Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect (18 page)

Ebrahim brings an interesting perspective to the civil war. Sitting down for coffee one evening in Damascus, he pulled out an iPhone to display idyllic photos of family and friends in his home village near Syria's Mediterranean coast. In happier times, they enjoyed the area's beautiful waterfalls and picturesque mountains. He also described the good relations among the village's diverse religious groups. Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Alawites got along well, he said, despite the increase in religious tensions elsewhere in Syria. Ebrahim said Sunnis in his village supported the government of Assad, so they didn't come under suspicion.

In the cities where rebels are fighting for control, however, entire Sunni neighborhoods are cordoned off with army checkpoints and became no-go zones at night. The army also laid siege to the mostly Sunni, rebel-controlled towns, frequently preventing entry of food, medicine, and other essentials. Ebrahim initially felt some sympathy for the peaceful protestors demonstrating in the early months of the uprising. But he said religious extremists came to dominate, leaving little room for civilian opposition.

And then earlier this year he faced a personal tragedy. His mother, a Syrian army officer, was assassinated by a rebel sniper, who killed her with a single shot at a distance of 1,300 yards while she was driving home. Firing a sniper rifle at a moving car at that distance is quite extraordinary. How could the sniper have known her route unless
helped by someone in the army? An army investigation revealed the rebels had inside help. His mother's assassination was just one more indication of a technically proficient enemy with intelligence capability even within the military.

Ebrahim said outsiders are responsible for much of the violence. He predicted the conflict will continue as long as the United States and Saudi Arabia fund the rebels. Civilian opponents and rebels made the same argument, only in reverse. “Assad would fall quickly if he didn't receive support from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah,” said activist Leen.
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And that's precisely what we'll explore next: Iran and Hezbollah's role in the Syrian Civil War.

On June 12, 2009, I went to sleep in Tehran fully expecting that the Iranian presidential elections had been resolved. I woke up the next morning to a country in turmoil. Spontaneous marches and rallies were starting. Rumors flew and facts simmered. Text messages burned up the lines. Within days, millions of ordinary Iranians were demonstrating in the largest protests in Iran since the 1979 revolution. Iranians asked, “Where is my vote?” and quickly concluded the election had been stolen.

Reformist candidate Mir Hussain Mousavi had campaigned promising greater civil liberties and an improved economy. He mobilized sentiment for reform that had been building against the regime for the previous thirty years. His supporters held huge rallies in Tehran and around the country. Iranians expected Mousavi to win outright or at least qualify for a run-off election. Instead, the official election results showed incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad winning with 62 percent of the vote.

Wealthy businessmen joined clerics and working-class women in chadors not only to protest vote fraud, but they also challenged the fundamentals of clerical rule. The Green Movement, as it became known, spread throughout the country.
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Some protestors wanted to reform the Iranian Constitution, which puts ultimate power in the hands of Shia Muslim clerics. Others wanted to overthrow the constitution entirely and return to the parliamentary system Iran had before 1953. That year, the CIA instigated a coup against the democratic government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed the pro-US dictator Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Green Movement protest lasted about eighteen months but was eventually crushed by the government.

The massive upheaval of 2009 presaged Bashar al-Assad's reaction to the Arab Spring of 2011. Millions of people protested peacefully only to be brutally attacked by the authorities. The rulers accused demonstrators of being tools of Western powers and Israel. The regime tried to crush all opposition. In 2011, the Iranian government sent riot-control equipment to the Syrian authorities, trained their police, and helped establish local militias based on Iran's infamous
basiji
, thugs who beat and killed regime opponents. The Iranian authorities learned their lessons well and passed them along to the Syrian ruling elite: try to crush the movement early by striking hard.

Iran's support for Syria's dictatorship is nothing new. The two countries had built a geopolitical alliance dating back to Iran's 1979 revolution. The alliance of a secular dictatorship with a clerical regime might seem to be a strange partnership. However, while they differed ideologically, they united around opposition to Israel, the United States, and its Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia. Assad sought to play a leading role among Arabs, while Iran wanted the leadership mantle for the entire Muslim world. The two goals overlapped but didn't directly conflict.

Over the years, Iran developed strategic interests in Syria. Iran's Revolutionary Guard helped create the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah. Iran remained a key source of military and economic aid to Hezbollah, much of it transshipped through Syria. Assad remained Iran's only Arab ally, and Syria formed a crucial part of an Iranian-influenced region that stretches from eastern Lebanon through Iraq, Iran, and western Afghanistan.

Iran also felt threatened by pro-US regimes in the Sunni Arab world extending from Turkey to Jordan, to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. If a regime hostile to Iran came to power in Syria, it would radically shift the geopolitics of the region. “If Syria cannot continue to be an absolute ally of Iran, Tehran will not allow it to become an enemy,” wrote Jubin Goodarzi, an assistant professor at Webster University in Saint Louis. “Iran therefore has the capacity to act as a long-term spoiler in Syria if Assad does eventually fall.”
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Iran's reputation in the region has suffered immensely as many
Arabs came to resent its Syrian intervention. In 2006 Iran enjoyed overwhelming popular support in the Middle East because of its support for Hezbollah in its short war with Israel. By 2013, majorities in almost every country questioned by a Zogby Poll said Iran was playing a negative role. Zogby is a major US polling company that surveys public opinion in the United States and the Middle East. Even Palestinians gave Iran a 70 percent negative rating.
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To understand this reversal of fortune, we need to explore some recent Iranian-Syrian history.

The grim visage of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is deeply imprinted in the American psyche. His long gray beard, tightly wrapped black turban, hawkish nose, and harsh expression came to personify evil. Khomeini and his clerics took power in Iran after a popular revolution overthrew the Shah in 1979. Student demonstrators seized the American embassy and held fifty-five staff members hostage for 444 days. The new regime broke from the US economic orbit, diversified its oil sales, and made alliances with nationalist and religious movements in the Muslim world. Khomeini became the symbol for Muslim opposition to the United States.

Khomeini and the Iranian leaders had little in common ideologically with Syria's Hafez al-Assad. Khomeini believed that Iran, indeed the entire Muslim world, should be governed by trusted religious figures. Assad was a canny military man who held no truck for religious government and sought to unite the Arab world based on pan-Arabism (see
chapter 4
). But the two leaders did have common enemies. Both opposed the policies of the United States and Israel. And both hated Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Assad's Baath Party had been mortal rivals with Iraqi Baathists dating back to a 1966 split in their once-unified party. Assad saw the 1979 Iranian revolution as potentially creating a new ally in the region. He sent Khomeini a gold-illuminated Koran in recognition of the revolution's victory.

In September 1980, Hussein launched a surprise attack on Iran. The brutal and costly war was to last eight years. While the Arab world sided with Iraq, Syria threw its support behind Iran. During the war, Syria closed an oil pipeline coming from Iraq, causing serious financial
losses to Hussein. For its part, Iran sent one million barrels of free oil to Syria each year and eight million barrels at below-market price, a huge boost to the Syrian economy.
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The Iran-Syria alliance became solidly cemented in the early 1980s with the formation of Hezbollah. Before then, Lebanon's Shias supported the Amal Movement. But Amal's spiritual leader didn't agree with Ayatollah Khomeini that clerics should play a leading role in politics, and he refused to subsume Lebanon's Shias to Khomeini's authority. So Iranian leaders set out to undermine Amal, build a new party, and expand their revolutionary presence in all countries with large Shia populations. In 1981, a very young Hassan Nasrallah visited Iran along with other Lebanese Shia. Iran sent Revolutionary Guard officers to Lebanon's Beka Valley to help form Hezbollah. Khomeini appointed Sayed Ali Khamenei to supervise the creation and development of this new group, a fateful decision. Khamenei was to become Iran's Supreme Leader after the death of Khomeini. Nasrallah later said Iran “offered Lebanon everything in its power: money, training, and advice.”
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In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with the intention of destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization (see
chapter 4
). It quickly defeated both the PLO and Syrian troops. Israel sought to use right-wing Lebanese Christian parties as their proxies but couldn't consolidate power. Hezbollah gained its reputation as fierce fighters during this period. Washington accused Hezbollah of bombing of the US Marine barracks in 1983, forcing Western troops out of Lebanon. Hezbollah, which didn't officially form until 1985, always denied the accusation. Over the next few years, with the support of Iran, Hezbollah replaced Amal as the dominant Shia organization in Lebanon, a situation that persists to this day. Amal eventually reconciled with Hezbollah, and the two forged an electoral and political alliance with Amal as the junior partner.

In 2002, President George W. Bush declared Iran to be part of the “axis of evil,” a triumvirate of countries supposedly threatening US vital interests. The other two countries were North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The United States occupied Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, coincidentally also getting rid of regimes hostile to Iran. Not
surprisingly, Iran and Syria drew closer together with each successive US intervention in the region. During the past thirty-five years, Iran and Syria also consolidated economic ties. Iran opened an automobile assembly plant, a cement plant, and a power generating station, and it made other investments in Syria. Iran's exports to Syria increased from $35.7 million in 2000 to $387.4 million in 2010. Syrian exports to Iran increased by twenty times during those same years.
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While the economic ties were mutually beneficial, they were not essential to the alliance.

The Iranian-Syrian marriage of convenience always had marital spats. During the mid-1980s Syria backed Amal in Lebanon while Iran favored Hezbollah. Syria sent troops to support the US-led Gulf War while Iran remained neutral. Ideologically the leaders of both countries remained far apart. Ayatollah Khomeini never invited Hafez al-Assad to Tehran because he was suspicious of the secular leader. Only in 2008, years after the deaths of both Khomeini and Assad, did Bashar al-Assad visit Tehran. Despite these differences, the two countries found unity in opposing the United States and its allies.

Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian group Hamas developed what they called a “resistance front” to oppose US and Israeli policies, and they claimed some successes. It forced the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000 and repelled Israel's invasion of that country in 2006, according to Hossein Ruyvaran, a leader of the Society for Defense of the Palestinian Nation, an Iranian advocacy group based in Tehran. Today Iran is a key ally of Syria, he noted. “Iran is the pivot of this coalition,” he told me.
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US policymakers worried about Iran's leading role in the resistance front. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman told the US Senate, “Today, Iran is training, arming, funding, aiding, and abetting the Assad regime and its atrocious crackdown on its own people. Iran has made it clear that it fears losing its closest ally and will stop at no cost, borne by both the Syrian and Iranian people, to prop up the Assad regime.”
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At least US and Iranian leaders agree on something: Assad's downfall
would tremendously weaken Iran's regional influence. From the beginning of the Syrian uprising, Iran worried that “if the Assad government fell, the replacement would have much stronger ties with the US government and Israeli government,” according to Professor Foad Izadi, an assistant professor at the University of Tehran's Faculty of World Studies. He told me, “that was the dilemma that Iran had.”
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Tehran was generally pleased with the “resistance front” right up to the beginning of the Arab Spring. Iranian leaders don't talk a lot about it now, but they were pleased when the Arab Spring uprisings began. They called the Arab Spring an “Islamic Awakening” against corrupt, Western-backed, secular regimes. Iran hoped that conservative Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood would be more friendly to Iran than the old, pro-Western dictatorships. Tehran put out feelers to opposition groups in the Arab Spring countries. Professor Izadi told me that both Iran and Hezbollah understood that there were strong ideological differences between them and the Sunni opposition groups. Nevertheless, they hoped to establish friendly relations based on their common Islamic faith and opposition to the United States. “An ideal situation would be to have a [Sunni] religious government that is tolerant of Iran,” he said.
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Izadi cited Hamas as an example of a Sunni group that cooperated with Iran, a relationship that cut across religious and ideological lines. “A group like Hamas, which is religious but friendly with Iran, is much better than a secular government,” he said. He admitted that there was a rather large problem with the analogy, however. Hamas, which had been allied closely with Damascus for years, broke relations and supported the Syrian uprising in 2011. Hamas closed its Damascus headquarters and decamped to Qatar (see
chapter 9
).

So the Syrian uprising posed a major dilemma for Tehran from the very beginning. It couldn't abandon Assad, its closest Arab ally. But opposing the popular revolt against Assad would discredit Iran on the Arab street. “Iran was disinclined to be the benefactor of an Assad regime run amok in a time of democratic hope in the Middle East,” according to Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute in Washington.
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During the initial months of the uprising, Iran met with Syrian
opposition leaders and Assad to seek a political accord. Iranian government officials told Assad “it would be wise to hold free and fair elections,” said Professor Izadi. If Assad won, he would be the legitimate ruler. If he lost, the Baathists would be “a major political player like Hezbollah in Lebanon. You win the elections or become a strong opposition.” But, according to Izadi, Syrian leaders rejected that option. “They thought they could suppress the uprising.”
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