The situation in Syria,
Iraq and Yemen
Two developments
characterise the situation in Syria: the slow reversal of fortunes in favour of
the Assad regime and the marginalisation of all moderate opposition groups to that
regime, whether Islamist or secular. With help from Iran and Hizbullah in
Lebanon, together with more covert support from Shia groups in Iraq, the Syrian
army over the past year has been able to begin to claw back control over the
central spine of Syria—the main road linking
Damascus to Homs and Aleppo. This is being done at immense cost to the 22
million-strong Syrian population: according
to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. By January 2015, 206,000 Syrians
had died since the beginning of the civil war and around 1 million have
been wounded. There are also 3 million Syrian refugees in surrounding countries
and a further 6.5 million Syrians are internally displaced—almost
half the total population.
Majid Almustafa/Demotix. All rights reserved.
Quite apart from this
appalling human cost, there has been a strategic cost as well—one
that the Syrian government seems willing to bear. This is that vast tracts of
Syrian territory are being alienated from its control. One-third of the country
is estimated to be under the control of extremist groups, mainly in the north
around Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor, where the Islamic State (IS) holds sway, with an
enclave in the south along the Golan Heights and next door to Israel under the
control of the Nusrah Front. Strangely enough, the Israeli government appears
unconcerned about its new neighbours, being more worried about its older enemy
in Lebanon, Hizbullah. Along the borders with Iraq and Turkey, Syria’s Kurds
are busy carving out a new autonomous Kurdish region and confronting IS. Then
there is the question of the future status of Turkey’s substantial Kurdish
population and, in a more remote future, the issue of Iranian Kurdistan as
well.
Kurdish success in
Syria, incidentally, raises questions about Kurdish ambitions for national
independence or, at the very least, autonomy, in both Syria and Iraq. There
have already been suggestions from Irbil that the time has come to consider
unity between the Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish autonomous regions and ambitions for
independence remain strong, particularly after Iraq’s Kurds have effectively
annexed the Kirkuk region and have similar ambitions towards the area around Mosul,
once IS has been expelled. There are, however, two major problems and several
minor ones with this scenario.
Firstly, Iran is completely unwilling to
consider any change in the status of its Kurdish population, not least because
of the implications this might have for its other minority communities, among
which native Farsi nationals form a bare majority. Secondly, Turkey is
extremely suspicious of the dominant political movement among Syria’s Kurds,
the Partiya
Yekîtiya Demokrat (PYD), which it sees as
an extension of the Partiya
Karkerên Kurdistani (PKK), considered to be a terrorist movement in Turkey. It
is therefore not prepared to endorse a separate Kurdish entity under PYD
control in Syria. On the other hand, Turkey has acted in recent years as patron
to Iraq’s Kurds, effectively guaranteeing the Kurdish Autonomous Region’s
status against pressure for further integration from Baghdad.
It
would, therefore, have an interest in extending its control over Syria’s Kurds
if the knotty problem of the PYD could be resolved, even if they were
politically integrated with Iraqi Kurdistan. The real problem, therefore, is
Turkey’s relations with the PKK, and this is currently under discussion as the
Erdogan regime negotiates a comprehensive and permanent deal with Abdallah
Ocalan, the imprisoned PKK leader who has been held in isolation in a prison on
the Sea of Marmara since 1999. If a new and acceptable status for Turkey’s
Kurds can be achieved, then Turkish suspicions towards Kurdish autonomy in Iraq
and Syria might dissipate. It is extremely unlikely, however, that Turkey would
embrace the idea of Kurdish independence, because of the implications that this
would have for its own territorial integrity—and the Kurds will not
be strong enough in the foreseeable future to demand it.
Björn Kietzmann/Demotix. All rights reserved.
A major reason for the
dramatic growth in extremist control has been the reluctance of the Syrian
regime to actually confront the groups concerned, apparently because their
success feeds its own narrative that the real cause of the civil war has been
the growth in Islamist extremism, not its own repressive brutality. This is, of
course, not the only reason, for the fragmentation of the Free Syrian Army, in
theory supported by the US and Europe, and of moderate Islamist groups
supported by the Gulf and Turkey, has allowed the extremists to dominate the
resistance arena. And, behind this has been the unwillingness of western powers
to actually provide the military muscle that the moderate opposition would have
needed, particularly after the Syrian chemical weapons programme was disbanded
in 2013, partly because the opposition, both civil and military, has proved to
be so fragmented over the past three years.
Now, of course, the military
campaign being waged by the US and its 60-member coalition against IS in both
Syria and Iraq has taken precedence, with the bizarre consequence that the west
– the sternest critic of the Assad regime – is tacitly seeking the same
outcomes as the regime that it condemns. And the essential mediators of this
new implicit relationship will be Russia and Iran, two states with which the west is otherwise at odds over Ukraine and Iran’s nuclear ambitions,
respectively.
Indeed, it has been the
extension of IS into Iraq that has occasioned the greatest international alarm. This
began in January 2014, although the group itself originates in Iraq, because its
immediate precursor had been al-Qaeda in Iraq during the previous decade at
the start of the century. The movement has been able to capitalise on the
resentments of the Sunni minority community there, particularly as a
consequence of the particularism shown by the al-Maliki government, which
deliberately marginalised and victimised them. A combination of government
insensitivity and army brutality at the end of 2013 transformed a local
demonstration in Ramadi into a province-wide tribal and popular protest
throughout Anbar Province. The Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), as it
then was, seized the opportunity, with its local allies, to exploit the
situation and was soon entrenched in Ramadi and Falluja, the two main cities in
the province, while the government discovered the consequences of having
transformed, for reasons of sectarian political control, the new Iraqi army
into a corrupt sectarian force with little real military capacity.
Soon the conflict in
Anbar spilled over into sectarian suicide attacks in Baghdad and surrounding
cities by sleeper cells long positioned there by Sunni extremists and the
former Ba’ath resistance, now concentrated in the Jaysh Rijal Tariqa
Naqashbandi, a resistance movement derived from the former Ba’ath Party and the
Naqashbandi order. By mid-year, ISIS, as the core of the newly awakened Sunni
resistance, expanded its reach into the predominantly Sunni provinces in northern
Iraq and, in a lightening move, seized control of Iraq’s second-largest city,
Mosul, while the Iraqi army there crumbled before the onslaught, which had
pitted a guerrilla force variously estimated at 1,500-3,000 men against Iraqi
army units between 30,000 and 40,000 strong. ISIS forces then moved southwards
towards Baghdad, but were eventually thrown on the defensive by a combination
of Kurdish peshmerga
forces and Shia militias, backed up by units of the Iraqi army. In September,
at the beginning of Ramadan, IS was proclaimed in Mosul as a caliphate,
becoming the nemesis of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which had laid out the
outlines of what were to become the states of the Middle East (see Joffé, 2015b).
Boris Niehaus/Demotix. All rights reserved.
ISIS’s success was also
to prove to be the nemesis of the al-Maliki government, for Iraq’s
international partners combined with his domestic opponents to force the prime
minister from office, to be replaced by a more moderate Shia figure prepared to
try to rebuild Sunni confidence in the post-invasion Iraqi political system. At
the same time the gratuitous brutality of IS, with its publicised beheadings of
hostages and its overt challenge to the formal geopolitical order of the Middle
East, persuaded the US to organise an extensive air campaign against it in
both Syria and Iraq that has severely hindered its potential to extend the
territories under its control.
Once again, as in Syria, the short-sightedness
of western policy has produced another contradictory result, for Iran has
actively engaged in supporting both the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Kurds,
thus making it into an objective ally of its greatest opponent—the
US. And in fact, although there is no concerted planning, the two countries
are now in contact over their individual operations against IS, a development
that Iran will undoubtedly—and probably correctly—assume
gives it increased leverage in the nuclear negotiations with the P5+1 group,
where a framework agreement is due by the end of March.
Yemen has become the
poor sister of the crises in Iraq and Syria, yet it has the potential to
profoundly destabilise the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, Yemen’s crisis is a
product of three separate but intersecting crises that all pre-date the Arab
Spring, but have been intermingled with it because of the way in which
demonstrations in 2011 in Change Square in Sana’a targeted the 34-year-long
regime of Ali Abdullah Salih, the nexus of the three crises. The problems that
Yemen faces arise from, firstly, the Al-Houthi rebellion; secondly, the Hirak (Southern
secession) movement; and, thirdly, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP),
and in one way or another all of them relate to policies long followed by the
Saleh regime. These policies were devoted to reinforcing the regime against
Saudi and tribal challenges, whatever the implications for North Yemen and,
later, Yemen itself. Initially, its major opposition came from the al-Islah
movement, derived from the Hashad tribal federation, itself backed by Saudi
Arabia. This, however, has changed during the last decade.
The Al-Houthi rebellion
began as a Zaidi[1]
political movement in 1992, calling itself Ansar Allah, but was transformed
into an anti-government rebellion in 2004, largely because of its opposition to
the Saleh regime’s policies of engagement in the US “war on terror”. Since
then, despite a series of broken ceasefires, six attempts by the government to
suppress it and one war with Saudi Arabia, the movement has continued to enjoy
widespread Zaidi support, especially from its support base in Sa’ida Province
north of Sana’a. In late 2014 it occupied the capital and at the start of 2015
took over the presidential palace, forcing both the president and the
government to resign. It has also moved south, challenging AQAP in its tribal
redoubts, and seems set to impose a new government on the country that will be
more sympathetic to Zaidi sentiment. It has even been said to have been in
contact with Ali Abdullah Saleh himself as he seeks to regain power by whatever
means might be available. Saudi Arabia asserts that the movement has been
funded by Iran, which now seems to be the case, although for many years this
was not so, and the GCC, which had considered letting Yemen join it, is
becoming increasingly alarmed about the regional implications of the situation
in Yemen.
Luke Somers/Demotix. All rights reserved.
The Hirak movement is
really part of the fallout of the end of the cold war in 1989. One consequence
was a Soviet decision to end its subsidies to the People’s Republic of South
Yemen, which had been established at the end of 1967 as the sole Marxist state
in the Middle East. This loss of support, coupled with a bloody settling of accounts
within the leadership of the country’s sole political party, the Yemeni
Socialist Party, forced the South Yemeni government to accept the option of reconciliation
and reunification with North Yemen, by then already under the control of the
Saleh regime, to create the current state in 1990. The reunification turned out
to be a disaster in which southern political leaders felt profoundly
marginalised, so in 1994 they tried to secede from the union. The resulting
six-month-long civil war enforced the union and the dissident leadership fled
into exile.
Southern resentments, however, have not abated and in recent years
have been increasingly overtly expressed. In 2007 these protests were organised
into demonstrations by the Hirak movement, a coalition of a series of Southern
protest groups with differing agendas, united only by a desire to rebalance the
North-South divide in Yemen in favour of the South. As the Al-Houthi movement
has extended its control, so Hirak has begun to entrench itself in Aden and the
Hadramauth and now refuses to recognise the authority of the Sana’a government.
AQAP in Yemen is a
consequence of two quite separate developments. The first was the attempt by
the Saleh regime to bolster its support base by allowing radical Islamic groups
in the Middle East to find a refuge there. Such groups were also mobilised
during the Yemeni civil war in 1994 to aid the Yemeni army in its victory over
dissidents in the South. It was only after the USS Cole
was attacked by al-Qaeda in Aden harbour in October 2000 that the regime,
reluctantly and under US pressure, turned against such groups.
The second
development was the expulsion of al-Qaeda from Saudi Arabia at the end of the
last decade after a sustained but ultimately unsuccessful campaign there
against the Saudi state. The remnants of the group gathered in South Yemen and
coalesced with other groups to form AQAP in 2009. The group has benefitted from
its protection by some of the local tribes to confront the Yemeni government
and army and has also transmuted into Ansar al-Shari’a (Yemen), developing a
policy of engagement with local populations to found an Islamic state, as
occurred in Sinjibar in 2011, rather than simply maintaining its original aims
of combating the “near” and “far” enemies of an Islamic order.[2]
The movement now also confronts the Al-Houthi movement as it moves southwards,
but is also threatened by a US drone-assassination campaign against its
leadership since 2012.
The Yemeni government,
therefore, is confronted with a far more complex threat than is the case
elsewhere in the Middle East and one, moreover, with roots buried in the
pre-2011 era rather than in the events of 2011. It is a threat that is
compounded by Yemen’s resource scarcity, partly human-made and partly the
result of the country’s extremely poor resource endowment, apart from some oil and
gas, the exploitation of which is constantly interrupted by tribal attack on
production facilities in attempts to gain concessions from the government. Yemeni
agriculture has been virtually destroyed by the cultivation of qat,
which occupies 40% of all available agricultural land and demands water that
could otherwise be used for food production. And in Yemen’s harsh mountainous
environment both water and land are in very short supply.
In short, the Change
Square demonstrations coincided with these far older problems in creating an
intolerable situation for the regime. Nonetheless, the regime did manage to
hold on to power until December 2011, despite provoking a civil war centred on
the capital, Sana’a. It was only when a GCC-brokered ceasefire and mediation
plan intervened that the then-president was persuaded to step down and go into
temporary exile in the US. He was replaced by Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who has
attempted unsuccessfully over the last three years to mediate with the Al-Houthi
movement and the Hirak while confronting AQAP against a background of tribal
unrest and discontent. It is his government that the Al-Houthi movement now
threatens to unseat.
[1] The Zaidi are a Shia movement derived from the fifth Shia imam, Yahia
bin Za’id, the son of Za’id bin Ali, the third son of the caliph, Ali,
alongside Hassan and Husain. Za’idi beliefs are close to those of the
rationalist Mutazilites and the legal system (fiqh) parallels the Hanafi mandhab.
[2] The terminology
comes from Muhammad Faraj, who defined the “near enemies” as autocratic and
morally deviant regimes (at least as far as the Islamic ideal was concerned) in
the Arab world, while the “far enemies” were those regimes outside the region
(such as the U.S. and European Union) that supported them. Both, therefore,
would be legitimate objects of jihad – his sixth but neglected obligation as a
matter of faith on all Muslims. The distinction recalls Ayatollah Khomeini’s
distinction between the greater and lesser Satans. See Faraj (2000).
