Syria explained: how it became a global flashpoint

The information battle over the chemical incident in Douma at the weekend is well and truly joined. Russia and the Assad junta deny their involvement in bombarding shelters with chlorine or any other banned toxin.

Any release of such subjects is down to the rebels themselves, according to the regime narrative.

This has been matched by a chorus of ‘false flag’ accusations across the internet and broadcast media. According to this view, which has been relayed even on Fox News, all claims that the Assad command was behind chemical attacks on eastern Goutha in August 2013, and fired sarin on innocent civilians at Khan Sheikhoun in April last year, are products of false witness promoted by the CIA and the National Security Council in Washington. They quote no less an authority than Seymour Hersh, who claimed that the Goutha attack, which so nearly provoked an armed response from President Obama, was all a put-up job by US covert forces.

Hersh claimed that chemical weapons had been used for the most part by Islamist rebels. His claims have not been embraced by mainstream media – presumably in his view, they are part of the propagandist plot. Even so, the Assad regime put its hand up for holding a substantial chemical weapons arsenal, which the Russians then helped them to destroy. Indeed, some materials were shipped as far as the Italian disposal facility near Gioia del Colle in 2013.

The stuff has kept turning up in Syria since, according to the OPCW – Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Warfare – the international authority. The chemical weapons inspectorate have long suspected that the Assad forces have stocks of chlorine, phosgene and sarin. So, the regime forces must have been deliberately hiding these materials, or continuing to make them.

This time, among the most prominent ‘false flag’ believers is Rand Paul, the libertarian one-time presidential pretender. He seems to have suggested that the CIA has engineered the chlorine attack as the siege of Douma was ending to open the way to Trump forcing regime change and the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.

These charges, however exotic, are not a trivial matter. This battle of information, dissembling and disinformation is something more than the Punch and Judy knockabout of social media. It is a key operational tool in the new way of confrontation and conflict – or ‘non-obvious warfare’ as some strategists style it. Most worrying is that this battle of wills as well as words has hardly been articulated and analysed by mainstream English language media across the world – the BBC and Times of New York, London, India and Israel included.

Syria continues to be a barrel of surprises, as it has been throughout history. This time they look pretty nasty, as once again Syria has the potential for becoming the hub of a widening conflict across the region, involving local, regional and international power struggles and vendettas.

The battle in the Kurdish areas of the North, now involving Turkey as well as Assad’s military and mercenaries is set to run for at least four years, according to a distinguished visitor, Patrick Cockburn, in the London Review of Books. Round Idlib a hard core of rebels, secular and Islamic, is defending a population of about two million mostly Sunni Arabs in an enclave that abuts the Assad Alawite heartland in north west Syria.

To the south, small pockets of local resistance and mini turf wars persist. There is little chance that the Assad regime will be in charge of a unified Syria on the 2011 borders soon, if at all in Bashar’s political lifetime.

The cascade of conflict that could now flow from beyond those borders makes the eyes water.

More concerning is the already simmering fight between Israel and Iran. Israel’s F-15 jets bombed the T4 Tyas base between Homs and Palmyra earlier this week as part of its ongoing campaign to prevent Iran’s Quds Force establishing bases across western Syria to arm and train Lebanese Hezbollah forces – possibly including chemical weapons – for confronting Israel. The Netanyahu government looks set to up the ante as it faces violence and trouble on two fronts; in Gaza as well as on the northern Lebanon-Syria border.

Trump is now enmeshed with Iran on two fronts – in Syria, where the Islamic Republic is now the most powerful regional ally and principal supplier of foreign ground forces to the regime, and over the nuclear development pact, which Trump has vowed to annul. If the international Iran nuclear deal collapses, or is collapsed by Washington, a Middle East nuclear arms race involving Saudi Arabia and Turkey is probable rather than possible.

Despite all the noise from Moscow, and the Russian desk at the UN threatening dire consequences if Trump and allies resort to force, Russia has limited options in Syria. It has a relatively modest fleet of aircraft – about 50 in number, and many of them quite old – and about 3,500 personnel, including military police, ground crew and intelligence operatives.

It is interesting that the Assad forces had to use Russian military police so extensively in the last incursions into Goutha and Douma, as if they couldn’t risk their own or their allies of the Shia militias and Hezbollah. Russian ranks have been bulked up with mercenaries with bizarre titles like ‘soldiers of the Ultra-Orthodox’ – who have been killed in their hundreds this year, making unwelcome headlines in Moscow.

During the Cold War, Syria was Soviet Russia’s ally. But this assured position couldn’t conceal its maverick status in the politics of radical Arab nationalism. In the wake of Nasser’s diplomatic triumph in the Suez crisis of 1956, Syria became united with Egypt in the cause of Arab nationalism and socialism, joining with it as the United Arab republic in 1958 – though this lasted only a few years. The republic embraced the radical ideology of the Ba’ath party – along with its neighbour Iraq. Unlike Iraq, the regime decided to ‘deradicalise’ its Ba’ath socialist credentials by allowing private enterprise and profit. As it did so it drifted towards military dictatorship, cemented in 1970 by the “correctional revolution” the quaint terminology for the coup headed by the then commander of the air force, Hafez al-Assad.

During the series of Arab-Israeli conflicts from 1948 to 1973, Syria’s awkward squad status was enhanced by one of the established maxims of Middle east diplomacy of the day: You can’t make war in the Arab cause without Egypt, and you can’t make peace without Syria.

Since the seventies the Damascus regime has been the clan state of the Assad family. Bashar – a highly qualified eye doctor – took over on his father’s death in 2000. His elder brother and designated heir apparent, Basel had been killed in a car crash a few years before. The Assads rule by clan – mafia power. Here there is a resemblance to the war the Putin mafia oligarchy operates. The Assads are from the Alawite minority whose home turf is in the mountains above the Mediterranean in the north west of Syria. They number about 1.5m in Syria, under a tenth of the notional population, and form a sub sect of the Twelver Branch of the Shia sect. To majority Sunni Arabs, the Alawites are a heretical subsect of a heretical sect, the Shias.

Syria has been the playground of minority sects, religious extremists and foreigners since late Antiquity. Saint Simeon Stylites practiced his extreme and punishing form of Christian ascetism by staying atop his pillar for 37 years in northern Syria in the 5th century CE. Its most famous soldier was Saladin, born to a Kurdish mother in Tikrit, whose great citadel and glacis was the most outstanding monument in Aleppo, till the latest war came.

Islamic extremists have long presented the big challenge to the corrupt Assad “McMafia” rule. In February 1982, insurgent Muslim Brethren – radical Sunnis – seized the historic city of Hama. In wresting back control, Hafez’s brother Rifaat was reported to have smashed down large parts of the beautiful old city, with tanks gunning down unarmed civilians as they fled. Rifaat still resides in Europe and denies any involvement.

A generation later, Bashar’s younger brother Maher has a similar reputation to his uncle Rifaat. Under his command the 4th Armoured Division has an unenviable reputation, not least in the trashing of Homs in the present conflict.

In September 2015, Russia decided to intervene militarily to save Assad and his exhausted forces from defeat. They were reeling from the incursions from Iraq by the Islamic State, which within a year had seized a third of Syria, admittedly much of it desert. With the Russians came redoubled efforts from the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, particularly the Al Quds Force commando. They in turn helped turn the levies of the Lebanese Hezbollah from regional militia into an effective, formed army.

The Russians’ intervention had decisively changed the facts on the ground inexorably in favour of the Assad clan and their allies.

That is where we are now. But advantage to the cause of the Assad junta does not mean it has the force, will, and knowhow to close the conflict off and bring peace, reconciliation and reconstruction to Syria. The future of Assad and his dictatorship is now in hock to Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. They do not have the means of stopping the fighting with the Kurds, the confrontation with Israel from bases in Syria, or close down the opposition of Sunni nationalists of different stripes and degrees of dedication and fanaticism.

The war and conflict will go on. Like the violence in Gaza and the grinding war in Yemen, the fighting itself overlays a rumbling earthquake of humanitarian disaster and social collapse.

This is a warning to Trump. The Syria crisis is not a Gordian knot, to be resolved by a single cut. If the US embarks on military action because of the mass murder in Douma, it will have to plan for sustained, continued, strategically balanced operations. They have to alter conditions and circumstances in favour of the allies of the West, and decisively so. Vague and erroneous calculations of outcomes, which plagued American planning and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent memory, will just make matters worse.

Inaction also carries a huge risk – one that has escaped the attention of much of the commentariat to date. If Assad and his supporters, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah included, get away with their casual, almost ritual, use of chemical weapons, and schoolboy lying about it, they will become increasingly accepted as a tool of conflict, violence and war. They will become quite possibly the tools of choice for criminals and terrorists. There will be little that the exhortations of the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons can do about it.

With the cluster of wicked problems dropping into the White House in tray – Syria, nuclear Iran, North Korea and all – now is not the time of the Trump presidency to retreat into the Twitter comfort zone, or go on an AHDD walk about.