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THE REGIONAL STRUGGLE for SYRIA Edited by Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy ABOUT ECFR THE REGIONAL STRUGGLE FOR SYRIA edited by Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy ABOUT ECFR The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) is the first pan-European think-tank. Launched in October 2007, its objective is to conduct research and promote informed debate across Europe on the development of coherent, effective and values-based European foreign policy. ECFR has developed a strategy with three distinctive elements that define its activities: •A pan-European Council. ECFR has brought together a distinguished Council of over one hundred and seventy Members – politicians, decision makers, thinkers and business people from the EU’s member states and candidate countries – which meets once a year as a full body. Through geographical and thematic task forces, members provide ECFR staff with advice and feedback on policy ideas and help with ECFR’s activities within their own countries. The Council is chaired by Martti Ahtisaari, Joschka Fischer and Mabel van Oranje. •A physical presence in the main EU member states. ECFR, uniquely among European think-tanks, has offices in Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome, Sofia and Warsaw. In the future ECFR plans to open an office in Brussels. Our offices are platforms for research, debate, advocacy and communications. •A distinctive research and policy development process. ECFR has brought together a team of distinguished researchers and practitioners from all over Europe to advance its objectives through innovative projects with a pan-European focus. ECFR’s activities include primary research, publication of policy reports, private meetings and public debates, ‘friends of ECFR’ gatherings in EU capitals and outreach to strategic media outlets. ECFR is a registered charity funded by the Open Society Foundations and other generous foundations, individuals and corporate entities. These donors allow us to publish our ideas and advocate for a values- based EU foreign policy. ECFR works in partnership with other think tanks and organisations but does not make grants to individuals or institutions. THE REGIONAL STRUGGLE FOR SYRIA Edited by Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take collective positions. This paper, like all publications of the European Council on Foreign Relations, represents only the views of its authors. Copyright of this publication is held by the European Council on Foreign Relations. You may not copy, reproduce, republish or circulate in any way the content from this publication except for your own personal and non-commercial use. Any other use requires the prior written permission of the European Council on Foreign Relations. © ECFR July 2013. ISBN: 978-1-906538-86-6 Published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), 35 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9JA, United Kingdom [email protected] Contents Introduction 5 Hegemony and sectarianism after Iraq Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy 1. The Gulf states: United against Iran, divided 17 over Islamists Hassan Hassan 2. Iran: Syria as the first line of defence 25 Jubin Goodarzi 3. Iraq: Sunni resurgence feeds Maliki’s fears 33 Hayder al-Khoei 4. Israel: Strategically uncertain, tactically decisive 41 Dimi Reider 5. Jordan: Stability at all costs 49 Julien Barnes-Dacey 6. The Kurds: Between Qandil and Erbil 55 Dimitar Bechev 7. Lebanon: Resilience meets its stiffest test 61 Julien Barnes-Dacey 8. Turkey: Goodbye to Zero Problems with 67 Neighbours Nuh Yilmaz Acknowledgements 74 About the authors 75 Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy Hegemony and sectarianism after Iraq Two years after the outbreak of a largely peaceful uprising, Syria has fallen into a deep civil war that is increasingly drawing in regional actors. While the battle on the ground continues to be predominantly fought by Syrians, neighbouring powers have a growing stake in the conflict, providing important patronage to the warring parties as part of a broader regional struggle. This confrontation has drawn in Iran, Iraq, and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement in support of the Assad regime, and Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey behind the rebels. Other players, including Jordan, the Kurds, and Israel, are active in pursuit of narrower interests. Violent tensions are now spreading out beyond Syria’s porous borders and the risk of a regional conflagration is growing. While regional players have been active in Syria since the early months of the conflict in 2011, the intensity of their involvement has clearly escalated in recent months. In June, Hezbollah fighters played a key role in helping President Bashar al-Assad seize the strategic town of Qusair and, together with Iranian advisors, have now assumed a greater role in facilitating regime efforts. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey remain the key sponsors of the rebel movement, providing it with arms and finance. There is also a growing cohort of foreign militants – from across the region and beyond (including from the Central Asian–Caucasus region, the AfPak theatre, and Europe) – fighting on behalf of the rebels. According to one credible estimate, the number of these fighters now stands at five thousand.1 Recent calls by leading regional religious figures, including the influential Qatar-based cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, for a Sunni jihad in Syria will fuel this flow. 1 Thomas Hegghammer and Aaron Y. Zelin, “How Syria’s Civil War Became a Holy Crusade”, Foreign Affairs, 7 July 2013, available at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139557/thomas-hegghammer-aaron-y-zelin/ how-syrias-civil-war-became-a-holy-crusade. 5 At the same time, neighbouring states are feeling the chill winds of violent destabilisation with increasing frequency. Attacks in Iraq killed more than one thousand people in May, the largest figure since the height of the civil war and an upsurge partly attributed to revived Sunni militancy linked to the Syria conflict; in Lebanon, clashes between pro- and anti-Assad groups are now happening on a near daily basis and the country is teetering on the edge of a deep abyss; and in Turkey, two car bombs in May killed 46 people in the town of Reyhanli, which sits along the Syrian border, the country’s largest terrorist attack in recent history. Meanwhile, of deepening concern for almost all of Syria’s immediate neighbours, the flow of refugees continues, seemingly without end. Lebanon, a country of four million, already hosts up to one million Syrian refugees. Jordan and Turkey host another half a million each, Iraq more than 150,000, and, further afield, Egypt has also received 300,000 Syrians. The associated political and economic strains could, quite simply, prove overwhelming, and although all of the states are trying to limit new arrivals, they keep on coming. No neighbour remains unaffected. Even Israel – not a destination for refugees – faces new threats emanating from its de facto border with Syria on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. In this context, this series of essays charts the interests of the key regional players and aims to deepen understanding of the forces shaping the regional dimension of the conflict. The battle for Syria has morphed into a regional conflict, drawing in multiple and competing ambitions and sending out increasingly destabilising ripples. There will of course be no end to the fighting in Syria until domestic actors reach some degree of common accord. But, short of a comprehensive understanding of the motivations driving increasingly influential regional actors, efforts aimed at charting a path out of violence are likely to continue to falter. Iraq and the regional order Given the maelstrom of competing ambitions, it is hard to identify one overarching narrative guiding regional involvement in the conflict. The fact that the warring parties and their backers largely break down along communal lines – Assad tied to regional Shia forces and the rebels to Sunni actors – makes it easy to assume that Syria and the region are engaged in a religious war driven primarily by identity politics. And indeed the reality is that the sectarian dimension has developed into the most powerful discourse, assuming a strong 6 imaginative hold over actors, state and non-state, that is directly fuelling the escalatory dynamic of conflict and sharpening polarisation across the entire region. However, the picture laid out in these essays is that the regional battle over Syria has emerged out of a more conventional struggle for regional hegemony, driven by geopolitical ambitions of a worldly nature rather than celestial differences over religious beliefs. Sectarian prejudices and ambitions animate most of the actors identified in this series, but regional engagement in Syria is first and foremost a product of strategic ambitions. These dynamics can be traced back to the 2003 Iraq War, which, by upending the existing regional balance, set in motion a new competition for regional hegemony – played out in sectarian guises and now coming to a devastating head in Syria. While many observers ask whether the fall of Saddam Hussein planted a democratic seed that bore fruit in the Arab uprisings of 2011, it is in fact the destructive forces unleashed by the Iraq conflict that are now playing out most powerfully across the region. Viewed through a regional lens, the Iraq War disrupted the existing order. With Saddam used by regional and Western actors in the 1980s as a bulwark against Iranian post-revolution expansionary influence and, later, cornered alongside Iran as part of a strategy of dual containment, the collapse of the Ba’ath order and its eventual replacement by forces aligned with Tehran helped precipitate a wider shift in regional influence in favour of Iran and its so-called resistance axis – Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Following Iran’s success in Iraq, these forces cemented their sway in other contested areas, including Lebanon and, to a lesser extent, the occupied Palestinian territories (with Hamas winning Palestinian Legislative Council elections in 2006 and then excluded from a West Bank role but assuming sole control of Gaza), while also establishing broad popular support across the region.
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