A CHASM AT THE HEART OF THE SYRIAN CRISIS / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENT & ANALYSIS

A chasm at the heart of the Syrian crisis

David Gardner

 

The lack of mainstream Sunni leadership is a blight across the Middle East

©Matt Kenyon

 

 

There is a big Sunni hole at the heart of international efforts to find a way out of Syria’s civil war and turn the tide against the Sunni jihadis of Isis and their menacing power-base in Syria and Iraq. From the UN Security Council in New York to the Syria forum convened by the US and Russia in Vienna, the architecture that diplomats are struggling to erect looks as riddled as a Swiss cheese.

 

Last month, after the Isis attack on Paris but also after five years of fighting that has razed vast swaths of Syria, the Security Council issued a unanimous call to arms against Isis. With France on a war footing, the US and Russia ostensibly putting aside their differences from Ukraine to the Middle East, and even Britain extending its modest role in the anti-Isis fight in Iraq into Syria, it seemed as if the lead external actors in the region were starting to coalesce. The Vienna diplomatic summit, with the presence of Iran, which kept Bashar al-Assad’s regime alive until Russian reinforcements arrived in Syria in September, agreed unanimously on a tentative transition out of the Syrian conflict. Is there substance to any of this?

The US and Russia, the two main powers embroiled in Syria, remain on opposite sides.

President Barack Obama leads a coalition against Isis backed, at least in theory, by Sunni Arab states and Turkey. President Vladimir Putin has put himself at the head of the Iran-backed Shia axis, whose main goal is to prop up the Assad regime, which came perilously close to being toppled by mainstream rebels over the summer. Yet they are both trapped in a dynamic that is conspiring to eliminate any centre ground — widening that already large Sunni hole.

Mr Putin, who says Russia now spearheads the struggle against Isis that Mr Obama had bungled, has concentrated most of his fire on non-Isis, Sunni rebels, variously backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. That is destroying the alternative to Isis that Russia and the US are purportedly trying to identify. By bolstering a minority regime built around Mr Assad’s quasi-Shia Alawite community, Moscow is fanning the sectarian flames consuming and partitioning the Levant.

 

Mr Obama inherited the debris of President George W Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, which replaced a Sunni tyranny with ruinously sectarian Shia leaders and shattered Iraq into pieces — giving the Isis death cult its start in life.

Yet the Bush mix of recklessness and fecklessness in Iraq resurfaces in Mr Obama’s lethal ambivalence towards Syria. His defenders say he was right to stay out of an intractable, shape-changing conflict. But that is not what he did. He called for the downfall of the Assads but then held back from giving the mainly Sunni rebels the means to achieve it — adding to the sense of dispossession of the Iraqi Sunni minority the feeling of betrayal among Syria’s Sunni majority.

The US-led coalition’s position on the ground against Isis relies essentially on Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Syrian Kurdish militia, effective forces that will nevertheless fight only for their own territory. The Pentagon’s attempt to rebrand the Syrian Kurd fighters as a Syrian Arab coalition — with the addition of Sunni tribal fighters and Assyrian Christian militia — merely spotlights the Sunni Arab hole.

The US and its allies are right that, if the Assads stay in place, there is little chance of enlisting mainstream Sunni sentiment against Isis. But, as things stand, Russia and Iran are not wrong in saying there is as yet no plausible alternative to fill a new vacuum if the Assads go. Ba’athist Syria was built as a security state almost impossible to disentangle from the Assad clan, with Alawites as its praetorian guard.

The lack of mainstream Sunni leadership is a blight across the region, which offers instead varieties of Sunni supremacism. Isis, a hybrid of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Ba’athist officers from Saddam Hussein’s army, disbanded by the US after 2003, is obviously the most virulent. But the big Sunni powers — Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt — are diluted flavours of this poison to which they claim to be the antidote.

 

Saudi Arabia, Washington’s main Sunni Arab ally, has told both the US and Russia its overriding concern is the march of Shia Iranian influence across the Arab world. Its sectarian Wahhabi strain of Sunni Islam competes with Isis as to which is the more effective hammer of the Shia. Turkey under the increasingly autocratic presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has seen its presumption of leading a neo-Ottoman Sunni revival boil down to a revived war with its Kurdish minority. Neither power is carrying the fight to Isis.

Egypt, after the 2013 coup against an elected Islamist government, has turned back towards a police state. Its presumption to being the Arab world’s intellectual powerhouse has to be measured against the fact that Al-Azhar, its millennium-old centre of Sunni learning, only this year excised from its curriculum early Islamic teaching on slavery, taxes due from non-Muslims, apostasy and jihad — the stock-in-trade of Isis.

 

The Middle East desperately needs a Sunni counter-narrative that takes on board the rights of minorities as well as individuals. Only that will challenge the presumption of Shia Iran and the Isis brand of millenarian Sunni supremacism — and start reassembling a disintegrating region into some sort of liveable shape.