As Gaddafi’s regime crumbles, speculation has started to arise
over whether the Syrian opposition will now be emboldened in their
struggle against Assad. Naturally, this raises the question of
precisely what course the unrest in Syria will take. Is it a
general uprising against the repressive Baathist regime, or is it
really a sectarian affair, pitting minority Shi’a Alawites against
a Sunni majority, while Christians generally side with the former
and Kurds with the latter?
Rather than assessing anecdotal evidence from within
Syria, it might be more instructive to look at how the country’s
neighbors view the instability. Indeed, it is particularly striking
that division of opinion about Syria is based on entirely sectarian
grounds.
Start off with the case of Iraq. It is of course in Iraq’s
interests to see the Assad regime embroiled in turmoil, for not
only has Assad facilitated the infiltration of foreign Sunni
insurgents into the country until the unrest, but Syria has also
been a destination of choice for many Iraqi refugees —
particularly Christians who comprise 5 percent of Iraq’s population
but 40 percent of refugees — fleeing from violence within their
homeland since the 2003 invasion.
With the onset of the protests in Syria, Iraqi refugees
have begun returning home, a development that is vital if Iraq is
not going to suffer from problems of “brain drain” that could
severely impede the nation’s economic development.
However, Iraq’s political elite does not view the Syrian
unrest in these terms. Instead, we witness the Shi’a politicians
standing with Assad, while the Sunni and Kurdish parliamentarians
openly back the opposition. For example, in light of events in
Syria, the Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki has warned that “Zionism and Israel”
are poised to take advantage of the instability caused by the
protests to bring about the “disintegration and internal erosion of
the Arab countries.”
Since his gaining a second term in power last December,
al-Maliki has cultivated close economic and diplomatic ties with
Assad, as the latter was eventually persuaded by Iran to back
al-Maliki rather than Ayad Allawi for the premier. Meanwhile, the
radical Shi’ite cleric and key “ally” of al-Maliki — Muqtada
al-Sadr — called Assad a
“brother” for opposing the United States, and
said that events in Syria are very different from the “popular
revolutions” in Tunisia and Egypt.
As for the Sunnis, a clear case in point is
Osama
al-Nujaifi, a prominent member from
Mosul of Allawi’s Sunni-dominated al-Iraqiya bloc and speaker for
the Iraqi parliament. He strongly denounced the repression of
protests by Assad, and called on him to “stop the bleeding” for the
sake of the Syrian people.
Likewise, in Lebanon it is noteworthy how the
traditionally pro-Syrian factions have divided between Christians
and Shi’a on the one hand as opposed to the Sunnis on the other.
While as-Safir newspaper — a publication affiliated with
pro-Syrian Sunnis — calls on the Syrian regime to cease using
force against demonstrators, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah
backs Assad (although his deputy Na’im Qassem, in a rather mild
tone, advised the regime to exercise restraint in utilizing
violence against the protestors), as does Michel Aoun of the
pro-Syrian Maronite faction known as the “Free Patriotic
Movement.”
We further have the example of
George Saliba, the Syriac Orthodox bishop of
Lebanon. Although unaffiliated with a political party, his
interview with ad-Dunya TV last month had the Syrian unrest in mind
when he characterized protests across the region as part of a
Jewish conspiracy.
Besides reflecting his own anti-Semitism, the fact that he
should believe there is a conspiracy at all is clearly tied to his
belief that the Assad regime serves as the protector of Syrian
Christians.
In a somewhat similar vein, the Melkite Greek patriarch
Gregory III
Laham, based in Damascus, has repeatedly warned
that the demonstrations against Assad are being hijacked by “armed
criminals” and other unidentified sinister forces.
Finally, we turn to the “resistance” bloc more generally.
In July, I had wondered whether Turkey could
abandon the bloc in light of intensifying tensions with Iran over
what to do about Syria. In fact, Turkey could well establish a
buffer zone inside Syria soon to prevent a refugee crisis along its
southern border.
Nevertheless, as Barry Rubin correctly explained to me,
the issue is not that Turkey is “leaving” the resistance bloc, but
simply joining the Sunni side of it, together with
Hamas,
which has also condemned Assad’s repression of the protests and has
consequently lost at least a significant proportion of financial
support from Iran.
All this evidence therefore suggests that the conflict in
Syria is indeed a sectarian issue. After all, what do we know about
events inside Syria that the country’s neighbors don’t? The
implications of such a conclusion do not bode well for Syria’s
future. Many pundits have recently wondered whether Libya could be
“another Iraq.” Yet it is highly unlikely that Libya, sparsely
populated and vast as it is, could ever witness anything like the
bloody sectarian fighting my relatives lived through in the Baghdad
civil war in 2006. They should really be asking such questions of
Syria.
