The New Middle East (61 page)

The name Alawite means ‘follower of Ali’, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. It is a relatively new term, dating back only to the French mandate. Many of their practices are carried out in secret. They follow the Shia custom of Taqiyya, which allows people to hide or even deny their faith to protect them from persecution. Because very little is known about the Alawite customs their religion has been censured as heretical by many Muslims, because they see in it the deification of Ali. The sect itself, like the Druze and the Ismailis, derives from the wave of Shia Islam that swept through the region a thousand years ago. Since then they have been regularly persecuted by all comers, including the Crusaders, the Sunni Mamluks and the Sunni Muslim Ottomans.
²⁴

The French, like other European colonialists, wanted to use the downtrodden minorities as their tools to manage the majority. In Syria this meant the Alawites. Most importantly it led to the disproportionate recruitment of Alawites into the French-run military force. This cemented the Alawites into a military tradition that extended beyond the departure of the French and created the dominant officer class of the Syrian army that emerged. It remains that way today. The historian Daniel Pipes wrote that: ‘An Alawi ruling Syria is like an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia – an unprecedented development shocking to the majority population which had monopolized power for so many centuries.’
²⁵

Hafez al-Assad rose to his position with skilful ruthlessness, and it was this trait he brought to both the domestic and the foreign arenas. His key foreign policy aim was to curb Israel’s, and therefore America’s, influence in the region. That meant maintaining at least arm’s-length control of Lebanon, and finally in 1976 deploying his troops there and running the country as an extension of his own state.

Lebanon has one of the most complicated societies in the Middle East and the most obscure political system. Like Syria it was carved out of the Ottoman Empire and was given to the French in the European bargaining after the First World War. It got its independence in 1943, when it also got its power-sharing system, which divided up key posts based on religion. The president was always a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of Parliament was Shia. The sectarian tensions bubbled along until 1975, when they exploded into a civil war that lasted fifteen years, killed or injured hundreds of thousands and laid waste to the capital Beirut. Hafez al-Assad used the war as the justification for his 1976 invasion.

The Lebanese war finally ended when a deal was reached called the Taif Agreement, named after the city in Saudi Arabia where it was signed. This agreement states that seats in the parliament will be divided equally between Muslims and Christians, and proportionately between the denominations of each sect and each district. It is the glue that holds the country together. It states as its aspiration the ‘abolition of political sectarianism’.
²⁶
Despite its fragility and failings, which enable groups like Hezbollah to wield huge political influence, the system that was worked out in Lebanon may end up as the framework for an agreement in Syria. Lebanon’s deal was reached only after all sides exhausted themselves in fifteen years of civil war. ‘I don’t know how long it will take the Syrians before they are tired of killing each other,’ a diplomat in Damascus told me in February 2013. He was clear that while either side thought it could win it would be hard to make progress with dialogue. And it was ‘dialogue, not negotiations’, the Syrian minister of information, Omran Ahed al-Zouabi, told me the same month. ‘Negotiations,’ he said, ‘are held between equals.’

The uprising that broke out in Syria in 2011 was not the country’s first major revolt. In February 1982 Hafez al-Assad conducted a scorched-earth policy to end a Muslim Brotherhood-led rebellion in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of Hama. It was the culmination of a violent six-year countrywide struggle with the group that began after Hafez suggested a new constitution should mandate a secular state and that a non-Muslim could be president. In 1976 the Muslim Brotherhood began their insurrection against what they saw as the ‘heretic’ Alawite rulers.
²⁷
In June 1980 Hafez was almost assassinated when Islamists attacked him as he waited for a foreign dignitary. Two hand grenades were thrown at him and he was targeted with machinegun fire. ‘He kicked one grenade out of harm’s way while a guard threw himself on the other and was killed instantly.’
²⁸
The regime responded by massacring Brotherhood members already held in jail.

The conflict got nastier until its climax at Hama, when the army surrounded the city and simply pounded it into submission with tank and artillery fire. Then Assad’s troops went in and carried out mass executions and rape. The assault went on for three weeks and was considered to be the single bloodiest attack by an Arab leader on his own people. At least 10,000 people were killed in Hama; some estimates put it at up to 30,000. A quarter of the city was flattened. It ended the Islamic insurgency.

Neda’s father was a doctor in Hama and stayed throughout the military operation.
²⁹
He sent his family away when a Syrian army officer searching the houses enquired whether Neda’s fifteen-year-old sister was married.

My uncle was a bank manager. They bombarded his area and destroyed his office, badly injuring his left leg and knocking him unconscious. When he woke up the soldiers had stacked him up in a pile of bodies. When they left he hid in the rubble of his office for two days. When he finally managed to get help and was taken to my father his leg was so bad it had to be cut off.

Neda recounted a whole series of stories about friends and relations who lost family members. Her family’s maid had her seven sons taken from the house, never to return. An entire class of college students were killed because their teacher happened to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. ‘My brother’s friend was killed in his house and they dragged his body around the street and then left it in the road. His mother went mad after that. She went along the whole street washing away his blood.’

The son had a hard act to follow, but follow he did. And it was clear, talking to his senior supporters in 2013, that it was still the Brotherhood – now supported by Qatar – rather than the Salafists supported by Saudi Arabia, that the regime hated the most. The Brotherhood though had been decimated by his father’s regime, and while it was a heavy presence among the exiles in the opposition it did not have a significant presence among the fighters on the ground.

When his father was busy murdering people in Hama the Arab League was not up in arms and imposing sanctions. The bonds of the old world that Bashar al-Assad inherited were broken during the 2011 uprisings because the League had had its own small revolution. But when he had railed at the League, Bashar al-Assad had been right to say Syria was at the heart of the Arab world. The old Middle East’s political fault lines all converged in Assad’s Syria. So while the regime was loved by no one it was vital to everyone. It won quiet applause from the Americans because it kept the border with Israel nice and quiet. The Iranians were happy because the Assad family let them run guns to their proxies, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Its credentials in respect of the Palestinian cause were second to none, and it housed and so protected key Palestinian militant groups in the capital Damascus, the most important of which was Hamas.

Like the other dictatorships, the Assad regimes always had ample amounts of something that successive American presidents did not have. Time. When they came across a political leader they couldn’t deal with, the Assads just watched the clock. Despite supposedly being a pariah state and a founding member of the US’s list of ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’, they could always find bits of the world that would deal with them. The European Union, for example, was Syria’s biggest trading partner. The Assads knew that Western and particularly European policy took regular big swings from left to right and back again. ‘We as Westerners consider that when something is happening it will have an end, so we look for a logical timeline to that end,’ a Western diplomat in the region told me.

[The Syrians] tend to believe that: ‘One day you are with us the next you are against.’ You don’t have to go back very far, just to 2005–7. Rice was saying after the assassination of [Lebanese prime minister] Hariri: ‘We are in an era of regime change.’ Then after the election of Sarkozy it was back to business: ‘This is a regime that can be modernised, can be amended.’ And the way they think is that this is temporary and they just have to wait it out.

That’s what the West intended to try this time. It hoped sanctions would bite so hard that after a while the regime would just fall apart. It didn’t work, and neither did the opposition group that Secretary Clinton had championed.

The SNC, which was dominated by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, proved itself to be a disastrous mix of self-serving, disorganised individuals who expended all their energies fighting with each other – at one stage quite literally, when a gathering in Cairo descended into a brawl.
³⁰
Syria ground on into civil war and people died in their thousands. The Obama administration was concentrating on getting re-elected rather than doing anything serious about it. So in the absence of an alternative plan the Gulf states did what they always do when confronted with a complex political dilemma. They opened their wallets and threw money at it.

The secular groups like Omar’s friends had no sponsors. They lost influence, as well as new recruits, to the groups that were getting the Gulf’s arms and cash, smuggled in across the northern border. ‘You could see a lot of convergence between the Turks and the Qataris [around] the Muslim Brotherhood,’ a UN official in New York told me. ‘The Qataris are pushing towards, in the context of Syria, to have another Islamic state run by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a different situation altogether with Saudis and the Salafists. The Saudi government are more concerned about Iran, that’s their biggest monster in the equation. What happens afterwards when it comes to Syria is almost immaterial.’

At first Israel advised America that it did not want Assad to go. Then when it was clear that his days were numbered they wanted it over with fast. They got neither outcome. According to a senior Israeli defence official, what worries Israel now is not just the geographical setting of a new jihad, but a change of focus that it says it detects since Ayman al-Zawahiri took over al-Qaeda following the killing of bin Laden: ‘The al-Zawahiri al-Qaeda from our point of view is worse than the Bin Laden al-Qaeda, because Bin Laden believed in a Global Jihad. He said: “Let’s destroy Washington and then we’ll deal with Israel.” Zawahiri says the opposite. He says: “Let’s destroy Israel, it does not stop us destroying the United States, but let’s focus on the Middle East.” ’

The Arab Spring was at first an ideological catastrophe for al-Qaeda. It fundamentally undermined one of the key planks of the Global Jihad philosophy, which was that the West will not allow peaceful change, so it must first be dealt a mortal blow before work can begin on the model Islamic society. The peaceful overthrow of the American-backed dictator in Egypt by the people in al-Zawahiri’s own home town destroyed that argument. The chaos in Syria gave groups like al-Qaeda another chance.

After the US had spent more than a decade at war with al-Qaeda in the region, the conflict in Syria led to the unedifying spectacle of America and Osama bin Laden’s followers being on the same side, albeit with starkly different visions for the post-conflict era. As that fact became more public and embarrassing Washington tried to distance itself from the nastier consequences of its failure to take a lead on the crisis. In December 2012 it formally declared that one of the more effective elements of the armed Syrian opposition groups, the hard-line jihadist Nusra Front, was an alias of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and thus a terrorist organisation. The announcement was made with little fanfare. That was because to have left the way open for al-Qaeda to reconstitute itself on the border of America’s most important Middle East ally, Israel, was a massive failure of US foreign policy. That money would start flowing from the Gulf states to back jihadist groups fighting in Syria was entirely predictable. It was also easy to move them there. They were just a car ride away in neighbouring Iraq. And they knew the route because it was through Syria, and with the help of the Assad regime, that they had got into Iraq in the first place.

The Nusra Front, also known as the Jabhat al-Nusra, first declared its presence in the conflict in January 2012.
³¹
The group has claimed to be behind most of the large bomb attacks that have taken place in the country, which unsurprisingly have mirrored those in Iraq. By the beginning of 2013 it was thought to number several thousand. However an arms smuggler in Lebanon’s northern Bekaa valley on the Syria border told me that the Nusra Front was ‘a kind of trademark that a lot of people are using to scare their enemies. A lot of people who claim to be Jabhat al-Nusra are not, but they think it’s a better brand name than being the “First Brigade” of somewhere or other.’