The theater of war in the Syr-IL region

The War for Syria. Regional and International Dimensions of the Syrian Uprising, 2020

The chapter’s main objective is to explore the dynamic interplay between sectarianism and power politics in the Middle East, and Syria in particular. To what extent has political realignment along sectarian lines become a significant driver of developments in the region? The depiction of the Syrian conflict as a sectarian proxy war that has taken the form of “Sunni versus Shi’a” covers only part of the highly localized, externally penetrated and complicated war. The principal argument is that regional actors involved in the Syrian war employ all necessary means—sectarian narratives among them—in their struggle for survival and maximization of influence.

IE Med Yearbook, 2014

As it has become more internationalised, the Syrian conflict has become bloodier and harder to resolve. What started as a local revolt against corruption and brutality has increasingly become a theatre for regional and international power struggles, especially a rivalry that has been described as a ‘cold war’ between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The failure of international efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis, along with ongoing failures to stabilise Iraq or achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace, has led the West’s allies in the region to question the willingness and ability of the US to offer the kind of security they would like. Direct military intervention by Western countries appeared less likely than ever, given the UK parliament’s refusal to authorise British participation in airstrikes that were briefly mooted by the US as punishment for the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and the US’s subsequent decision to avoid airstrikes in favour of a UN-supervised dismantling of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons stocks. The US and Europe have subsequently focused their efforts more on diplomacy and humanitarian assistance, but UN- brokered talks have made scant progress, and the Syrian government has escalated its violence against opposition-held areas. The crisis has also cast a shadow over the wider Arab uprisings, as the preeminent example of how an uprising initially concerned with social justice and an end to police brutality has been derailed by ethnic and sectarian identity politics.

The last six years of insurgency, rebellion, and war have eroded territorial state sovereignty in Iraq and Syria. The scale and savagery of the war have transformed Sunni-Shia sectarianism into a zero-sum politics of survival. In other words, residents of Iraq and Syria have been forced to choose between Sunnis and Shia in order to survive. This essay explains how the diverging interests of foreign actors—Iran, the Islamic State and other Salafi-Jihadi foreign fighters, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States—prolonged the war, providing the time and space for the belligerents in Iraq and Syria to weaponize sectarianism.

The Syrian conflict which started in March 2011 is well into its third year and its dimensions and implications are steadily moving beyond Syrian borders and the broader Middle East. Syria's uprising has developed into a civil war between government forces and the opposition, motivated primarily by internal and external actors' strategic and at times existential interests. This article examines the implications and dimensions of the Syrian crisis for the major actors in the region, including Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, the Gulf States, Israel and the Kurds. It argues that pitting a Shiite Iran-Iraq-Syria-Hezbollah axis against a Sunni Turkey-Gulf states axis is the most significant geo-political regional effect of the Syrian crisis. What is more devastating is not the division of the region along sectarian lines but the proxy war between the Shiite and Sunni factions.

The National Interest

The past decade has seen an explosion of creative institutional design in new democracies. From Indonesia to Iraq, scholars and policymakers interested in the management of ethnic conflict have engaged in overt 'political engineering' with the aim of promoting stable democracy in deeply divided societies.

Washington institute, 2018

Syria's sectarian fragmentation was not created when the war began in 2011; it had its genesis in an inherited Ottoman millet system whose traits were accentuated by the "divide to reign" policies of Hafiz al-Assad. The war has compelled Syrians to cling to their sectarian identities more tightly, whether out of socioeconomic self-interest or simply to survive. Examining these identities is therefore crucial to answering the most fundamental questions about the ongoing upheaval. In many ways, the Syrian conflict has been taken out of the hands of Syrians themselves, becoming a proxy war between regional and international forces that often exploit the country's divided society for their own benefit.

Tel Aviv Notes, Vol.8, No 5, 2014

2019

The Syrian civil war, that started in 2011, seems never ending. Sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia, including Alawi, of which the al-Assad family stems, is ensuring a protracted war. Still, it would be simplistic to refer to sectarian identity as the main driver of uprising against the Assad regime or continued violence. Regardless, scholars preferred ‘ancient hatreds’ and ​sectarianism ​as explanations for the current domestic and regional political conflict in both Syria and the Middle East (Darwich, Fakhoury 2016, p. 2). These scholars describe the conflict by delving into the past, when ruptures first appeared between Sunni and Shia Muslim branches over the disagreement regarding Prophet Muhammad's successor, after his death in 632 AD (Hashemi, N. and Postel, D., 2017, p. 1). One group, the Sunnis, argued that the next leadership should be chosen among his close companions. Shias, in contrast, believed it should be chosen among his family. This dispute centralized on Muslim leadership but more broadly on the moral basis of legitimacy regarding “political and religious authority in Islam” (Hashemi, N. and Postel, D., 2017, p. 1-2)