Syrian Requiem

The Civil War and Its Aftermath

Itamar Rabinovich, Carmit Valensi

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691212616
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Middle Eastern Politics

A compact, incisive history of a war that was an ominous prelude to Russia's invasion of Ukraine Leaving almost half a million dead and displacing an estimated twelve million people, the Syrian Civil War is a humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable scale. Syrian Requiem analyzes the causes and course of this bitter conflict—from its first spark in a peaceful Arab Spring protest to the tenuous victory of the Asad dictatorship—and traces how the fighting has reduced Syria to a crisis-ridden vassal state with little prospect of political reform, national reconciliation, or economic reconstruction.Israel's chief negotiator with Syria during the mid-1990s, Itamar Rabinovich brings unmatched expertise and insight to the politics of the Middle East. Drawing on more than two hundred specially conducted interviews with key players, Rabinovich and Carmit Valensi assess the roles of local, regional, and global interests in the war. Local sectarian divisions established the fault lines of the initial conflict, ultimately leading to the rise of the brutal Islamic State. However, Syria rapidly became the stage for proxy warfare between contending regional powers, including Israel, Turkey, and Iran. At the same time, while a war-weary United States attempted to reduce its military involvement in the Middle East, a resurgent Russia regained regional influence by supporting Syrian government forces. Telling the story of the war and its aftermath, Rabinovich and Valensi also examine the considerable potential for renewed conflict and the difficult policy choices facing the United States, Russia, and other powers.A compact and incisive history of one of the defining wars of our times, Syrian Requiem is a vivid and timely account of a conflict that continues to reverberate today.

CHAPTER 1

The Ba’th in Power, 1963–2011

Roots and Weakness of the Syrian State

The seeds of modern Syria were sown in negotiations between Great Britain, France, and their other allies during the First World War. When planning the future of the region in the war’s aftermath, Britain was especially interested in securing a land bridge from Iraq to the Mediterranean in order to transport Iraqi oil through territory it controlled. France, by contrast, had vaguer goals in mind—primarily the desire to emerge from the war with its colonial empire enhanced.¹ France’s claims to the region included an interest, manifest since the 1860s, in protecting the Christians of the Levant, the Lebanese Maronites. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 reflected France’s desire to control the Levant, namely the area covered currently by Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian authority.

Shortly after the war the League of Nations accorded France a mandate for Syria and Lebanon.

At that stage, the French government opposed the very notion of Syrian statehood, viewing the principal political force in the Syrian heartland—Sunni Arab nationalists—with suspicion and hostility.² In French eyes, modern Arab nationalism was actually a British creation, a force and a movement hostile to France’s interests and aspirations. So upon taking control of Syria and Lebanon in 1920, the architects of French policy in Syria refrained from creating a unitary Syrian state, forming instead a Syrian federation composed of several statelets characterized by sectarian division and regional rivalries. They also added parts of Syria in southeastern and northern Lebanon to the Lebanese state, seeking to enlarge the entity they viewed as the mainstay of their position in the area. It was only five years later, in 1925, that a Syrian state was established. Two statelets populated by the Alawi and Druze minorities were integrated into that entity in 1945, when in the aftermath of World War II and under American and British pressure Syria was accorded independence. The newly independent Syria was governed by the traditional Arab nationalist elite, composed mostly of urban notables and landlords. This leadership had struggled against French control during the previous decades but failed to mobilize and lead a successful national war of liberation. Thus, France left Syria not as a result of expulsion by a nationalist opposition but rather as a result of pressure from the United States and Britain. These victorious wartime powers concluded that the French claim to Syria and Lebanon had expired, and they sought to absorb the new Syrian and Lebanese states into their spheres of influence.³

The Syrian Republic emerged as a weak and fragile state. Through the late 1940s and the 1950s Syria would become synonymous with instability. The traditional Arab nationalist politicians who came to power upon independence failed to form a stable, effective regime; the country was buffeted by internal divisions and conflicts, the intervention of regional and foreign powers, and successive coups d’état. Three military coups were staged in Syria in 1949 alone, and even the return to parliamentary life in 1954 failed to stabilize the chaotic state.

The rulers of a newly independent Syria had to cope with a vast array of challenges, first and foremost the need to engage in nation and state building. The population was diverse, with an Arab Sunni majority of 60 percent, and the rest composed of several religious and ethnic minorities: 10 percent Alawis, 10 percent Christians, 10 percent Kurds, and such smaller groups as the Druze, Ismailis, and Armenians. The Kurds were Sunni but not Arab, and most of them lived in the country’s northeastern part close to the Turkish and Iraqi borders. The Alawis and the Druze were so-called “compact minorities,” concentrated in mountainous areas, and their separatist tendencies had been encouraged by the French authorities earlier in the century to weaken the Sunni Arab nationalist elite of Syria’s major cities.

The fledgling new Syrian state was pulled in opposite directions, between supranational ideologies and identities (Arab and Greater Syrian) and the reality of regionalism and localism. Syria was ruled by staunch Arab nationalists, and Damascus was commonly known as “Arabism’s pulsating heart.” The Kurdish minority naturally felt alienated in a country defined as Arab, and many Kurds did not actually possess Syrian citizenship. They crossed the border from Turkey and were not accorded citizenship by Syrian Arab nationalist governments, which were uninterested in expanding the ranks of this non-Arab minority. Other minorities, such as Christian and sectarian Muslims (Alawis, Druze, and Ismailis), regarded the dominant ideology of Pan-Arab nationalism to be an essentially Sunni Arab phenomenon in which they were relegated to an inferior position as members of minority sectarian groups. (Christians had played an important role in formulating the ideology of Pan-Arabism, but their hope of becoming equal members in a new political community were frustrated by Arabism’s Sunni tincture.) A new postindependence generation of younger Syrians, defined neither by sect nor by ethnic affiliation but as “a new middle class,” felt excluded and exploited by the traditional governing elite. There was also tension between the civilian government and the leadership of the Syrian army, since that army had been built originally on the colonial auxiliary military force formed by the French authorities. As part of their policy of “divide and rule,” the French had sought out military recruits from members of minority communities, and army commanders from these groups were treated with disdain by civilian politicians. Syrian politicians, in turn, were divided among themselves by personal and regional rivalries, with individual political actors forming alliances with rival regional and external powers seeking to manipulate Syria’s politics. Internal tensions were exacerbated by the unsuccessful war with Israel in 1948–49.⁴

The rise of messianic Pan-Arab nationalism in the region, under Gamal Abd al-Nasser—second president of Egypt—and the impact of the Cold War and Soviet influence in the region in the 1950s further radicalized Syrian politics. In February 1958, Syria’s leaders, led by the Ba’th, finally sought refuge by merging themselves with Egypt into what became known as the United Arab Republic (UAR). But the UAR proved to be a failure; the much larger and more assertive Egypt ended up dominating Syria. Paradoxically, the union reinforced a sense of Syrian distinctiveness owing to the bitter experience of Syria’s being overwhelmed and overshadowed by Egypt. In September 1961 Syria seceded from the UAR and reestablished itself as an independent state. Egypt’s Nasser refused to accept the secession and attempted to undermine the newly formed Syrian state by speaking over the heads of the Syrian government to the Syrian public directly via radio broadcasts. Nasser had retained some lingering support among Syrian politicians and army officers. It was against this backdrop that a group of officers identified with the Ba’th Party staged their coup on March 8, 1963, thus laying the foundation for decades of Ba’thi rule. Ironically, it was a party advocating Arab unity and union that consolidated Syria’s existence as a self-standing sovereign state.

The Ba’th in Power

The Ba’th has been nominally in power in Syria ever since the military coup of March 8, 1963—but it has undergone several transformations.⁵ Known in Arabic as the “Socialist Party of Arab Renaissance,” the Ba’th Party was first founded in the 1940s by two Damascene intellectuals: Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Bitar. The party offered a secular version of Arab nationalism combined with a social democratic ideology. Its secularism attracted members of minority communities, and its social democratic ideology attracted younger men who were critical of the traditional ruling elite and who sought social and political change. In 1953, the original Ba’th founding party merged with another party formed by a politician from the central Syrian city of Hama: Akram Hourani. Hourani had recruited to his party young army officers and mobilized peasants in the countryside against the traditional political elite under the banner of Arab socialism. Hourani brought to the augmented Ba’th Party both voting power and influence in the military. The combined party—which spread beyond purely Syria, to Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan—did well in parliamentary elections, particularly in the elections of 1954, and played an important role in the ongoing radicalization of Syrian politics, and in championing the ill-fated union with Egypt, aiming for a leading role in Pan-Arab politics. But the party’s hopes of genuine partnership with Abd al-Nasser were to be frustrated; Nasser wanted full mastery of the political sphere. The Ba’th became a hostile critic of the Nasserist regime, and some of its leaders turned to facilitating instead the breakup from the UAR and rebuilding Syrian independence.

The party’s rise to power in Syria came about in an unusual way. A group of army officers—members of the party, most of them from minority communities—formed a secret cabal known as “the Military Committee” during the union with Egypt. This was the group that planned and executed the coup on March 8, 1963, quickly forming a partnership with the traditional leadership of the Ba’th to establish the Ba’th regime.

The first phase of the Ba’th regime lasted from March 1963 to February 1966. During this period the new regime consolidated its hold over the country, confronting both Nasser’s pressure from outside and the enmity of the Sunni urban elite and middle class at home. It carried out several socialist reforms, including nationalizing large enterprises and an agrarian reform distributing land owned by major landowners to peasants. Consequently, the state and the public sector came to dominate the economy, and the regime enjoyed support in the countryside among the beneficiaries of the agrarian reform. Yet the new regime was also torn by internecine conflicts: between the army officers who had staged the coup and who consequently felt they owned the regime, and the historical leadership of the Ba’th; and between the party’s more moderate wing and a new radical, Marxist wing that had emerged during the union with Egypt. The regime as a whole found itself in conflict with the Sunni urban elite, the religious establishment, and the merchant classes. These groups felt dispossessed and alienated: by the large number of minority members (Alawis, Druze, and Ismailis) in the ranks of the regime’s military wing; and by the radicalism and secularism of part of its leadership.

The overrepresentation of minoritarian officers in the ranks of the new regime—particularly its military wing—turned sectarian and communal issues into a major element in Syrian politics. This overrepresentation had its origins, first, in French colonial “divide and rule” practices of recruiting officers and noncommissioned officers from minority communities, and second, in the attraction that young men of these same minority communities, wary of the Sunni orientation of Arab nationalism, had to secular political parties. In the 1940s and 1950s two secular parties, the Ba’th and the SSNP (Syrian Social Nationalist Party), competed for the hearts and minds young Alawis, Druze, Ismailis, and Christians across all Syria, adding them in large numbers to their ranks.

In Ba’thi Syria, sectarian solidarity became a major political force for the first time, particularly as individuals and factions within the regime began to fight over position and influence. In Arabic, the term ta’ifiyyah refers to social and political allegiance and conduct determined by sectarian and ethnic affiliation. The term Ta’ifah referred to a religious community. In the Ottoman system, the Islamic empire—headed by a sultan, also regarded as a caliph—had no problem giving religious groups known as millets a large degree of autonomy in the so-called millet system. But once Arab nationalist sentiment replaced allegiance to the Ottoman caliph, all ultimate loyalty to such primordial groups as sects and tribes came to be seen as retrograde. The prominent role played by members of minority communities in the new regime was therefore unacceptable to many Sunnis, who—in addition to feeling dispossessed—refused to accept Alawis and (to a lesser extent) Druze as proper Muslims. In 1964, the Syrian branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Islamist movement organized an early protest in Hama against the regime’s secularist nature; a second outburst against the regime’s secularism and socialism broke out in Homs in 1965. A third protest occurred in 1967 following the publication of an atheistic essay in the Syrian army’s magazine authored by a radical Alawi Ba’thi intellectual.

The principal challenge to the Ba’th regime, however, remained Abd al-Nasser’s refusal to accept Syria’s secession from the UAR and the new regime’s legitimacy. In 1963, Syria signed a tripartite union with Egypt and the new Ba’th Party regime in Iraq in an attempt to consolidate its hold over the country. This short-lived abortive agreement was never to be implemented because of the underlying hostility between Nasser and the two Ba’th regimes.

In late 1963, in an effort to neutralize Nasser’s animosity, the Ba’th regime adopted a radical new strategy vis-à-vis Egypt—a strategy that would play a major role in escalating Arab-Israeli tensions in the years 1964–67, and which would ultimately lead to the crisis of May 1967 and to the Six-Day War. Simply put, Syria threatened to go to war against Israel and to drag Egypt into that war against the latter’s will. The Syrian threat was triggered by Israel’s completion of an overland water carrier (consisting of both a canal and a pipeline) from Lake Tiberias to the south of the country. In Arab eyes, the completion of the project was seen as a crucial step in consolidating Israel’s existence by enabling it to settle the country’s arid southern region. When Israel announced the project, the Ba’th regime threatened to go to war in order to abort it. The threat was in fact directed at Egypt rather than at Israel.⁶ Implicit behind this was the knowledge that a Syrian-Israeli war would end in Syria’s military defeat—which would force Egypt to intervene on Syria’s behalf. Nasser had already learned from the Second Arab-Israeli War of 1956 that it was imperative for Egypt not to be drawn prematurely to another war with Israel. So, in order to check Syria, in January 1964 Nasser summoned the first Arab summit conference in Cairo, to develop a comprehensive strategy for dealing with Israel’s water project and other core issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It would not be the last time Syria’s Ba’thi rulers would use the threat of escalation with Israel as a means of pressuring Egypt to recognize Syria’s legitimacy as an independent state. Much as Nasser resented the new regime in Syria, he realized that he could not afford to see it militarily destroyed by Israel. The resolutions adopted in Cairo—to divert the tributaries of the Jordan River, to build unified Arab command in support of that move, and to support the establishment of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization, an organization created by the Arab League, dominated by Egypt)—would inaugurate a new phase in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Their strategy proved effective, but it also would bring the region to the brink of war in May 1967.

Meanwhile, internecine conflicts within the Ba’th regime in Syria were coalescing by 1965 into a struggle between two coalitions. One was led by the country’s president, the Sunni general Amin al-Hafez, along with the Ba’th Party’s historic civilian leadership and a supportive military faction; the other consisted of a group of mostly Alawi and Druze army officers, along with the civilian party’s radical wing. In February 1966, the latter group—known as the Neo-Ba’th—staged a coup and took control of the regime. The coup of February 23, 1966, would have far-reaching consequences. The new regime in power had a more distinctive sectarian character and a much narrower base of support. The new regime had a difficult dilemma to resolve right off the bat: How could it legitimize its conduct as a Ba’th regime when it had expelled the party’s founding fathers? In an effort to overcome this problem, the regime now argued that the Ba’th Party’s true founder was Zaki al-Arsuzi, an Alawi intellectual from Alexandretta (the Syrian province ceded to Turkey by France on the eve of World War II). The fact that Arsuzi was Alawi suited the country’s new rulers. The Ba’th regime had previously dispossessed and antagonized Syria’s urban Sunni elite during its first three years of power, but some of its leaders, including Amin al-Hafez and Salah al-Bitar, still managed to communicate with members of the country’s ousted elite, in order to minimize its opposition to the regime and to guarantee broader base of support. After February 1966 these lines of communication were completely severed, and the regime relied on an extremely slender base consisting of radical intellectuals as well as pro...