PEPE ESCOBAR
October 18, 2019
Following the Damascus-Kurdish
alliance, Syria may become the biggest defeat for the Central Intelligence
Agency since Vietnam, says Pepe Escobar.
What is happening in Syria,
following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical
game-changer. I’ve tried to summarize
it in a single paragraph this way:
“It’s a quadruple win. The
U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a
conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians –
that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia
prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process
alive. And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.”
Syria may be the biggest
defeat for the CIA since Vietnam.
Yet that hardly begins to tell
the whole story.
Allow me to briefly sketch in
broad historical strokes how we got here.
It began with an intuition I
felt last month at the tri-border point of Lebanon, Syria and Occupied
Palestine; followed by a subsequent series of conversations in Beirut with
first-class Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, Russian, French and Italian analysts;
all resting on my travels in Syria since the 1990s; with a mix of selected
bibliography in French available at Antoine’s in Beirut thrown in.
The Vilayets
Let’s start in the 19thcentury
when Syria consisted of six vilayets — Ottoman provinces — without
counting Mount Lebanon, which had a special status since 1861 to the benefit of
Maronite Christians and Jerusalem, which was a sanjak (administrative
division) of Istanbul.
The vilayets did not
define the extremely complex Syrian identity: for instance, Armenians were the
majority in the vilayet of Maras, Kurds in Diyarbakir – both now part
of Turkey in southern Anatolia – and the vilayets of Aleppo and
Damascus were both Sunni Arab.
Nineteenth century Ottoman
Syria was the epitome of cosmopolitanism. There were no interior borders or
walls. Everything was inter-dependent.
Then the Europeans, profiting
from World War I, intervened. France got the Syrian-Lebanese littoral, and
later the vilayets of Maras and Mosul (today in Iraq). Palestine was
separated from Cham (the “Levant”), to be internationalized. The vilayet of
Damascus was cut in half: France got the north, the Brits got the south.
Separation between Syria and the mostly Christian Lebanese lands came later.
There was always the complex
question of the Syria-Iraq border. Since antiquity, the Euphrates acted as a
barrier, for instance between the Cham of the Umayyads and their fierce
competitors on the other side of the river, the Mesopotamian Abbasids.
James Barr, in his splendid “A
Line in the Sand,” notes, correctly, that the Sykes-Picot agreement imposed on
the Middle East the European conception of territory: their “line in the sand”
codified a delimited separation between nation-states. The problem is, there
were no nation-states in region in the early 20thcentury.
The birth of Syria as we know
it was a work in progress, involving the Europeans, the Hashemite dynasty,
nationalist Syrians invested in building a Greater Syria including Lebanon, and
the Maronites of Mount Lebanon. An important factor is that few in the region
lamented losing dependence on Hashemite Medina, and except the Turks, the loss
of the vilayet of Mosul in what became Iraq after World War I.
In 1925, Sunnis became the de
facto prominent power in Syria, as the French unified Aleppo and Damascus.
During the 1920s France also established the borders of eastern Syria. And
the Treaty of
Lausanne, in 1923, forced the Turks to give up all Ottoman holdings but
didn’t keep them out of the game.
The Turks soon started to
encroach on the French mandate, and began blocking the dream of Kurdish
autonomy. France in the end gave in: the Turkish-Syrian border would parallel
the route of the fabled Bagdadbahn — the Berlin-Baghdad railway.
In the 1930s France gave in
even more: the sanjak of Alexandretta (today’s Iskenderun, in Hatay
province, Turkey), was finally annexed by Turkey in 1939 when only 40 percent
of the population was Turkish.
The annexation led to the
exile of tens of thousands of Armenians. It was a tremendous blow for Syrian
nationalists. And it was a disaster for Aleppo, which lost its corridor to the
Eastern Mediterranean.
To the eastern steppes, Syria
was all about Bedouin tribes. To the north, it was all about the
Turkish-Kurdish clash. And to the south, the border was a mirage in the desert,
only drawn with the advent of Transjordan. Only the western front, with Lebanon,
was established, and consolidated after WWII.
This emergent Syria — out of
conflicting Turkish, French, British and myriad local interests —obviously
could not, and did not, please any community. Still, the heart of the nation
configured what was described as “useful Syria.” No less than 60 percent of the
nation was — and remains — practically void. Yet, geopolitically, that
translates into “strategic depth” — the heart of the matter in the current
war.
From Hafez to Bashar
Starting in 1963, the Baath
party, secular and nationalist, took over Syria, finally consolidating its
power in 1970 with Hafez al-Assad, who instead of just relying on his Alawite
minority, built a humongous, hyper-centralized state machinery mixed with a
police state. The key actors who refused to play the game were the Muslim
Brotherhood, all the way to being massacred during the hardcore 1982 Hama
repression.
Secularism and a police state:
that’s how the fragile Syrian mosaic was preserved. But already in the 1970s
major fractures were emerging: between major cities and a very poor periphery;
between the “useful” west and the Bedouin east; between Arabs and Kurds. But
the urban elites never repudiated the iron will of Damascus: cronyism,
after all, was quite profitable.
Damascus interfered heavily
with the Lebanese civil war since 1976 at the invitation of the Arab League as
a “peacekeeping force.” In Hafez al-Assad’s logic, stressing the Arab identity
of Lebanon was essential to recover Greater Syria. But Syrian control over
Lebanon started to unravel in 2005, after the murder of former Lebanese Prime
Minister Rafiq Hariri, very close to Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA)
eventually left.
Bashar al-Assad had taken
power in 2000. Unlike his father, he bet on the Alawites to run the state
machinery, preventing the possibility of a coup but completely alienating
himself from the poor, Syrian on the street.
What the West defined as the
Arab Spring, began in Syria in March 2011; it was a revolt against the Alawites
as much as a revolt against Damascus. Totally instrumentalized by the
foreign interests, the revolt sprang up in extremely poor, dejected Sunni
peripheries: Deraa in the south, the deserted east, and the suburbs of Damascus
and Aleppo.
What was not understood in the
West is that this “beggars banquet” was not against the Syrian nation, but
against a “regime.” Jabhat al-Nusra, in a P.R. exercise, even broke its
official link with al-Qaeda and changed its denomination to Fatah al-Cham and then
Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (“Organization for the Liberation of the Levant”). Only
ISIS/Daesh said they were fighting for the end of Sykes-Picot.
By 2014, the perpetually
moving battlefield was more or less established: Damascus against both Jabhat
al-Nusra and ISIS/Daesh, with a wobbly role for the Kurds in the northeast,
obsessed in preserving the cantons of Afrin, Kobane and Qamichli.
But the key point is that
each katiba (“combat group”), each neighborhood, each village, and in
fact each combatant was in-and-out of allegiances non-stop. That yielded a
dizzying nebulae of jihadis, criminals, mercenaries, some linked to al-Qaeda,
some to Daesh, some trained by the Americans, some just making a quick buck.
For instance Salafis —
lavishly financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — especially Jaish al-Islam, even
struck alliances with the PYD Kurds in Syria and the jihadis of Hayat Tahrir
al-Cham (the remixed, 30,000-strong al-Qaeda in Syria). Meanwhile, the
PYD Kurds (an emanation of the Turkish Kurds’ PKK, which Ankara consider
“terrorists”) profited from this unholy mess — plus a deliberate ambiguity by
Damascus – to try to create their autonomous Rojava.
That Turkish Strategic Depth
Turkey was all in.
Turbo-charged by the neo-Ottoman politics of former Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu, the logic was to reconquer parts of the Ottoman empire, and get rid
of Assad because he had helped PKK Kurdish rebels in Turkey.
Davutoglu’s Strategik Derinlik (“Strategic
Depth’), published in 2001, had been a smash hit in Turkey, reclaiming the
glory of eight centuries of an sprawling empire, compared to puny 911
kilometers of borders fixed by the French and the Kemalists. Bilad al Cham, the
Ottoman province congregating Lebanon, historical Palestine, Jordan and Syria,
remained a powerful magnet in both the Syrian and Turkish
unconscious.
No wonder Turkey’s Recep
Erdogan was fired up: in 2012 he even boasted he was getting ready to pray in
the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, post-regime change, of course. He has been
gunning for a safe zone inside the Syrian border — actually a Turkish enclave —
since 2014. To get it, he has used a whole bag of nasty players — from militias
close to the Muslim Brotherhood to hardcore Turkmen gangs.
With the establishment of the
Free Syrian Army (FSA), for the first time Turkey allowed foreign weaponized
groups to operate on its own territory. A training camp was set up in 2011 in
the sanjakof Alexandretta. The Syrian National Council was also created in
Istanbul – a bunch of non-entities from the diaspora who had not been in Syria
for decades.
Ankara enabled a de facto
Jihad Highway — with people from Central Asia, Caucasus, Maghreb, Pakistan,
Xinjiang, all points north in Europe being smuggled back and forth at will. In
2015, Ankara, Riyadh and Doha set up the dreaded Jaish al-Fath (“Army of
Conquest”), which included Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda).
At the same time, Ankara
maintained an extremely ambiguous relationship with ISIS/Daesh, buying its
smuggled oil, treating jihadis in Turkish hospitals, and paying zero attention
to jihad intel collected and developed on Turkish territory. For at least five
years, the MIT — Turkish intelligence – provided political and logistic background
to the Syrian opposition while weaponizing a galaxy of Salafis. After all,
Ankara believed that ISIS/Daesh only existed because of the “evil” deployed by
the Assad regime.
The Russian Factor
The first major game-changer
was the spectacular Russian entrance in the summer of 2015. Vladimir Putin
had asked the
U.S. to join in the fight against the Islamic State as the Soviet Union allied
against Hitler, negating the American idea that this was Russia’s bid to
restore its imperial glory. But the American plan instead, under Barack Obama,
was single-minded: betting on a rag-tag Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a mix
of Kurds and Sunni Arabs, supported by air power and U.S. Special Forces, north
of the Euphrates, to smash ISIS/Daesh all the way to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.
Raqqa, bombed to rubble by the
Pentagon, may have been taken by the SDF, but Deir ez-Zor was taken by
Damascus’s Syrian Arab Army. The ultimate American aim was to consistently keep
the north of the Euphrates under U.S. power, via their proxies, the SDF and the
Kurdish PYD/YPG. That American dream is now over, lamented by imperial
Democrats and Republicans alike.
The CIA will be after Trump’s
scalp till Kingdom Come.
Kurdish Dream Over
Talk about a cultural
misunderstanding. As much as the Syrian Kurds believed U.S. protection amounted
to an endorsement of their independence dreams, Americans never seemed to
understand that throughout the “Greater Middle East” you cannot buy a tribe. At
best, you can rent them. And they use you according to their interests. I’ve
seen it from Afghanistan to Iraq’s Anbar province.
The Kurdish dream of a
contiguous, autonomous territory from Qamichli to Manbij is over. Sunni Arabs
living in this perimeter will resist any Kurdish attempt at dominance.
The Syrian PYD was founded in
2005 by PKK militants. In 2011, Syrians from the PKK came from Qandil – the PKK
base in northern Iraq – to build the YPG militia for the PYD. In predominantly
Arab zones, Syrian Kurds are in charge of governing because for them Arabs are
seen as a bunch of barbarians, incapable of building their “democratic,
socialist, ecological and multi-communitarian” society.
One can imagine how
conservative Sunni Arab tribal leaders hate their guts. There’s no way these
tribal leaders will ever support the Kurds against the SAA or the Turkish army;
after all these Arab tribal leaders spent a lot of time in Damascus seeking
support from Bashar al-Assad. And now the Kurds themselves have accepted
that support in the face of the Trukish incursion, greenlighted by Trump.
East of Deir ez-Zor, the
PYD/YPG already had to say goodbye to the region that is responsible for 50
percent of Syria’s oil production. Damascus and the SAA now have the upper
hand. What’s left for the PYD/YPG is to resign themselves to Damascus’s and
Russian protection against Turkey, and the chance of exercising sovereignty in
exclusively Kurdish territories.
Ignorance of the West
The West, with typical
Orientalist haughtiness, never understood that Alawites, Christians, Ismailis
and Druze in Syria would always privilege Damascus for protection compared to
an “opposition” monopolized by hardcore Islamists, if not jihadis. The
West also did not understand that the government in Damascus, for survival,
could always count on formidable Baath party networks plus the dreaded mukhabarat —
the intel services.
Rebuilding Syria
The reconstruction of Syria
may cost as much as $200 billion. Damascus has already made it very clear that
the U.S. and the EU are not welcome. China will be in the forefront, along with
Russia and Iran; this will be a project strictly following the Eurasia
integration playbook — with the Chinese aiming to revive Syria’s strategic
positioning in the Ancient Silk Road.
As for Erdogan, distrusted by
virtually everyone, and a tad less neo-Ottoman than in the recent past, he now
seems to have finally understood that Bashar al-Assad “won’t go,” and he must
live with it. Ankara is bound to remain involved with Tehran and Moscow, in
finding a comprehensive, constitutional solution for the Syrian tragedy through
the former “Astana process”, later developed in Ankara.
The war may not have been
totally won, of course. But against all odds, it’s clear a unified, sovereign
Syrian nation is bound to prevail over every perverted strand of geopolitical
molotov cocktails concocted in sinister NATO/GCC labs. History will eventually
tell us that, as an example to the whole Global South, this will remain the
ultimate game-changer.
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