North, South, and chaos

              Protests in Suwayda. Photo credits: CBS News; Leys El-Cebel/Anadolu Agency/Getty

The tensions this week in the north and south of Syria show off its eternally Byzantine politics.

 

In the southwestern city of Suwayda, hundreds of the Druze continued to call for the overthrow of President Bashar Assad, as they have for more than two weeks. They ripped up posters of his father and preceding president, replacing them with posters of nationalist leaders who revolted early in the 20th century against the French masters of the colony. This protest has the blessing of the spiritual leader of the Druze, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hidjiri. Earlier, some spiritual leaders had been careful not to endorse Assad’s overthrow. 

 

A tiny but educated minority in Syria, most of the Druze had stayed out of the civil war in exchange for exemption from military services. Now they’re in the thick of the nationwide protest. It began with demonstrations against a sudden near-250% increase in fuel prices in August. But it now invokes the calls for democracy that led to the civil war in 2011, during the Arab Spring. Even Assad’s sect, the Alawites, the core of his military and political support, is stirring.    

 

The fighting in northwestern Syria is probably a typical feint.  First, some background.   

 

Turkey wants a buffer in Syria to keep terrorist Kurds from establishing a base for attacks on Turkey and to keep out Syrian migrants. In 2019, the US had agreed to patrol the northwest and eject the Turkish terrorists, the YPG (the People’s Protection Units, if you really want to know). But President Donald Trump got cold feet, his chronic condition in foreign policy.  So the US withdrew to the oilfields in the northeast, allegedly to protect them from the Islamic State. The US Army left the northwest to its Kurdish allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces. These are not associated with the YPG. 

 

But in reality, the northwest is controlled by Turkish troops and by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose leader was a power in al-Qaeda but now claims to be a Syrian nationalist.

 

The Syrians in Afrin a northwestern city, are divided between the Turkish troops and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham for religious reasons. (Some regard the HTS as blasphemous because it doesn't adhere to Sharia law.) They have been fighting each other. 

 

The Syrian Democratic Forces attacked these factions...reportedly backed by munitions from Damascus! The Syrian Democratic Forces are supposed to be leading the charge against Damascus. At least 13 died in the fighting.

 

Well, some things are clear. Damascus gains from these attacks, because they push out the Turks and make room for Assad to move in. Iran also gains, because anything that extends Assad's influence also extends Tehran's. So I would wonder if the munitions backing the attack of the Syrian Democratic Forces on the Afrin factions really came from Tehran. I don't think that Damascus has much control over its army these days, aside from the unit controlled by Assad’s brother that is busy making Captogan, the “poor man’s cocaine,” for fun and family profit.

 

The other thing that's clear is that the US is out to lunch. The Syrian Democratic Forces are supposed to work for the Americans, not subvert their interests, as they have been in deadly attacks for two weeks.

 

 I don't know who's making American policy for Syria these days -- State, Defense, or Central Command. But whoever it is, it isn't working. And the White House has washed its hands of the mess.

 

Elsewhere in the region, the US is practicing with Saudi Arabia shooting down drones. And it's talking about a system for all of Central Command, so I guess it worries about potential Iranian drone attacks on the US Army in Syria, not to mention on Israel.

 

Iranian officials were at the Kremlin a few days ago. I presume that they compared notes on the performance of Iranian drones in Ukraine. 

 

The head of Central Command, General Erik Kurilla, told the House in March that Iran was stronger in offensive weapons than five years ago, despite the ongoing talks to relax sanctions on Tehran in exchange for a supposed commitment not to develop nukes.

 

It looks like Iran is filling the power vacuum created by the reduction of US troops in the Middle East to 30,000 to fight China instead. Israel won't be shy to step up to bat, given US aid. (And where are the Republicans?)

 

Now Assad is heading to Beijing. Apparently, as Russia concentrates on its war on Ukraine, China will fill its shoes as Assad’s ally. China certainly has enough dollars to give the Syrian central bank to prop up the vanishing Syrian pound as well as to rebuild much of the country’s infrastructure, which has been destroyed by war and neglect. This all fits China’s strategy to extend its influence in the Middle East, not to mention in Central Asia, at the expense of the Kremlin.

 

Moral of this convoluted story: In Syrian intrigues, there is never a shortage of players. Or pundits!  – Leon Taylor, Baltimore tayloralmaty@gmail.com

Notes

I thank Annabel Benson for useful comments.

References

Agence France-Presse. Anti-government protests take hold in southern Syria - Al-Monitor: Independent, trusted coverage of the Middle East.  August 25, 2023.

Albert Aji and Bassem Mroue. Syria's Assad will visit China as Beijing boosts its reach in the Middle East | AP News.  September 19, 2023.

George Baghdadi and Tucker Reals. Syria protests gain steam, challenging Bashar Assad as he tries to put the civil war behind him - CBS News.  September 20, 2023.

Beatrice Farhat.  Kurdish forces kill 14 pro-Turkey fighters in north Syria attack - Al-Monitor: Independent, trusted coverage of the Middle East.  September 19, 2023.99999

Ghaith al-Sayed. Attack on Turkish-backed opposition fighters in Syria kills 13 of the militants, activists say | AP News. September 18, 2023.

 

  

The Syrian thief

                                 So, when does your flight depart?  Photo source: FIKRA Forum
 

The Syrian Democratic Forces—the Kurds in Syria, fighting the dictatorial President Bashar al-Assad—last week bounced their liaison to the Arab tribes, Abu Khawla, head of the military council of Deir al Zor, the northeast province with most of Syria’s oil and water. The Kurds arrested him for a lot of things, including running drugs. But their real complaint is that he’s working with Assad. Now they've been attacking Khawla's tribal allies. More than 90 have died.

Khawla is a thief. He began his career by stealing motorbikes. But he's our thief: The Americans used him as a surrogate.  So the Kurds are basically turning on the Americans. Undoubtedly the Iranians are fomenting the Kurdish revulsion of Khawla to distract from the growing national rebellion against Assad.  The protest began against Assad’s witless doubling of fuel prices this summer but now also calls for democracy and therefore Assad’s ouster. Thanks to Russian support, Assad had been winning the 12-year civil war. But now he is even on the verge of losing his own ethnic group of Alawites, on the western coast. The Alawites were his loyal military core.   

Khawla’s loss of power bodes ill for the Americans. US troops control the oilfields of northeast Syria, ostensibly to keep them out of the hands of the Islamic State. Fighting Daesh is why a few hundred US soldiers are still in Syria. But the Arab tribes like the Akidat have long complained that US limits on oil exports out of Deir al-Zor province are robbing them—at a time when the Syrian economy is already collapsing, due to Western sanctions and the central bank’s bungling of the supply of Syrian pound, which lost two-thirds of its dollar value overnight. More than 90% of Syrians live on less than $2 per day. It would take little to turn the tribes against the Americans for good. Then there will be real trouble, and not just in the northeast.

What is the White House doing? Nothing. The National Security Council has no Syrian strategy. (The official name is “laissez faire.”) You may recall that it had no Afghanistani strategy, either. But Biden is focused on Ukraine.

So that leaves the US Army to make policy in Syria. General Matthew McFarlane, who headed the fight against Daesh, is out, to the obligatory praises of the head of Central Command, General Erik Kurilla.  Kurilla and several Republican senators visited the Syrian Democratic Forces recently, presumably to try something new. But now the Kurds are acting on their own.  In a press conference last month, McFarlane said the number of Daesh attacks in the region had dropped two-thirds over the year; that the last major attack, on Ghwaryan Prison, was in January 2022.  But observers perceive growing Daesh activity in Syria.  

The Arab tribes in the northwest of Syria were revolting against the Kurds, as they did in the northeast. What was weird was that the Russians bombed the Arabs.  It was if the Russians were siding with the Syrian Democratic Forces, even though the SDF leads the opposition to Assad, Russia's nominal ally. Perhaps the Russians figured that the Americans were organizing through the Arabs an overthrow of Assad, and they wanted to bog down the US to get concessions in Ukraine.

As of today, the Americans seemed finally to have gotten a grip on the situation in Deir al Zor, since the Syrian Democratic Forces and the Arab tribes have stopped fighting.  But the fact remains that the Russians and Iranians outmaneuvered the Americans. I don't doubt that they will try again to eject US troops.

But no matter how skillfully they exploit tensions, Assad will find a way to gum up the works. Damascus now plans to cancel subsidies of food on top of those of fuel. This will drive Syrians into a frenzy. I suspect that Tehran and Moscow can dispense with his services.

 The prospect of starving will drive many Syrians to try to flee. But the European Court of Justice has just backed Greece in deporting a Syrian refugee. The Syrians are bottled up, and an explosion is nigh. Syria remains the textbook example of a country destroyed by fraud, incompetence, and international indifference.

 Possible steps towards a solution:

 (1)   The World Food Program of the United Nations is the world’s largest food donor, unfortunately. It could develop a serious statistical program enabling it to track where to spend money and how it is spent. In exchange, the United States could restore funding of the Program, which has seen its funds fall 40% in the past year. At present, no one quite knows where the Program’s money or food goes in countries like Syria.

(2)   The central bank of Syria could publish monetary data so that investors and donors would know how many dollars it needed to prop up the vanishing Syrian pound…and the extent to which the bank truly controls the money supply.  Hyperinflation makes eating expensive for Syrians.

(3)   The United Nations could compel Damascus to lift barriers to aid in opposition areas and to re-establish subsidies of fuel and food. Of course, in principle, such subsidies are a bad idea, because they lower prices below cost at the margin, ensuring over-consumption. But this is not the time to worry about principles. Syrian families rely on the subsidies to survive.  –Leon Taylor, Baltimore tayloralmaty@gmail.com

 

 Notes

 For useful comments, I thank Annabel Benson and Mark Kennet.

 I learn a lot about Syria from Al Monitor. The New York Times is as clueless as the White House...oddly enough, since The Times broke the story about the Assad family's control of the "poor man's cocaine," Captagon, in 2021. The US media in general, except for CBS News, is out to lunch. At McFarlane’s press conference, the only question from a Western reporter was from the propaganda agency Voice of America.

 

References

Edith M. Lederer. UN says it's forced to cut food aid to millions globally because of a funding crisis | AP News . July 28, 2023.

Special Online Briefing with Major General Matthew McFarlane, Commander, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve - United States Department of State

Jared Szuba.  Syria’s Kurds struggle to contain backlash after detaining allied Arab militia leader - Al-Monitor: Independent, trusted coverage of the Middle East . September 2, 2023.