"Truly no one has the feel for what a post-authoritarian Assad Syria will eventually turn out to be. How deep is sectarianism? It may not be deep at all, but once the killings start, people revert to long repressed sectarian identities."
Robert Kaplan
The Revenge of Geography (2012)
* written 2 years before the rise of Islamic State
Conflict - Overview
In early June of 2014, the world drew a terrified gasp when a relatively unknown and lightly-armed offshoot of Al Qaeda, the 'Islamic State' (IS) sacked an unsuspecting North-Western Iraq.
Rapidly overrunning the historical region of Upper Mesopotamia, the groups lightning offensive crippled the US-trained Iraqi army within days. Plundering banks and military depots, the group made ferocious gains as they burned, maimed and butchered their way towards Baghdad, falling just shy of it's western fringes.
In a 4 week stretch of land grabs & looting, the Islamists captured billion's of dollars in stolen currency, as well as a swathe of strategic oil fields and a sweltering plethora of sophisticated US weaponry.
Looking west the group focused their attention on their failing Syrian Jihad, and propelled a column of American Humvees, tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces through the Syrian border. Whilst the group faced extinction in Syria only months beforehand, IS rapidly consumed the power-vacuum left behind by Assad's failed regime and claimed de facto regional leadership.
The territories IS have captured now form a messy statelet between Iraq & Syria, with self-appointed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declaring an Islamic Caliphate under his rule. Calling on all Muslims to declare allegiance, IS has encouraged attacks against Western interests and given the ultimatum of conversion-or-death to Christians and Shiite's in the lands it occupies.
Administratively a dysfunctional government of sorts has taken office and enforced a suffocating code of strict Sharia law. With medieval-esque evocations of barbarianism, IS now subdues it's imprisoned peoples through beheading, torture, arbitrary detention, summary executions and sexual slavery.
Certainly while not the first invaders of Upper Mesopotamia to use such methods of cruelty, they have unquestionably developed a level of brutality far outweighing their grim predecessors; Saddam and Assad. From the chaotic collapse of these former Soviet-styled dictatorships, Upper Mesopotamia has once again fallen victim to history's fatalistic determination of the region.
Currently whilst effective American airstrikes have disrupted Islamic State's expansionist ambitions, the future lays in the balance. With no clear victor emerging from the mayhem, the conflict only intensifies as it's erratic nature continues to morph.
With Iran now swirling into the trouble zone to bolster it's regional influence, moderate Jihadist squaring off against extreme Jihadists, secular rebels on the back-foot against Regime soldiers, and Kurdish forces seeking a state of their own, the situation is to say the least - incredibly complex.
Currently whilst effective American airstrikes have disrupted Islamic State's expansionist ambitions, the future lays in the balance. With no clear victor emerging from the mayhem, the conflict only intensifies as it's erratic nature continues to morph.
With Iran now swirling into the trouble zone to bolster it's regional influence, moderate Jihadist squaring off against extreme Jihadists, secular rebels on the back-foot against Regime soldiers, and Kurdish forces seeking a state of their own, the situation is to say the least - incredibly complex.
Conflict - Origins
The Iraqi & Syrian Conflicts are stooped in history and deeply rooted in geopolitics, with both countries future's bound to each other's.
Nestled between the Euphrates and Tigris river systems, Upper Mesopotamia encompasses most of Eastern Syria and Western Iraq. Being once the centre of Muhammad's Islamic Caliphate, the region has been the throbbing cultural epicentre of the Middle East since antiquity. Also sitting on a geographical frontier region, has meant that Mesopotamia has long been a fixation of conquest by grand empires and Jihadists alike.
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| 1258 Mongol Invasion of Baghdad |
Due to clashing powers long squabbling over regional leadership, the inhabitants of Upper Mesopotamia have frantically tussled on both religious and ethnic levels. In the wake of such conflict, remnants of conquering populations live side-by-side one another, smattering the Mesopotamian landscape with various ethnic and religious identities.
To give context to the Mesopotamian tapestry; Kurds & Yazidi's are descendants of Ancient Persians, the Turkmen are remnants of the Seljuk Empire & Ottoman Empires, the Assyrians are vestiges from the pre-Islamic Assyrian Empire and Sunni Arabs are descendants of the Rashidun, Ummayad & Abbasid Caliphates. Shia Islam too permeated under the 4th Rashidun Caliphate. Whilst not leaving a memorable bloodline in Mesopotamia, The Mongols also played their part sacking the world's first megacity; Baghdad.
With these ancient cultures often falling into their traditional geographical fault lines, sensitivity is needed when defining homogenous regional nation states. If viewed without the official lines of a map, a "crude finger painting" of religious and ethnic clusters emerge. Upon inspection, these clusters certainly contradict defined national borders, reminiscent of the way Europe appeared in pre World War history.
Taking the delicate religious and ethnic framework into account, perhaps the biggest pre-cursor to contemporary regional violence was messy colonialist map-making and attempts at divvying up the Middle Eastern Post-Ottoman bounty.
Under the British-French 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement following World War 1, the region was
partitioned into an incomprehensible mess of ill-fated borders. Some of these borders mixed tense religious and ethnic groups, while others drew boundaries separating largely unified kindred cultures. The result was a powder keg of modern state boundaries destined for eruption. IS leader Baghdadi has himself proclaimed; "Advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy". The very ability of IS to transnationally attack Syria and Iraq with ease, has certainly highlighted the artificiality of Middle Eastern borders.
While IS is a grotesque misrepresentation of cultural similarities in Western Iraq and Eastern Syria, it's mere presence represents some geographic logic. In the last 2156 years Syria has only had a grand total of 187 years, in which Syria closely resembles its current boundaries. Historically it has more commonly formed a territory inside larger states than a stand alone nation. The very idea of defining Syria as a unified state lacks oversight and critical thought.
Conversely Eastern Syria and Western Iraq, nestled between the Euphrates-Tigris river systems, are undoubtedly a cohesive & homogeneous Sunni Arabic body. It belongs neither to the Lebanon leaning Damascus, or the Iranian leaning Baghdad. Wedged in-between two sects of Shiism, the territories IS control are largely Sunni Arabic and share a particular brand of Sunni tribal culture. The very borders of Iraq and Syria are merely man-made mounds of sand.
While the backdrop of poor colonial map-making is to blame - Saddam and Assad deserve an honorary mention. With half a century of grim & violent dictatorships, the populations of Iraq & Syria have been suffocated by their draconian regimes, driving deep wounds through the Iraqi and Syrian national characters.
After Ba'athists took power in Iraq in 1968 and in Syria in 1971, it was to begin decades of repression and abuse; under a cloaked guise of Pan Arabism. With both the regimes of Saddam Hussein & Al-Assad desperate to attain national stability, religious & ethnic minorities were silenced through state sponsored terrorism.
In Iraq Saddam Hussein - a Sunni Iraqi, stacked his cabinet with other Sunni Muslims, in a country that was overwhelmingly Shiite. Escalating attacks against both the Shiite's and the Kurds, Saddam's regime allegedly murdered several thousands of dissenters through murder and conventional warfare.
The Assad's rap sheet is not pale in comparison. Forming a minority of the Syrian population, the Assad's belong to the Alawite Shiite Sect of Western Syria. The Alawite's have long dominated Syria's Sunni population through sectarian fuelled violence. Following the massacring of democratic protestors against Assad's rule in 2011, the country plunged into war. In the years which have followed, tens of thousands of Syrian civilians have been killed in Assad's indiscriminate bombing campaign.
This gruesome context was the landscape America wandered into in it's naivety. The Bush Administration truly didn't know the precarious situation, a post Saddam Iraq would pose. While the toppling of Saddam was certainly righteous, it lacked the foresight to see the unravelling religious and ethnic tensions that Saddam had merely sparked. Already in motion, the spiralling sectarian tensions were long out of control before the American Invasion of Iraq.
After quickly propping up an Iraqi government and armed forces, America did not ethically give the Iraqi people the tools it needed for self sufficiency. Removing a violent dictator who successfully subdued his population, created a chasm of chaos, in which a new Iraqi government was simply not ready.
With little resistance from the Iraqi army, Al Qaeda in Iraq launched a long a gruelling insurgency following the US withdrawal in 2007. Morphing into present day Islamic State, the group is not solely however a product of America or Saddam; but a product of history.
Conflict - Contemporary
As the US grows increasingly unwilling to draw themselves into the conflict, the regional powers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran look to hold the fate of this troubled war-zone. For now however, IS holds its territories in custody and it's powerful regional neighbours remain in grid-lock, equally hesitant to make the first real moves to oust IS.
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| Key players; Turkish and Iranian leaders meeting in Tehran |
Despite US and allied forces having launched a semi-effective air campaign against the Jihadist movement, the penny is quickly dropping - Islamic State cannot be defeated by air forces alone. With few moderate rebels to choose from in it's proxy ground war, Obama is unlikely to train sizeable numbers of the Free Syrian Army coalition. Only 60 rebels in fact have been trained by the US at July 2015.
Amidst the situation growing increasingly difficult for the United States, it has been noticeably retreating from a firm commitment to the region. As they struggle to wage ground warfare, Shiite Iran conducts it's with ease. Pincering Iraq & Syria from two sides, Iran has put increasing pressure on IS but at the detriment of the region's Sunni's. Bolstering it's Shiite allies; the Syrian Assad Regime, Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Iraqi Government, it threatens to redirect the course of conflict into a Sunni vs Shia war.
Counterbalancing Iran's domination is Kurdistan, who have been one of the most effective largely Sunni forces to battle IS. America has been hesitant however to back the Kurds, fearing the weakening of it's relationship with rising regional power Turkey. The Kurdish Peshmerga despite supporting democracy and secularism, also seek a Kurdish homeland which would threaten Turkey's territorial boundaries; in turn damage Turkish-US relations.
From the stand point the most impartial power appears to be the Sunni Muslim state of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi's have the most powerful and modernised military in the Gulf and have 200,000 active armed serviceman, not to mention a host of strong allies in North America and the Middle East. It has the funds and the war-ready capabilities which could easily dominate IS. Sitting on the fences they have however watched idly, fearing a backlash from Shiite Iran & homegrown IS sympathisers.
Although acts of aggression against the Kingdom cannot be ruled out by Iran it is however unlikely. If Iran were to escalate conflict with the Saudis, it would drawn attention from powerful ally the United States. Iran cannot bare this risk and are in absolutely no position to take on the American's in military conflict.
With this considered greater diplomatic pressure needs to be exerted on the Saudi's to sensitively extract Islamic State and establish a pro-Saudi Sunni government, all whilst not branching into neighbouring Shiite territory. This would best represent the local Sunni population of Upper Mesopotamia and keep a hungry Iran and treacherous Assad from straying too far towards the Sunni heartland.
As for the borders of Iraq and Syria themselves, serious considerations should be taken by the international body to redefine the region into a number of smaller and more cohesive states. As seen in the splintered Balkans, similar such actions have largely lead to regional peace in Europe. The Middle East deserves the same. To give weight to such claims, simply consider the history that has been studied in this article. Syria and Iraq are not dissimilar to the fragmentation that is taking place in Yemen and Libya. After colonialists drew borders in the Middle East without having the sensibility to define populations that existed there, they create ill fated borders with no homogenous cultural characters. With colonial borders still in place to this day, the whole of the Middle East seeks to redefine it's boundaries into a more logical sociological order.
While brutal leaders like Saddam & Assad successfully herded factional groups under a banner of 'nationalism', they haven't taken away the various constituents within these nations. As the contemporary surface level of government slips away, these constituents become more visible in the public eye as they assert themselves as distinct national groups. Iraqi's and Syrian's are but a body of different peoples under contemporary colonial-drawn borders, which are only vague geographic expressions and hardly define the peoples of the region. Regardless of an American invasion, Assad and Saddam were bound to fall due to the pressures of their divided peoples one way or another. As history usually dictates for divided nations, this is the inevitable consequence. The ancient constituent groups of Iraq & Syria were destined for a reshuffling of borders, through it by the Islamic State or by another Sunni Upper Mesopotamian group.
These are hard truths to swallow, but do not consider this a defeat. A divided state of Iraq or Syria is not an acceptance of American defeat or a triumph of militants. The truth is when studied through the lenses of history, the Iraqi and Syrian national boundaries are not just some engineering problem that a bit of plumbing (American air strikes) will sort out, greater critical thought is needed here than that. What we can do is consider the cogs already in motion for a national breakup. The rebels will never cross the Anti Lebanon mountains to take Latakia with regime troops dug in, the Kurds will not give up their newly found autonomy and the Sunni tribes of Western Iraq/Eastern Syria will never again succumb to the Shiite rule of The Iraqi or Syrian governments now that they have proven their independence. The return to a unified Iraq and Syria is not unlikely, it is impossible.
What to consider now is, what can we do to facilitate new states building peaceful and just societies. Through this means of thinking, the West has a chance not to lose this war. This is a chance to redefine a splintered region into a cohesive body of nations. The toppling of the Islamic State and the propping up of a law abiding Sunni Government in Upper Mesopotamia could well save Iraq & Syria and begin a process that could be the foundations for peaceful solutions in both Yemen and Libya also.
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| The Unravelling Boundaries of Iraq and Syria |
