In the previous couple of years, a brand new phrase has been added to the political vocabulary “Syrianization”. This new phrase means turning a rustic right into a land with no authorities, within the frequent sense of a burnt, lawless land, each a part of which is beneath the management of an armed mafia group.
The leaders of the Islamic Republic, who are actually shaken by the mass motion of the Iranian individuals, are warning to avoid wasting themselves that Iran may additionally be destroyed. In different phrases, our alternative is proscribed to dwelling or half-living beneath the rule of jurisprudential tyranny or falling into the second Syria.
How did Syria turn out to be Syrian? To start with, practically 12 years in the past, a bunch of Syrian youths got here to the road in Daraa metropolis to protest the continued suffocation, the unfold of unemployment and the darkness of their life horizons. This demonstration was utterly peaceable. The protesters didn’t set fireplace to something and didn’t shout any incendiary slogans. If Syria had a authorities within the standard sense that day, the clever approach to reply to these protests can be to ship a delegation from the central authorities in Damascus to hearken to the protesters and discover methods to meet at the least a part of their calls for.
However the authorities of Bashar al-Assad, the president, was not a standard authorities. This was a authorities monopolized by a military-security-commercial minority, which itself was a minority inside the framework of the Nasiri spiritual minority, which can also be a minority in Shia Gholat, which can also be a minority within the Islamic faith. Thus, accepting the Daraa protesters as equal residents was not acceptable for the minority in query. Within the political sphere of Assad and his Baath Arab Socialist Celebration, the federal government instructions and the individuals, who’re degraded to the extent of topics, obey. On this world, the reply to protest is bullets or jail.
Nonetheless, the massacre that occurred within the valley didn’t finish the protests. Inside a number of days, the Syrian individuals’s motion reached Hama, Aleppo, Sweida and Damascus. This time, some distinguished figures of the Baathist regime demanded a political response to the protests in secret conferences with the regime leaders. However a regime that is aware of nothing however lies and repression couldn’t reap the benefits of the instruments supplied by politics to unravel society’s issues and get out of crises.
At a essential stage in 2012, Bashar al-Assad thought to avoid wasting all the Baathist regime by leaving the scene. The temper of these days was described by Brigadier Basic Hossein Hamdani, one of many officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran who was despatched to Syria, in an extended dialog, a 12 months earlier than his demise in Syria. In response to Hamdani, they packed their baggage to go away in Damascus as a result of at the moment part of the Syrian military had damaged away from the Assad regime and hoped to beat the capital by establishing the “Free Syrian Army”.
Though it may be mentioned that Hamedani has exaggerated the significance of Tehran’s involvement, there isn’t any doubt that the message of the chief of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to Bashar al-Assad was not ineffective in altering the opinion of the dictator of Damascus to go away the scene. Khamenei’s message was easy: keep and resist! We give no matter you need!
Within the decade since that day, the Islamic Republic has spent greater than 20 billion {dollars} in Syria, based on consultants’ estimates. Tehran has additionally created a number of navy models to struggle towards the Syrian individuals and for the good thing about Bashar al-Assad: the Fatemiyoun Brigade, the Zainbiyoun Brigade, and the models of the Morteza Ali motion belong to this class. Together with them, models from Lebanon’s Hezbollah, one other department of Khamenei’s proxy forces, have additionally fought in Syria. Iranian “volunteers”, who’re known as “defenders of the shrine”, have additionally been and are current alongside Syrian, Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi mercenaries.
So as to add to the chaos within the nation, Assad launched greater than 20,000 imprisoned Islamic “terrorists” to open a brand new entrance towards the freedom-loving protesters. It was these freed terrorists who shortly participated within the institution of the Islamic Caliphate in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). On the similar time, Assad promised the greater than 1.5 million Kurds who had misplaced their Syrian citizenship that he would restore full citizenship to them. On this approach, part of the Syrian Kurds beneath the affect of the Kurdistan Staff’ Celebration (PKK), whose fundamental base is in Turkey, entered the battle towards the Syrian freedom teams.
However all these measures had been unsuccessful in suppressing the Syrian individuals’s motion. In 2014, Tehran made contacts with Russia to push Vladimir Putin into struggle in Syria. These calls got here to fruition and Putin assigned the Russian Air Pressure to suppress in Syria. The worth of this service to Bashar al-Assad was a 45-year contract based on which Russia obtained an air-sea base on the Syrian coast of the Mediterranean and was capable of increase its navy presence to that strategic sea for the primary time after the autumn of the Soviet Union.
Putin used the identical tactic in Syria that he utilized in Chechnya: bombing cities throughout the nation. Thus, Aleppo, the second most populated metropolis in Syria, like Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, grew to become a mountain of rubble.
Regularly, “Syrianization” was shaped as a political-historical idea. Destruction means widespread devastation in a rustic the place half of its inhabitants has both turn out to be displaced and refugees or has turn out to be homeless inside its personal land. “Syrianization” means sustaining management of part of the capital and preventing with dozens, or maybe a whole bunch, of different armed teams throughout the nation to formally acknowledge a regime that now not exists. “Syrianization” additionally has one other which means: the division of two info of a rustic into the sphere of affect of a number of overseas powers. Proper now, a part of Syria is managed by Turkey, whereas the opposite half is managed by the US beneath the guise of its Kurdish allies. A 3rd half is managed by Russia and the Islamic Republic has the fourth half within the desert bordering Iraq. The fifth sector can also be dominated by Druze armed forces with the assistance of Jordan Hashemi. Bashar al-Assad and what he calls himself the Syrian authorities are displaying their shadow legitimacy in a sixth part in Damascus.
Thus, the joint plan of Bashar Assad, the Baath Celebration, a part of the Nasiri (Alawi) minority, Ayatollah Khamenei, Main Basic Qassem Soleimani, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are being destroyed. However one other actor has performed a task on this ominous present: the management of the Syrian individuals’s protest motion. This management was by no means capable of current a transparent technique to achieve energy. This management lured the Western powers with mouth-watering guarantees and thought it was carried out taking footage with the French president and receiving a message from the US secretary of state – countless seminars in additional than 30 capitals, from Tokyo to Ottawa, the place the actual political work is finished and took the cities and villages of Syria. A gaggle of exiled figures who had been round Syria for years all of the sudden got here beneath the worldwide highlight as the long run leaders of Syria. Their work was consecutive interviews with Western media, usually in suites of 5-star lodges in Paris, London, New York, and so on. It’s fascinating right here that lots of the leaders of the Baathist regime, who had been lower off from Bashar al-Assad, joined this shaved management so as to compensate for his or her misplaced political virginity and to take a share if there’s a reconciliation.
“Syrianization” needs to be thought-about a brand new sort of tragedy-comedy of human societies by which a whole bunch of hundreds, if not tens of millions, of idealistic, honest and selfless individuals come to the sector to overthrow an autocratic, and corrupt system, hoping to construct a free and law-based society and justice. However, ultimately, they’re lowered to the extent of a device for the revenue of the alleged leaders on the one hand and the battle of overseas powers on the opposite.
“Syrianization” couldn’t have turn out to be a actuality with out Bashar al-Assad, Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama and the ignorant or profit-seeking leaders of the favored motion. At present, Syria, this stateless land, is a breeding floor for the worst parts that threaten a contemporary society: numerous terrorists, looters, business and non secular mafias and mercenaries. To rebuild this ruined nation, greater than three trillion {dollars} of capital is required, a capital that can by no means be collected with out the institution of a authorities in its regular sense. On this approach, Syria is confronted with the query “got here first the hen or the egg”: capital comes first or the conventional authorities?
Let’s return to the propaganda of Khamenei and his accomplices concerning the “Syrianization” of Iran. At first look, the presence of some brokers of Syrianization, together with Khamenei himself and his mentor, Putin, part of the Revolutionary Guards and mercenaries of the Islamic Republic in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, makes the hazard of Syrianizing Iran seem severe.
However a number of necessary elements, I feel, shield Iran towards the chance of turning into Syrian. The primary issue is the deep roots of Iran as a nation. Earlier than 1948, Syria by no means existed as an impartial nation-state and was at all times a group of ethnic, geographical and cultural entities inside the framework of varied empires from Chaldea and Assyria to Rome, Byzantium, Ottoman and eventually, France. However, Iran has handed by way of the crucibles of the constitutional motion and has turn out to be aware of the idea of freedom inside the framework of the legislation throughout 150 years, though intermittently, earlier than Ayatollah Khomeini took workplace. The position of the establishment of the Kingdom of Iran in strengthening the nationwide solidarity of Iranians can’t be ignored both.
Most significantly, the present motion of the Iranian individuals, not like the protest motion of the Syrian individuals, which had a spiritual undertone – with the robust presence of the “Muslim Brotherhood” – doesn’t have a spiritual or sectarian facet, and is a motion that goes past spiritual, skilled and ethnic ideas and calls for a return to the trail of constitutionalism. It means making a society primarily based on the legislation and serving the residents. In current months, the sector leaders of this motion have displayed an encouraging maturity and political tact and have proven that, not like the Syrian protesters, they don’t seem to be ready for a “inexperienced mild” from Paris, London and Washington. Thus, those that need to assist this motion should enter into the sport with the situations and rules of this motion, to not impose their very own situations and rules on it.
At present, Iran seeks to finish the rule of Syria builders like Khamenei. Those that have performed a task in Syrianizing Syria can not scare us from turning into Syrian.
