Case study Syria week 1 t/m 7
Lecture 1: Introduction, regional history, and
power
relations
The issue is multi-level and multi-actor
Conflicts that start on a local level go all the way to the international level.
A lot of different actors are involved.
You can point out many starting points of the conflict.
One is the 'day of rage' on march 15 2011, where hundreds of protests
in Damascus and Aleppo took place, calling for democratic reforms.
Another is the moment a couple of school boys wrote 'It's your turn doctor' on their
school wall. The boys were detained and tortured and as a consequence protests in
Daraa erupted.
Another factor which could have fueled the conflict was the 'De-ba'athification'. In
both Syria and Iraq the Ba'ath party was in charge, in Syria led by the Assad family.
When the VS took over Iraq they fired everybody connected to the Ba'ath party,
causing a big group of intelligent and educated angry people.
You can also look for a starting point at the decolonisation. In 1916 the UK and
France made a secret treaty, called the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In this agreement
they divided the middle-east, they did so without any regard for already existing
cooperation between tribes or trading routes, creating unrest. One of ISIS primary
goals was to undo the agreements in the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Case study Syria week 1 t/m 7 1
, You can use different IR theories to look at the conflict in Syria.
Proxy warfare= a war fought between groups or smaller countries that each respresent
the interests of other larger powers and may have help and support from these larger
powers.
States have different motives for conducting proxy warfare and becoming sponsors
of other smaller parties.
Motives:
1. Coercion: You support your enemies enemy, whoever they may be, to push them to
give in on another issue.
2. Disruption: You intend to weaken you enemy militarily.
3. Transformation: To engineer a major political transformation in the target state.
Some risks for the sponsors are:
The unintended sponsoring of terrorist groups.
Risk of escalating involvement that will cause you to employ you own troups
anyway.
You can distinguish 'different' conflicts:
1. The core conflict: Assad vs. Opposition
2. Among the opposition. The opposition broke up in different militions with different
underlining goals and sponsors.
3. Islamic state vs. the rest
4. Foreign interventions and proxy wars
Russia has backed Assad from the beginning, providing arms.
Iran and Syria have been close strategical allies, Iran sponsors the Syrian
government and in return gets regional influence.
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, US provided weapons and support to Syrian rebels, executed air strikes and
fought ISIS.
Turkey is a NATO member and is allies with the EU and US. They did have
friendly relations with Syria before the conflict, but they switched as soon as it
started and provided a safe haven for defected syrian soldiers. They became a
major sponsor of factions fighting Assad. Making it extra complicated is that a
group sponsored by Turkey is fighting a group sponsored by the US.
Qatar has a major airbase from which ISIS was fought by a coalition of several
NATO members.
Saoedi-Arabië supports the Syrian opposition in hope of installing a government
able to fight the Iran influence.
Take aways:
1. Conflict in Syria became a stage of proxy war and even one for great power politics
(US - Russia).
2. There are advantages and disadvantages to proxy war. There are also different
purposes: coercion, disruption and transformation.
3. IR theories can help understand the interactions between states.
4. IR theories are widely divergent.
Phillips, Christopher (2020) The Battle for
Syria (New Haven: Yale University Press),
Chapter 1: Syria and the Middle East on the
eve of civil war and Chapter 2: The Arab
Spring comes to Syria Chapter 3: Assad
must stand aside? Chapter 11: Syria's war in
the age of Trump
Case study Syria week 1 t/m 7 3
, Chapter one: Syria and the Middle East on
the eve of civil war
Syria in the Middle East
Young country in an ancient land
While it boasts two of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, Damascus and
Aleppo, the
modern state of Syria gained its independence only in 1945.
Like many such postcolonial states, it faced an uphill battle to bind its disparate
population to the idea of a nation state.
Arab nationalism, the call to unite all the Arabs in one state, found a receptive
audience, as did Greater Syrian nationalism, which called for Syria to be united with
neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.
Meanwhile Kurdish nationalism grew in popularity among Kurds as Syria’s Arabs
increasingly denied them cultural rights.
These weak building blocks contributed to Syria’s emergence as a fragile and unstable
state after independence.
The Syrian political scene was chaotic and unstable, weakened further by the
machinations of external actors.
Assad takes over
This changed after November 1970 when Hafez al- Assad (Assads father), the Ba’athist
Defence Minister, seized power in a final coup.
He restructured the security forces, packing key positions with relatives and
Alawis, the sect from which he hailed, believing they would see his regime as
protection against any return to the Sunni persecution of the Ottoman era.
For those not persuaded by the material benefits and stability of the regime, a wall of
fear was built to keep them in line.
Hafez was helped by three shifts in the regional environment:
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, 1. The oil boom of the late 1970s.
2. An era of Arab cooperation.
3. Cold War dynamics stabilised the region.
This combination of regional factors and Hafez’ regime consolidation prompted
Syria’s transformation from an arena of competition to a projector of influence.
Change and continuity under Bashar
Assad revived his father’s tactics of backing non- state militia to undermine his
enemies, facilitating the flow of Jihadists into Iraq to undermine the US occupation.
The Bush administration hit back where it hurt: Syria’s control over Lebanon.
Banning all US trade with Syria, aside from food and medicine, it demanded both “an
end to its occupation of Lebanon,” and to all “illegal shipments of weapons and other
military items to Iraq”.
In September 2004, the US then co- sponsored with France UN Resolution 1559,
which called for all ‘foreign forces’ to withdraw from Lebanon – code for the 14,000
Syrian troops and intelligence agents who had remained after the civil war.
Assad ignored the UN calls, but on 14 February 2005 a massive bomb in Beirut killed
former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafic Hariri, a popular supporter of UN1559, and
fingers immediately pointed at Damascus.
Huge anti- Syrian demonstrations broke out in Beirut, demanding Syrian withdrawal.
As the flow of fighters into Iraq sporadically continued, Bush, who withdrew the US
ambassador from Damascus immediately after the Hariri assassination, urged the
international community to diplomatically boycott Syria.
Facing isolation, Assad drew closer to Iran, also ostracised by Bush. Damascus
promoted the
idea that, far from an axis of evil they – Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamist
group Hamas – were an ‘Axis of Resistance’ against US and Israeli domination of
the Middle East.
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, While the US continued to oppose Assad, its attempts to isolate the regime had
failed.
However, the regional shifts caused by the Bush era actually meant that Assad’s
position was not as strong as he and others assumed.
The Middle East and American hegemony
While Hafez (father Bashar) made the most of the shift in regional circumstances
marked by the end of the Cold War, Bashar conversely suffered from the gradual end of
US regional hegemony.
America’s ‘moment’?
After the collapse of the SU and the end of the Cold War came an era of unrivalled
American dominance, a ‘unipolar’ order, in which the United States was the only world
superpower.
The swift success of Operation Desert Storm suggested George H.W. Bush’s vision
of an American- led ‘New World Order’ was at hand.
Unlike in Europe, the region did not always divide into neat binary camps but displayed
complexity, of which Cold War politics was but one dynamic.
So as America’s ‘moment’ in the Middle East began in 1991, few regional
governments had actually subordinated their foreign policy to a superpower patron
in the way that most European states had, and many of the intra- regional rivalries
were unaffected by the changing global dynamics.
The regional leaders and their populations perceived American power to be the future
of the region.
Moreover, though US military power was not able to translate into political
transformation, regional media and regime propaganda repeatedly emphasised its
ability to do so.
This reinforced the idea of US hegemony and power.
Shifting the balance of power: the 2003 Iraq war
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, The destruction of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003 and the occupation of Iraq by
US- led forces shifted the regional balance of power.
The rise of the Saudi–Iranian rivalry was perhaps the most dramatic regional shift
caused by the Iraq war.
The increased rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran provided space for Qatar to take
on Saudi Arabia’s previous role as regional moderator.
The rise of sectarianism, Jihadism and Kurdish nationalism
Three pre- existing transnational forces were greatly exacerbated and gained region-
wide significance as a result of the Iraq war: sectarianism, Jihadism and Kurdish
nationalism.
Sectarianism: the politicisation of differences between sects within a religion, often
leading to discrimination, hate or tension. Like the Sunni-Shia divide.
Jihadism: a form of Islamism that seeks to impose a particular version of Islam on
society by force or armed struggle (jihad), which will result in the establishment of
an Islamic state or caliphate. Not only did the occupation act initially as a rallying
point for radicals to flood into,
or inspire Jihad elsewhere such as Saudi Arabia, but American- run Iraqi prisons
soon served as a further breeding ground.
Kurdish nationalism: is a nationalist political movement which asserts that
Kurds are a nation and espouses the creation of a state in Kurdistan. The creation
of the KRG transformed the Iraqi Kurdish lands from an arena of regional
competition to a projector of regional influence.
Ending America’s moment?
Finally, the Iraq war and its consequences shifted US power in the Middle East,
both perceptions of it by regional actors, and its own leaders’ views of what it could
achieve.
The fact that Bashar al- Assad allowed Jihadis into Iraq from Syria, although they
were his sworn enemies, illustrates how seriously the US’ regional opponents
perceived America’s military threat.
Case study Syria week 1 t/m 7 7
, Meanwhile Iraq, the original success story, was descending into a violent insurgency
costing American lives. At the same time a sectarian civil war was undermining any
hope that Iraq would
become a model pluralist democracy. Eventually the US withdrawed in 2011.
Added to Bush’s failures were three related factors that shifted the US approach to the
Middle East.
1. The 2008 financial crisis.
2. There was public fatigue with deploying troops and money abroad, particularly in
the Middle East.
3. The coming to power of Barack Obama as president, who had opposed the Iraq war
and approached US regional policy with a different worldview.
There are broadly two schools of thought as to what caused this post 2009
retrenchment:
One attributes the shift to agency, mostly the choices of the Obama administration.
The other attributes it to structural changes in both the Middle East and the wider
world, to which Obama had to react.
After America: a shift in power
The Middle East in 2011 was a region in transition. The perceived dominance of the
United States, already more limited than assumed, was ebbing after 2009 and a
nascent multipolar regional order was emerging.
The Syrian civil war must be understood within the context of these regional shifts,
as both a symptom and a subsequent reinforcer of them.
The US was still the most powerful, but now other powers were independently asserting
or reasserting their influence.
This book focusses on the five that, alongside the US, would go on to shape the
Syria conflict: Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.
The view from the United States
Case study Syria week 1 t/m 7 8
, Barack Obama made much of his opposition to the unpopular Iraq war in his
election campaign.
Obama’s non- ideological approach allowed him to deal with issues on a case- by- case
basis to best protect American interests.
When the Arab Spring began in December 2010 his priorities in the Middle East were
relatively
clear:
Firstly, he wanted to reduce the US physical presence.
Secondly, he wanted to rebuild America’s reputation in the Middle East and wider
Islamic world.
A shift in approach to Syria was part of Obama’s new agenda.
But after five years of isolating Assad, knowledge of his regime, and interest in it,
was limited. Washington’s closest western allies, when it came to the Middle East,
France and Britain, were more up to date on Syria, having retained a diplomatic
presence in Damascus.
Russia: Putin’s evolving view
Putin has often been portrayed by western commentators as ruthless, autocratic and
expansionist, seeking a return to Russia’s power under the Soviet era, but Russian
Middle East policy under Putin was more nuanced than this simple caricature allows.
Firstly, Putin’s worldview was far from fixed and appears to have evolved.
Secondly, despite autocratic tendencies, Putin was a populist and public opinion
mattered. This meant economics became a core pillar of foreign policy.
Thirdly, Putin was opportunistic and reactive.
As 2010 ended, the Kremlin looked at the Middle East through three lenses.
1. First was the domestic security lens. Russia suffered numerous terrorist attacks by
Islamists in the 2000s.
Case study Syria week 1 t/m 7 9
, 2. Second was the regional economic lens. Putin had greatly expanded Russian trade
with the Middle East.
3. The third lens was geopolitical. Putin and his nationalists mostly saw the Middle
East through a zero- sum perspective, seeing each diplomatic or economic gain for
Russia there as a defeat for the US, and vice versa.
Iran: competing powers
On the eve of the 2011 crisis Syria remained a key pillar of Iran’s regional policy.
While the fall of Saddam meant that Iraq was now its greatest strategic priority,
revolutionary Iran’s oldest regional ally was still of great value.
As both states were isolated by the Bush administration, Iranian trade with Syria grew
steadily, though it remained small compared to that of other states.
Syria’s value to Iran was primarily political rather than economic.
The ‘Resistance Axis’ had given both regimes domestic and regional legitimacy and the
alliance continued to flourish.
In the civil war Iran supports the syrian government.
Unfamiliar ground for Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia was among the biggest losers of the 2003 Iraq war.
Despite internal concerns there was broad consensus among Saudi Arabia’s elite after
2003 that the threat from Iran was the number one regional issue, especially Tehran’s
accelerated nuclear programme.
Fear of Iran partly motivated Saudi Arabia’s own detente with Syria.
Given the animosity to follow after 2011 (SA sponsors syrian rebel groups), this
temporary reconciliation suggests a realism in Riyadh’s thinking: driven primarily by a
desire to contain Iran but not seeing Assad’s sect or professed ideology as an obstacle
to courting his support.
Turkey’s return to the Middle East
Historically Turkey had limited its engagement with the Middle East, propelled by
founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s desire to face westwards and a lingering
Case study Syria week 1 t/m 7 10
