What began as a protest
movement long ago became an uprising that metastasized into a war, a
vicious whirlpool dragging a whole region toward it.
Many analysts believe the
United States can do little to influence -- let alone control -- the
situation. And it could make things worse. Fawaz Gerges of the London
School of Economics argues against the United States "plunging into the
killing fields of Syria ... because it would complicate and exacerbate
an already dangerous conflict."
Others contend that if
the United States remains on the sidelines, regional actors will fight
each other to "inherit" Syria, and hostile states such as Iran and North
Korea will take note of American hesitancy. They say inaction has given
free rein to more extreme forces.
And in the wake of the
strikes against Damascus, apparently by Israeli planes, critics argue
that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is now more vulnerable than ever
and U.S. intervention could help finish him off.
Syrian opposition: Russia changed stance
Obama takes aim at Syria, North Korea
A war wary village
Difficulty of proving chemical weapons
Republican Sen. John
McCain has revived calls for a no-fly zone. And introducing legislation
to arm the Syrian rebels in the U.S. Senate on Monday, Democratic Sen.
Robert Menendez said: "There will be no greater strategic setback to
Iran than to have the Assad regime collapse, and cause a disruption to
the terror pipeline between Tehran and Hezbollah in Lebanon."
But more than two years
since the revolt against al-Assad began, regional analysts say Syria is
in danger of becoming the next Somalia, which collapsed into fiefdoms 20
years ago and has been stalked by anarchy, terrorism and hunger ever
since. Except Syria would be worse. Its religious and ethnic fault lines
extend across borders in every direction; Somalia's anarchy was largely
self-contained. Somalia never had chemical weapons, nor the missiles
and modern armor that make Syria one of the most crowded arsenals in the
world.
And unlike Syria, Somalia was never central to a titanic struggle between different branches of Islam: Sunni and Shia.
Given that background, here are five reasons Syria's war suddenly looks more dangerous.
1: Israel and Hezbollah's proxy war
For two years, Israel
has looked on with growing anxiety as brutal repression in Syria has
become de facto civil war. Now a high-octane game of regional poker is
under way. The Israelis have not admitted carrying out the devastating
strikes of last week, but U.S. officials tell CNN they have no doubt
Israel was responsible.
Why would Israel
suddenly become an active participant? While much has been said about
President Barack Obama's "red line" -- that the use of chemical weapons
in Syria would make him reassess U.S. involvement -- the Israelis have a
different threshold: the transfer of advanced missiles to al-Assad's
ally, the Shiite Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
Their main worry, U.S.
officials say, was the possible transfer of Iranian-made Fateh-110
missiles, whose accuracy would pose a new threat to Israel. A
consignment of these ballistic missiles had recently arrived at
Damascus' airport. Similarly, the second Israeli strike before dawn
Sunday was on a "research facility" near Damascus where weapons destined
for Hezbollah were kept.
According to Jane's
Intelligence, Iran's Defense Ministry reported the test firing of an
upgraded Fateh-110 last year, and the Iranian Aerospace Industries
Organization claimed it had a range in excess of 180 miles (300
kilometers.)
Israel's motive was not
to degrade the Syrian military. It was about sending al-Assad a message
(copied to Iran and Hezbollah): "If you try to raise the regional stakes
by passing a new generation of short-range ballistic missiles to
Hezbollah, the response will be swift and severe."
Gerges, author of "Obama
and the Middle East," told CNN that we are seeing "an open-ended war by
proxy. ... On the one hand you have Israel, regional powers and the
Western states; on the other hand you have Iran, Hezbollah and Syria."
Is Syrian war escalating to wider conflict?
Middle East analyst Juan
Cole agrees, writing on his blog: "It is not that the Israelis and
Hezbollah are in any direct conflict, but they are gradually both
becoming more active in Syria on opposite sides. It is an open question
how long this process can continue before the conflict does become
direct."
One miscalculation could provoke a wider escalation.
The stakes for Hezbollah
are enormous. For nearly 30 years, it has been sustained by Iranian and
Syrian support. If Syria becomes a Sunni-dominated state, Hezbollah's
"rear-base" vanishes, and suddenly it looks more vulnerable to its
archenemy Israel, one of whose strategic goals is to counter the growing
missile threat from the north.
See destruction from airstrikes in Syria
Syria's battle of the textbooks
Israel bolsters defense near Syria
Military analysts
believe Hezbollah has an arsenal of some 50,000 missiles and rockets,
supported by a sophisticated, hardened infrastructure that would be even
harder to uproot than during its last conflict with Israel in 2006.
Little wonder that Israel has deployed two of its Iron Dome
missile-defense batteries in its northern cities.
Will the Syrians
retaliate for the strikes, which they describe as a declaration of war
by Israel? To do so would divert resources from the regime's battle for
survival. Not to do so would convey an image of weakness in the face of
the "Zionist enemy."
Al-Assad has a history
of not retaliating against Israel, most notably when the Israelis took
out what was purported to be a Syrian nuclear installation in 2007.
According to Cliff Kupchan with the Eurasia Group, Israel has calculated
that "Bashar al-Assad is incapable of fighting on two fronts, that Iran
will keep its powder dry for a possible future conflict over its
nuclear program, and that Hezbollah will not attempt significant
retribution without approval from its sponsors."
But one risk to Israel
is that in weakening the Assad regime, it may strengthen some of the
best organized and most potent rebel factions: jihadist groups such as
the al-Nusra Front, which has already declared its affiliation with al
Qaeda in Iraq.
2: More than ever, it's sectarian
In the early days of the
Syrian uprising, people who were anti- and pro-regime shared one common
dread: that Syria would descend, Bosnia-style, into sectarian horror.
Now, in the fight to prevail, that has become a reality.
Moderates have been
sidelined, and despite efforts to revitalize the opposition's political
leadership in exile there is still no umbilical cord between the
government-in-waiting and the fighters inside Syria.
The Free Syrian Army
coexists with a strong Sunni jihadi element, while the regime is
mobilizing "irregular" Alawite militia and Hezbollah fighters.
Syria's (largely Sunni)
rebels say hundreds if not thousands of (Shia) Hezbollah fighters are
now fighting for the Assad regime. Hezbollah's secretary-general, Hassan
Nasrallah, said last week that his party would not stand by and watch
the Assad government fall. Regional analysts believe there is a very
real risk that along the poorly marked Syrian-Lebanese border, Sunni
jihadists will come up against Hezbollah units, setting off a vicious
war-within-a-war.
The Syrian opposition
sees Iran and Hezbollah everywhere. The head of the UK-based Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel-Rahman told the newspaper
Asharq al-Awsat that "Iranian and Hezbollah officers are running the
operations room in the battle for Homs and are controlling the army
operations in the city."
He warned of "massacres against the Sunni community living in the besieged areas if the army captures these areas."
Such massacres were
reported in the past week in the coastal Sunni enclaves in Baniyas and
al-Bayda. The State Department said over the weekend that "regime and
shabiha forces reportedly destroyed the area with mortar fire, then
stormed the town and executed entire families, including women and
children."
3: Al-Assad goes for broke?
After being on the
defensive for months, the Syrian regime has recently launched a series
of brutal counterattacks against areas controlled by rebel factions,
seeking to restore precious lines of communication and reconnect
Damascus with other parts of the country. In so doing, it appears Assad
has relied even more on the shabiha -- loyalists with an existential
stake in the regime's survival.
As veteran Middle East
watcher Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies has put it: "The Assad regime seems ready to
escalate in any way it can to either preserve power or effectively
divide the country."
Among the areas where
this counteroffensive has been most intense is Daraya, south of the
capital, which has been reduced to ruins on the principle that "if we
can't control it nor shall you." To the east of Damascus, regime forces
have encircled rebels in the Gouta region, relieving the immediate
threat to Damascus airport, which is at one end of the critical air
bridge between Syria and Iran.
As critical as these
areas around Damascus is the town of Qusayr between Homs and the
Lebanese border, once home to 50,000 people. Videos uploaded in recent
days show the regime pouring artillery fire into the town and conducting
airstrikes from above; whole blocks have been demolished. Claims
emerged Wednesday from opposition sources of new massacres around the
town.
Qusayr sits astride one
route to the Syrian coast and another to the Lebanese border. For the
rebels, holding Qusayr is important because it's another way of
strangling the regime's ability to sustain itself, and it complicates
Hezbollah's access to Syria.
The signs are that
al-Assad is investing heavily in trying to break the rebels' hold in key
parts of south and central Syria, reversing the gains they had made in a
series of hard-won victories last year.
Short of forceful
foreign intervention, some military analysts argue for tying al-Assad's
hands behind his back by providing the rebels with more anti-armor and
anti-aircraft missiles and a communications infrastructure. More
ambitiously, some say the international community should enforce what
might be called a "no-move" zone, selectively picking off regime forces
from the air or with missiles.
In essence, that's what
NATO's mission in Libya became. But it would take considerable airpower
and the use of facilities across the region to gain control of the
Syrian sky. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin
Dempsey, said at the end of April: "The U.S. military has the capability
to defeat that system (of Syrian air defenses), but it would be a
greater challenge, and would take longer and require more resources"
than in Libya.
4: Chemical Weapons
For much of last year,
Obama's "red line" seemed a largely hypothetical one. But as al-Assad's
situation grows more desperate and control of chemical weapons stocks
more difficult to guarantee, there are indications that some chemical
agents have been used in limited quantities in places like Daraya. The
questions are: how much, of what and by whom?
The announcement by a
senior U.N. official Monday that rebels may have used sarin gas during
an operation near Aleppo in March means this red line is even more
difficult to discern. The U.N. commission subsequently said it "has not
reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria
by any parties to the conflict."
Establishing "custody" and the systematic use of such weapons is very difficult in the absence of monitors on the ground.
A U.S. State Department
official on Monday would say only: "We take any reports of use of
chemical weapons very seriously and we are trying to get as many facts
as possible to understand what is happening."
But understanding and
countering the threat are miles apart. The Pentagon estimated last year
it might take 70,000 troops to secure or destroy Syria's massive
stockpiles -- and the situation on the ground has deteriorated since
then.
In Cordesman's view,
"Any U.S. forces that tried to deal with the chemical weapons in Syria
through ground raids would present the problem of getting them in,
having them fight their way to an objective, taking the time to destroy
chemical stocks, and then safely leaving."
5: Players and Puppets: Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan
Syria is surrounded by
neighbors with a stake in influencing the outcome of its civil war. Most
-- and other more distant states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia -- are
backing their own factions as well as supporting the
"government-in-waiting." Now more than ever they feel the force of that
whirlpool.
Iraq's beleaguered Sunni
minority is more and more in confrontation with a Shia-dominated
government in Baghdad allied to Iran. The Sunni tribes of Anbar and
Ramadi have historical connections with their brethren across the border
and would welcome a Sunni-dominated government in Syria as a valuable
counterbalance to a hostile government at home.
For more than a year,
there have been persistent reports of weapons crossing the border to
help the Syrian resistance and evidence of co-operation between Syrian
and Iraqi jihadists. Resupply convoys headed through Iraq to the Syrian
regime have been ambushed in recent months.
In the view of Ian
Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, "Iraq is teetering back towards
civil war, with direct implications for the investment climate across
the country, and deepening geopolitical conflict between Iran and the
Sunni monarchies" of the Gulf.
Turkey is also growing
alarmed at the prospect of a more "Balkanized" Syria. It already has
322,000 refugees on its soil, according to latest figures from the
UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency, with another 100,000 clamoring to cross.
Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has upped his rhetoric in recent days, criticizing
the Israeli strikes but reserving his most passionate denunciation for
the Assad regime.
"You, Bashar Assad, will
pay for this. You will pay heavily, very heavily for showing courage
you can't show to others, to babies with pacifiers in their mouths," he
told an audience over the weekend.
But Erdogan is
struggling to turn indignation into influence. As the International
Crisis Group noted in March: Turkey "now has an uncontrollable,
fractured, radicalized no-man's-land on its doorstep."
The Jordanians know how
that feels. They are trying to cope with 450,000 Syrian refugees --
equivalent to some 7% of the Jordanian population -- growing restless
and desperate in makeshift camps. The number in Lebanon has shot up to
455,000, according to the United Nations. In all, the Syrian conflict
has generated an extra half million refugees in just two months.
Lebanon -- whose
sectarian equation mirrors that in Syria -- cannot help but be dragged
into the war next door. Several Salafist sheikhs in Lebanon have
declared jihad against the Syrian regime in response to Hezbollah's
growing involvement. One of them, Sheikh Ahmed Assir, called on Sunnis
in the city of Sidon to form brigades to help the resistance in Qusayr.
And rocket fire, apparently from the Free Syrian Army, has landed in
Shiite areas around the Lebanese town of Hermel.
A land of bad options
Some critics of the
Obama administration say there is a moral imperative to intervene in
Syria in the face of slaughter (at least 70,000 Syrians have died so
far.) In the Washington Post, former Obama adviser Anne Marie Slaughter
has recalled the "shameful" failure to confront genocide in Rwanda.
But Cordesman writes:
"Syria has become the land of bad options. The Obama administration has
reason to hesitate in intervening."
And Joshua Landis, who
runs the blog Syria Comment and is director of the Center for Middle
East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, warns that even "a
humanitarian intervention will become a nation-building project, as was
the case in Iraq."
With the number of internally displaced now put at 4.25 million people, that would be a huge project.
The dream among
diplomats a year ago was that a moderate opposition could be brought
together with some regime elements to ease al-Assad from power. As the
Syrian war threatens to become a regional one, the United States and
Russia are dusting off that option, calling for an international
conference within weeks that would be attended by both the government
and the opposition.
"The alternative is that
Syria heads closer to the abyss, if not over the abyss and into chaos,"
said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
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