The New Middle East (64 page)

‘It shouldn’t be a winner-and-loser game. We should keep the nature of the Syrian society. One in three of the Syrian population one way or another supported this regime, so we cannot throw them away.’ These views, expressed by the Syrian journalist Ahmed, were increasingly rare in a society losing sight of what was worth keeping of their old lives.

I am definitely against any kind of deba’athification or dissolving the army. The minorities are scared. We are talking about around a million and half people in the Alawite community in Damascus. The majority of them are under forty, they didn’t know any president but Hafez Assad and then Bashar. They didn’t know any situation apart from the situation they are in where they have the privilege to come from the village to Damascus and to find a job and to survive. So now there is a revolution that wants justice, but justice is hard for them so they will feel scared.

In the long run Professor Landis believed that allowing Syria to fight for its future, even if that meant a long and bloody civil war, was perhaps a better way of ensuring its stability in the future, because leaders would eventually emerge with revolutionary credibility. ‘Because this is a problem of nation building and identity formation the Syrians have to figure this out for themselves,’ he told me.

Nobody can impose a solution. We tried to do that in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and Obama just doesn’t want to get involved. The Syrians have to find their own George Washington in a sense. America can’t do that. We tried to do that in Iraq with Chalabi and now with Maliki. We tried to do that with Karzai, but you can’t select somebody else’s leader, they [have to] emerge. You could make the argument that war is a national building process, in a horrible way, and especially in these multi-ethnic countries where it’s very hard to find a formula. For America to jump into that and to try to play cop is a fool’s errand.

The war slowly destroyed most of the country’s businesses, but a few did start to thrive. One was ad hoc kidnapping for ransom, which was dominated by the Shabiha, though there were many such incidents in opposition-held areas too. A variant of this became a big new money-spinner for the government, which industrialised the extortion. The regime ransomed off the captured FSA fighters held in its jails. The going rate, as the conflict passed its second anniversary, for the families of opposition fighters to get their loved ones back was 500,000 Syrian pounds, which was then equivalent to around US$5,000. The government rounded up rebels, sold them back to their families and then rounded up some more. It was an endless circle of supply and demand. The cost of a bribe to get anything done in the city had also gone up tenfold from the previous summer when I had visited the city.

The people who could not buy their way out of jail were the organisers of the first peaceful protests. Releasing some of the young fighters did not scare the regime, because these men suited its narrative of the opposition as bunches of violent terrorist gangs. But it saw the peaceful disciplined activists as much more of a threat. If they were released and got together with the fighters then the government might suddenly have been faced with a credible internal political opposition combined with a more organised military wing. That prospect scared them.

The question next door in Israel and among the Western nations is whether, after the war, Syria becomes a base for Sunni extremists to destabilise the wider region. ‘Syria is a new opportunity for Global Jihadists. There is a repetition of what happened in the Eighties in Afghanistan, the Nineties in Bosnia, and the conflict in Chechnya. Now we have it in Syrian society,’ says Professor Olivier Roy, who is one of the world’s leading scholars on modern religious movements.

But I think the Bosnian scenario is the most likely, that once they win they will expel the Salafi jihadists, so these guys will have to go elsewhere. We’ll have a problem, but with nomadic jihadists. I don’t believe Syria will create a strong hub for them. We tend to have a territorial approach and we fear the creation of sanctuaries for jihadists. Actually sometimes that is not a problem, because they are an easier target when they settle somewhere. The worst jihadist is the guy who looks European, travels by plane, has a British passport and operates like that.

And it may turn out that many of the Islamist fighters will prove not to be very committed to the jihadist cause beyond the fall of the regime. The money to support the opposition fighters was coming from the Gulf, and to get that money you needed to show some Islamist credentials. Previously clean-shaven fighters started to grow beards and adopt the dress code of the Salafist movement because it won them funding and arms. ‘I don’t think many of them are fanatics at all,’ a woman very involved in the opposition movement in Damascus told me. ‘I went with ten people to meet the Nusra Front people in Damascus, and three of us were women. Me and one another woman came dressed like this’ – she gestured to her uncovered hair and tight Western-style clothing – ‘and these men didn’t care at all. They shook my hand. They’ve just grown beards to get money that’s all, because they are funded by Qatar.’

There were also signs that while the regime leadership and opposition leadership in exile could not work out a way to talk, on the ground at a very local level, deals could be done. When the opposition groups took over parts of Syria’s small but vital oilfields they looted the offices but they looked after the wells. When they realised that they didn’t know how to run them, I was told by people involved in negotiating the deals that they leased them back to the local regime representatives in return for royalties. That way the oil kept flowing, the opposition got funding for its war, and so did the regime. FSA activists working from Lebanon told me their fighters even did deals with Syrian army units to buy ammunition. They assumed that the local commanders kept the money themselves. The same kind of local arrangement was made over opposition fighters captured by the Shabiha. Often the national army would act as the intermediary between the two sides to settle the ransom demands.

By the spring of 2013, in total, more than a million people had fled to neighbouring states to escape the chaos in Syria. Over half of them were children.
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Many of the children were traumatised, having seen family members killed. Some had been themselves subjected to torture.
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By then UN aid workers I’d met inside the country had told me four million people had been displaced. They said the health care system in parts of Syria had collapsed and in others hospitals were carrying out major surgery without anaesthetic.

By then Jordan already had 460,000 Syrian refugees in the country. It was by far the largest number anywhere. ‘How are you going to turn back women, children, and the wounded?’ said King Abdullah. ‘This is something that we just can’t do.’
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But he warned that by the end of the year the number would have gone much higher. Many were fleeing because the rape of men, women and children, largely by the Shabiha militias, had reached epidemic proportions.
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Jordan was already fragile after the Arab revolts because of a resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood and the ever-present tensions between Jordanians and the Palestinian refugee community, two million strong, and most of whom have full Jordanian citizenship. The fate of Jordan was a major concern for the US because it was a major concern for Israel. ‘God save the king,’ joked one of Israel’s senior generals to me as the internal pressure in Jordan built up. The US based a team of its own military officials to try to insulate Jordan from the growing turmoil along its long border after there were skirmishes between Jordanian and Syrian troops. Assad warned the Jordanians there would be consequences for supporting the process of arming the opposition. ‘The fire will not stop at our border,’ he said, ‘and everybody knows that Jordan is exposed as Syria is.’
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Young Omar Shakir had thought to himself when he emerged from his tunnel after the escape from Homs that Assad would survive until 2014. Few others thought so at the time. When I went to Damascus in the summer of 2012 everyone seemed to think the regime was staggering towards its end. When I went back the following summer Omar’s prediction looked a lot more likely. As darkness fell and the streets emptied, the previous year’s sound of a vibrant nightlife was replaced by the regular thud of artillery fire landing a few kilometres away in the Damascus suburbs. In 2012 I had had to drive several hours from the city to find the war. The following year the war had come to me. Yet Assad’s supporters in the capital still believed they could hold on to what they had got out of the regime. ‘I told him recently, you are our agent for change,’ one of Assad’s friends told me. ‘I told him we have invested so much in you. Only you have the political maturity to see the country through the transition.’ His supporters believed he would be vindicated in the presidential polls promised for 2014, though how they were going to hold this election in the middle of a civil war was less clear.

Even though it was now in the third year of its fight against the Syrian people the regime still didn’t think it was necessarily going to lose though it knew it couldn’t win. But European patience with the status quo had begun to run out.

The jihadist fighters never had a problem getting a regular supply of arms, an Arab diplomat told me, because wealthy, mainly Saudi, individuals in the Gulf funded them. The Syrian businessmen who initially funded the FSA had, two years after the uprising, largely exhausted their reserves. However an EU diplomat told me that by the spring of 2013 Britain was helping to supply arms to the non-Islamist rebel fighters but with enough distance from the process to maintain deniability. But that supply waxed and waned depending on international diplomatic manoeuverings. A senior FSA activist also told me the British were helping to arm them by working with the Saudi government. The US had made it clear it was now not going to try to convince them otherwise.
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The diplomat said all three countries, though predominantly the Americans, had set up a camp along the border in Jordan to train rebel fighters in tactics and arms, essentially building an FSA officer class. Broader European enthusiasm for maintaining their strict arms embargo was also on the wane.

On Syria the US wasn’t ‘leading from behind’, it was not leading at all. On his first trip to the Gulf as secretary of state John Kerry had to stand next to the Qatari prime minister and listen to him gently chide the Obama administration over its reluctance to arm the opposition. ‘There is a change in the international position and the American position in this regard. They’re talking about weapons,’ said Sheik Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani through a translator. ‘We hope that this had happened sometime ago before, because this would have maybe lessened the death and destruction that took place in Syria . . . I’m not an expert on arms, but if there is some rocket-propelled grenades or RPGs or anything provided, this will not threaten the world order.’

In response the secretary of state could only say: ‘We had a discussion about the types of weapons that are being transferred and by whom. We are aware of what people are doing . . . we did discuss the question of the ability to try to guarantee that it’s going to the right people and to the moderate Syrian Opposition Coalition.’
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The previous day in Saudi Arabia Kerry had acknowledged that in Syria ‘bad actors, regrettably, have no shortage of their ability to get weapons from Iran, from Hezbollah, from Russia,’ and then he had to listen to a lecture from its foreign minister Saud al-Faisal about how ‘what is happening in Syria is a slaughter . . . and we just can’t bring ourselves to remain quiet in front of this carnage.’
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Unfortunately for Secretary of State Kerry US policy towards the Gulf meant he could not point up the contradictions in all their positions. The Gulf countries couldn’t remain quiet about the violence, but they all kept quiet about the aspirations behind the original revolts because what they did not support was the democracy and human rights most of the Syrians were fighting for.

The first year of the conflict saw the West trying to negotiate Assad out of the country. From the second year, once it was clear that Assad was not going to go in a matter of months and that there was no appetite among the US public for military engagement, the Obama administration sought to stop the violence spilling out elsewhere. The US has not been trying to resolve the situation in Syria, it has been trying to contain it.

In an election year you can’t answer the question ‘What are you going to do about these massacres?’ by saying ‘Nothing.’ The Obama administration was criticised for having no policy towards the violence in Syria, and that criticism was unfair. It did have a policy. It was a ‘We’re not getting involved’ policy, but it couldn’t spell that out until 2013.

If the Obama administration was reluctant to play a leading role during the fighting it also hinted it might take a back seat when the regime finally collapsed. When he was asked by the Senate committee if there were plans for stabilisation operations for the end of Assad’s rule General Mattis said the Arab League and the GCC states ‘may be able to take this on’.
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