The port of Oktyabrsk is situated on the left bank of the Bug River, 58 km. north of the entry to the Black Sea. Close to the city of Nikolayev, this anonymous Ukrainian port could not seem further from the strife-torn Middle East.
Yet in the last year, Oktyabrsk has played a key role in the international structure that enables the survival of the Assad dictatorship in Syria. It is the main point from which ships bearing the Russian arms that underwrite the Assad regime’s survival set off undisturbed on their journey to the Syrian coast.
As the Syrian revolution against Bashar al-Asad’s rule enters its first year, Asad appears to have a good command over Syria’s large and fractious minority community. Three of the most prominent minority groups include the Christians, Druze, and Kurds. Asad’s control of these groups was not happenstance but the result of a number of hard- and soft-power moves executed by the regime. These calculations did not simply involve direct internal dealings with said minorities, but also outreach to their populations living in neighboring states and abroad. Due to the regime’s many policies, minority support may continue for some time.
Our way of government is not identical with that which is pursued with such conspicuous success in highly civilised and settled countries like your own. We leave the various communities and tribes alone to settle their internal differences. It is only where tribe wars on tribe, religion on religion, or their quarrels stop the traffic on the Sultan’s highway that we interfere. What would you have, mon ami? We are here in Asia!” – An Ottoman governor in Syria to author Marmaduke Pickthall, late nineteenth century.[1]
Since the 1990s, Hizballah has defined itself along a number of parallel lines, each of which prior to 2011 appeared to support the other. The movement was simultaneously a sectarian representative of the Lebanese Shi’a, a regional ally of Iran and Syria, a defender of the Lebanese against the supposed aggressive intentions of Israel, and a leader of a more generically defined Arab and Muslim “resistance” against Israel and the West. As a result of the events of 2011, most important the revolt against the Asad regime in Syria, these various lines, which seemed mutually supportive, began to contradict one another. This has diminished Hizballah’s position, though it remains physically unassailable for as long as the Asad regime in Syria survives.
The Australian: In Egypt, Islamist parties now hold about 80 per cent of the seats in parliament. Given the majority of demonstrators in Tahrir Square were liberal secularists, has Egypt’s Arab Spring been hijacked?
Daniel Pipes: No, because the liberals of Tahrir Square did not force Mubarak from power. The military took advantage of their mass demonstrations to dispatch a president it had had enough of, in large part because of his intent on handing power to his son, Gamal.
Is the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood bad news for Egypt’s Coptic Christians and secularists?
by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, Oskar Svadkovsky and Phillip Smyth*
Recent reports out of Syria have warned of the ethnic cleansing of 90 percent of the Christian population of Homs, the city that has been ravaged by the conflict between Assad’s forces and armed opposition groups since the uprising against the regime began in February last year. The responsibility for the mass killings and expulsions has been pinned on an armed opposition group known as the “Al-Faruq Brigade.”
This claim first gained wide distribution in a report published on March 21 by Agenzia Fides (the official Vatican news agency), which declared its source to be “a note sent to Fides by some sources in the Syrian Orthodox Church.”
Fides added that “in the ‘Faruq Brigade,’ note other sources, there seems [sic] to be armed elements of various Wahhabi groups and mercenaries from Libya and Iraq.”
Huge balls of fire and mushrooms of smoke seen on the latest videos from Homs indicate that the Syrian army is using more powerful weapons in its assault on the remaining rebel strongholds in the city.
This is what the daily shelling of Homs used to look like when the Baba Amro district was still under rebel control:
February 8, 2012
Explosions seen on the latest videos look rather different:
As Syria sinks deeper and deeper into the throes of civil war, the decade-long honeymoon between Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and Bashar al-Assad’s regime has all but ended. Fearing the possible spread of the revolt to Turkish territory, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu cold-shouldered their hitherto feted ally, openly siding with the rebels. They sheltered thousands of refugees fleeing government repression, including scores of military defectors, conferred with opposition leaders, and even threatened military intervention should the regime continue its brutal crackdown.[1] In August, Erdoğan warned that “we reached the end of our patience”;[2] three months later, he lauded the “massacred” rebels as “martyrs,” prophesying that “the Syrian nation will reap the results of its glorious resistance.”[3] As President Assad ignores these admonitions, has Turkey reached the limits of “soft power” and will it revert to the instruments of hard power to find stability on its southern border?
As Syrian president Bashar al-Assad struggles to contend with a massive popular uprising, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB) is poised to dominate whatever coalition of forces manages to unseat the Baathist regime. Though in many ways the Brotherhood’s official political platform is a model of Islamist moderation and tolerance, it is less a window into the group’s thinking than a reflection of its political tactics. Unlike its parent organization, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which often kept its ideological opponents at arm’s length, the SMB has repeatedly forged alliances with secular dissident groups even as it secretly tried to negotiate a deal with the Assad regime to allow its return from exile. Since the moderation of its political platform over the past two decades has clearly been intended to facilitate this triangulation, it does not tell us much about the ultimate intentions of the Syrian Brotherhood.
What is the alternative to Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria? A simple if indirect way to find out is to consider which groups in Syria are especially for or against Assad—and why.
Christian minorities, who, at 10% of the Syrian population, have the most to gain from a secular government and the most to suffer from a Sharia-state, have no choice but to prefer Assad. They are already seeing aspects of the alternative. A recent Barnabas Fund report titled “Christians in Syria Targeted in Series of Kidnappings and Killings; 100 Dead,” tells of how “children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim.” In one instance, kidnappers videotaped a Christian boy as they murdered him in an attempt to frame the government; one man “was cut into pieces and thrown in a river” and another “was found hanged with numerous injuries.”
The new Middle East strategic battle is heating up and this is only the start. It has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with two more serious lines of battle: Arabs versus Persians and Sunni versus Shia Muslims.
The Arab-Israeli or Israel-Palestinian dispute is increasingly unimportant, despite the hatred of increasingly powerful Islamist forces for Israel. The real struggle is over who will control each Muslim majority country and who is going to lead the Middle East. Both issues have almost nothing to do with Israel. At the same time, Israel has virtually no role to play in these struggles, except to ensure that Hamas doesn’t take over the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority.
Some thoughts on U.S. policy toward Syria on the occasion of the just-ended “Friends of Syria” meeting in Tunisia:
Since the end of the cold war, many Americans have a sense of being so strong, they don’t need to think about their own security but can afford to focus on the immediate humanitarian concerns of others. This leads to a sentimental U.S. foreign policy of “war as social work” in which the welfare of peoples with an admittedly wretched record as American allies (Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians) can trump national interests. In fact, American interests often diverge from those of Middle Easterners. For example, as I put it six years ago, “when Sunni terrorists target Shiites and vice-versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt.”
The iron fist against “terrorist gangs” as promised by Bashar Assad got off to a fairly impressive start two weeks ago. Homs — the Benghazi of the Syrian rebels — has been subjected to massive and sustained shelling for days, causing hundreds of fatalities among the defenders. With the fist heading for its third week, however, the spectacular artillery barrages seem to have delivered little.
This is not the first time during the uprising that the Syrian army has stormed urban areas. In July and August, the army recaptured Hama, Deir ez Zor, and Latakia after these had been taken over by crowds of protesters reinforced by army defectors.
One year after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak as president of Egypt, what conclusions can we draw regarding the ongoing wave of unrest in the Middle East and North Africa?
Around this time last year at the Herzliya Conference, the Israeli historian Prof. Martin Kramer lambasted the Obama administration for taking the view that the “status quo” in the region was no longer sustainable, and even went so far as to accuse the U.S. government of “throwing Mubarak under the bus.”
1. Dewy-eyed predictions of democracy within the year proved to be as silly as they appeared to be back then. Instead, a power-hungry military leadership shows it will do whatever necessary to remain in the saddle.
Fides added that “in the ‘Faruq Brigade,’ note other sources, there seems [sic] to be armed elements of various Wahhabi groups and mercenaries from Libya and Iraq.”
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