seen IS’s ‘Caliphate’ shrink in size, as well as some of its leaders and many rank and file killed. However, hundreds of fighters then headed to Libya to set up another base, possibly as a back-up in the event they are routed in Syria and Iraq. By the spring of 2016, Libya had clearly become another front in a long battle.
With the Russians, the British, the Americans, the French and others all now heavily committed, thousands of drone missions have been flown, some from within the continental United States. Drones are a clear, modern example of technology overcoming some of the restrictions of geography – but at the same time they serve to underline geography’s importance. The US houses its growing fleet of drones in at least ten bases around
the world. This allows a person sitting in an air-conditioned office in Nevada with a joystick to hit targets or transfer control to an operative near the target. But it also means the US needs to keep good relations with whichever country is housing the regional drone headquarters. For example, the signal sent from Nevada may need to travel through an underwater cable to Germany and then be sent up to a satellite belonging to a third country that sells bandwidth to the Pentagon. This is a reminder of the conceptual map of US power, which is needed in order to fully understand geopolitics today.
Drone strikes have been used to devastating effect against individual targets. During 2015/16 they made a huge contribution to reclaiming several thousand square miles of territory in Iraq from IS, even if it was still in control of large swathes of the Sunni-dominated regions of the country.
Sunni Islamist fighters from across the globe, drawn like moths to the light of a billion pixels, have taken advantage of the three-way split between Kurds, Sunni and Shia in Iraq. They offer the Sunni Arabs a heady mix of the promise of restoring them to their ‘rightful’ place as the dominant force in the region, and the re-establishment of the caliphate in which their version of all true believers (Sunni Muslims) live under one ruler.
However, it is the very fanaticism of their beliefs and practices that explains why they cannot achieve their utopian fantasies.
Firstly, only some of the Sunni Iraqi tribes will support the jihadist aims, and even then only to achieve their own ends – which do not include a return to the sixth century. Once they get what they want they will then turn on the jihadists, especially the foreign ones. Secondly, the jihadists have demonstrated that there is no mercy for anyone who opposes them and that being a non-Sunni is akin to a death sentence. So, all non-Sunni Muslims and all the minorities in Iraq, Christians, Chaldeans, Yazidis and others, are against them, as are dozens of Western and Muslim countries.
The non-jihadist Iraqi Sunnis are in a difficult position. In the event of either a fragmented or a legally federalised Iraq they are stuck in the middle, surrounded by sand in an area that is known as the Sunni Triangle, with its points roughly located just east of Baghdad, west of Ramadi and north of Tikrit. Sunnis living here often have more in common with their related tribes in Syria than they do with the Kurds in the north or the Shia of the south.
There is not enough economic diversity within the triangle to sustain a Sunni entity. History bequeathed oil to ‘Iraq’, but the de facto division of the country means the oil is mostly in the Kurdish and Shia areas; and if there is no strong, unified Iraq, then the oil money flows back to where the oil is found. The Kurdish lands cannot be brought under their control, the cities south of Baghdad such as Najaf and Karbala are overwhelmingly Shia, and the ports of Basra and Umm Qasr are far away from the Sunni territory. This dilemma leaves the Sunnis fighting for an equal share in a country they once ruled, sometimes toying with the idea of separation, but knowing that their future would probably be self-rule over not very much.
In the event of a split the Shia are geographically best placed to take advantage. The region they dominate has oilfields, 35 miles of coastline, the Shatt al-Arab waterway, ports, access to the outside world and a religious, economic and military ally next door in the form of Iran.
The jihadist fantasy is global domination by Salafi Islam. In their more lucid, yet still wild, moments they plan, and fight, for a more limited aim – a caliphate throughout the Middle East. One of the jihadists’ battle cries is ‘From Mosul to Jerusalem!’, meaning that they hope to control the area from Mosul in Iraq right across to Beirut in Lebanon, Amman in Jordan and Jerusalem in Israel. However, the real size of Islamic State’s geographical caliphate is limited by its capabilities.
This is not to underestimate the problem or the scale of what may be the Arab version of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). It is not just a Middle Eastern problem. Many of the international jihadists who survive will return home to Europe, North America, Indonesia, the Caucasus and Bangladesh, where they are unlikely to settle for a quiet life. The intelligence services in London believe there are far more British Muslims fighting in the Middle East for jihadist groups than there are serving in the British Army. The radicalisation programme undertaken by the Islamists began several decades before the de-radicalisation initiatives now under way in European countries.
Most countries in the region face their own version of this generational struggle to a greater or lesser degree. Saudi Arabia, for example, has taken on Al Qaeda cells over the past decade but, having mostly taken them apart, it now faces renewed challenges from the next generation of jihadists. It has another problem in the south, on the border with Yemen, which itself is blighted with violence, separatist movements and a strong jihadist element.
There is also a simmering Islamist movement in Jordan, especially in the town of Zarqa, in the north-east towards the Syrian and Iraqi borders, which is home to some of the several thousand supporters of groups such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State. The authorities are fearful of a jihadist group in Iraq or Syria reaching the now fragile borders in strength and crossing into Jordan. The British-trained Jordanian Army is thought to be one of the most robust in the Middle East, but it might struggle to cope if local Islamists and foreign fighters took to the streets in guerrilla warfare. If the Palestinian Jordanians declined to defend the country it is not unrealistic to believe that it would descend into the sort of chaos we now see in Syria. This is the last thing the Hashemite rulers want – and it’s the last thing the Israelis want as well.
The battle for the future of the Arab Middle East has to an extent taken the spotlight off the Israeli–Arab struggle. The fixation with Israel/Palestine does sometimes return, but the magnitude of what is going on elsewhere has finally enabled at least some observers to understand that the problems of the region are not down to the existence of Israel. That was a lie peddled by the Arab dictators as they sought to deflect attention from their own brutality, and it was bought by many people across the area and the dictators’ useful idiots in the West. Nevertheless the Israeli/Palestinian joint tragedy continues, and such is the obsession with this tiny piece of land that it may again come to be considered by some to be the most pressing conflict in the world.
The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Coast as a part of the region of Syria. They called it Filistina. After the First World War, under the British Mandate this became Palestine.
The Jews had lived in what used to be called Israel for millennia, but the ravages of history had dispersed them across the globe. Israel remained for them the ‘promised land’ and Jerusalem in particular was sacred ground. However, by 1948 Arab Muslims and Christians had been a clear majority in the land for more than a thousand years.
In the twentieth century, with the introduction of the Mandate for Palestine, the Jewish movement to join their minority co-religionists grew and, propelled by the pogroms in Eastern Europe, more and more Jews began to settle there. The British looked favourably on the creation of a ‘Jewish homeland’ in Palestine and allowed Jews to move there and buy land from the Arabs. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, Jews tried to get to Palestine in even greater numbers. Tensions between Jews and non-Jews reached boiling point, and an exhausted Britain handed over the problem to the United Nations in 1948, which voted to partition the region into two countries. The Jews agreed, the Arabs said ‘No’. The outcome was war, which created the first wave of Palestinian refugees fleeing the area and Jewish refugees coming in from across the Middle East.
Jordan occupied the West Bank region, including East Jerusalem. Egypt occupied Gaza, considering it to be an extension of its territory. Neither was minded to give the people living there citizenship or statehood as Palestinians, nor was there any significant movement by the inhabitants calling for the creation of a Palestinian state. Syria, meanwhile, considered the whole area to be part of greater Syria and the people living there as Syrians.
The Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza remain contested territory following the Six-Day War in 1967.
To this day Egypt, Syria and Jordan are suspicious of Palestinian independence, and if Israel vanished and was replaced by Palestine, all three might make claims to parts of the territory. In this century, however, there is a fierce sense of nationhood among the Palestinians, and any Arab dictatorship seeking to take a chunk out of a Palestinian state of whatever shape or size would be met with massive opposition. The Palestinians are very aware that most of the Arab countries, to which some of them fled in the twentieth century, refuse to give them citizenship; these countries insist that the status of their children and grandchildren remains ‘refugee’, and work to ensure that they do not integrate into the country.
During the Six-Day War of 1967 the Israelis won control of all of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. In 2005 they left Gaza, but hundreds of thousands of settlers remain in the West Bank.
Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal, indivisible capital. The Jewish religion says the rock upon which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac is there, and that it stands directly above the Holy of Holies, King Solomon’s Temple. For the Palestinians Jerusalem has a religious resonance which runs deep throughout the Muslim world: the city is regarded as the third most holy place in Islam because the Prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from that same rock, which is on the site of what is now the ‘Furthest Mosque’ (Al Aqsa). Militarily the city is of only moderate strategic geographical importance – it has no real industry to speak of, no river and no airport – but it is of overwhelming significance in cultural and religious terms: the ideological need for the place is of more importance than its location. Control of, and access to, Jerusalem is not an issue upon which a compromise solution can be easily achieved.