Turkish riot police spray a woman in the face with tear gas at a demonstration in Istanbul. Photo: Reuters/Osman Orsal

3rd day of demonstrations in Istanbul. AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis

See more photos at the following Atlantic article: Days of Anti-Government Protests and Harsh Crackdowns

A protest in Istanbul, Turkey, that began as a relatively small event earlier in the week, erupted into massive anti-government demonstrations across the country following a harsh crackdown by riot police. People had gathered in Gezi Park to prevent the demolition of the last remaining green public space in the center of Istanbul as part of a major renewal project. Pent-up anger against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party flared up after the violent breakup of the Gezi Park protest, fueling the fiercest anti-government demonstrations in years. Yesterday, more than a thousand protesters were arrested in 90 different demonstrations across Turkey. Prime Minister Erdogan has issued several defiant and dismissive messages, urging demonstrators to go home — which they appear to be ignoring, as thousands have gathered once again in Taksim Square today, starting a third day of protest.

Taksim park protests in 4th day amid police crackdown – Hurriyet

A Turkish American comments from Istanbul:

Many are calling it the Turkish Spring, and a large number of Turks and foreigners inside of the country have found this new activism refreshing. Finally, the people of Turkey are openly expressing their disapproval of what is happening in their country. …

Anyone visiting Turkey will immediately notice how passionate the Turkish people are about their country.  Flags fly everywhere, and it is not difficult to find a picture of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, in every workplace.  Turks have every right to be proud.  Turkey is a Muslim country that has been more successful than other Muslim countries in separating religion and state.  In spite of its success, Turkey still has many struggles.  Over the last two years Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative government, which still remains very popular, has made more and more policies that have upset many Turkish people. Most unhappy Turks, however, simply do nothing more than grumble about the “Islamization” of their country.

On Friday night, May 31, this apathetic mentality changed.  People met in a park in downtown Ankara in a show of solidarity with the protesters of Istanbul.  The Ankara police did not waste any time tear gassing and shooting water cannons at a protest group marching towards the parliament building.  As the night wore on, news spread of protests taking place in other cities across Turkey-some broken up by the police, some not.  Finally, at 2:30 A.M. Saturday morning, June 1, Ankara came alive.  Cars drove through the streets honking, people chanted and cheered, and those in their apartments moved to windows and balconies banging pots and flashing lights.

… The nation-wide protests that started earlier this week in Istanbul were not expected to grow this large. They started as a peaceful sit-in against the destruction of yet another urban park – a growing problem in many Turkish cities.  As the peaceful protest moved into its third day, people started to talk and watch.  Most protests here don’t last more than a few hours.  Early Friday morning the police moved in to try and clear the park using pepper spray and tear gas.  This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

… So what are they protesting?  This protest is not just about a park and trees anymore.  It is about a government-led by Prime Minister Erdogan-that has stopped listening to its people.  It is about a government that is increasingly restricting the media and all attempts at honest reporting about Turkey and its politics. It is about the atrocities the police have committed against the people they are supposed to protect. It is a about a prime minister and his government who were elected for their pro-democracy stance, but seem to be moving in the opposite direction toward authoritarianism.

Analysis: Erdo?an no longer almighty – Hurriyet

To cut the story short, the Taksim wave of protests has turned into the first public defeat of the almighty image of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo?an, and by Turkish people themselves.

It was around lunch time June 1 when Erdo?an reiterated his hard-line position regarding the demonstrators protesting his decision to turn the only remaining green spot in Istanbul’s iconic Taksim Square into a reconstructed historical building with a shopping mall.

… To call this a “Turkish Spring” would be over-dramatizing it. It could be, if there were opposition forces in Turkey that could move in to stop the one man show of a mighty power holder. But it can easily be said that the Taksim brinkmanship marked a turning point in the almighty image of Erdo?an.

Alawites, Alevis, Turkomen

The Alawites (with populations in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey), the Turkish Alevis, and the Turkomen are three separate groups with distinct identities. The Alevis are sometimes mistaken as the “Alawis” of Turkey, but their religious traditions and culture are distinct. Turkey does have an Arabic-speaking Alawite population, primarily in the Antakya area north of Latakia. The following are a few recent articles about the situations of all three communities. The Alevi and Turkomen are often not discussed in the context of the current conflict. Thanks to readers who mailed in or posted comments with the articles.

An Alevi woman prays in Hacibektash (TARIK TINAZAY/AFP/Getty Images)

Syria’s War Impacts Turkish Alevis – al-Monitor – excellent article by Orhan Kemal Cengiz

A legal complaint lodged recently by a Turkish citizen reveals some intriguing details about a book that contains serious hate speech against Alevis.

The book, the title of which translates as The True Face of Batinites and Qarmatians, refers to Alevis as “perverts” who “consider the illicit to be licit.” It has been in circulation since 1948.

Undoubtedly, books containing such hate speech could make their way to printing houses in any country. But the details Turan Eser included in his complaint offer intriguing insight into Turkish realities.

The book’s first edition was printed by none other than the Religious Affairs Directorate (RAD), which, according to the constitution, must be impartial toward all citizens but in fact serves only Sunnis, paying the salaries of all 133,000 imams in mosques across Turkey. More recent editions have been printed by a private publishing house, Sebil.

In the preface of the first edition, then-RAD Chairman Ahmed Hamdi Akseki summarizes the myths circulating about Alevis in Turkey.

“Their remnants continue to exist today. In Iraq, they are called Qaramita and Mazdakiyya because, just like Mazdak in Sassanid times, they say that property and women are to be shared and cannot be in anyone’s ownership and possession. In Khorasan, they are known as Talimiyya and Melahide as well as Maymuniyya after Qarmat’s brother Maymun. In Egypt, they are called Ubeidiyyun after the famous Ubeid, while in Damascus they take the names of Nusayri, Druze and Tayamine. They are known as Baha’is in Palestine, as Bohra and Ismailis in India, as Yamiyya in Yemen, as Alevis in Kurdistan, as Bektashi and Qizilbash among Turks, and as Babiyye in Persia,” Akseki writes.

The book describes Alevis as “ill-intentioned and diabolical,” and says that “marriages with them are not permissible; they are worse heretics even than Jews and Christians since eating the meat they cook is forbidden.”

Alevis are then portrayed as people indulging in sexual debauchery: “When dark falls in the evening, glasses start to make the rounds and heads heat up. As flesh begins to crave, all members of that accursed sect bring in their wives. Entering from all doors, the women join the men, blow out the candles and grab whoever they come across first.”

It is a matter of great interest how the Turkish judiciary will handle this case of hate speech, just weeks after musician Fazil Say and writer Sevan Nisanyan received jail sentences for insulting the religious values of Sunnis in Turkey.

It is, of course, impossible to directly blame the Justice and Development Party (AKP) for such a book still being printed. But undoubtedly, the government holds the primary responsibility for the fact that no step has been taken to resolve the “Alevi problem” in Turkey.

Discriminatory practices against Alevis continue unabated by both the government and RAD. Before anything else, RAD — funded by taxes collected from all Turkish citizens, including the Alevis — provides services for the Sunnis alone.

The government and RAD refuse to recognize the Alevi houses of worship — the cemevis — as such, because the official view in Turkey is that Alevis are Muslim and the mosque is the only house of worship in Islam.

The rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in cases that Alevis have brought and won against Turkey on grounds of discrimination are not being implemented.

Sinan Isik, for instance, had complained over the denial of his request to have the word “Alevi” written in the religion section on his ID card. The ECHR subsequently ruled that the religion section on ID cards violated freedom of conscience. As a result, Turkey was supposed to remove that section from ID cards, but this has not been done.

Similarly, in a case filed by Alevi citizen Hasan Zengin, the ECHR condemned Turkey on grounds that religion classes in schools teach only Sunni Islam and that Alevi students are barred from seeking exemption from those classes. The government has made no move to scrap the compulsory religion classes in line with the ruling.

In the reforms the government has so far introduced, the “Alevi problem” has benefited the least. The government has been less tolerant toward demands for the recognition of Alevi identity and freedom of worship even when compared to its attitude towards non-Muslim minorities.

Certain moves in recent years have seriously alienated the Alevis. In the past two years, for instance, the government has denied Alevis permission to hold commemorations for the terrible Alevi massacre in Maras province on Dec. 19-26, 1978.

It is crystal clear that Alevis feel increasingly ostracized by a government that refuses to recognize their houses of worship, is reluctant to make satisfactory amendments in line with ECHR rulings, bars them from even commemorating the atrocities they have suffered, and — on top of everything — is pursuing a pro-Sunni foreign policy.

It goes without saying that in the eyes of Alevis, the government’s Syria policy is in no way irrelevant to the situation described above. Given this background, the lines of Rober Koptas in Agosweekly make perfect sense: “The impact of the Syrian war on [the border province of] Hatay is embodied in the anxiety of the Nusayri [Alawite/Alevi] population in the area and their not-so-tolerant attitude toward refugees fleeing to Turkey. Its reflection in domestic politics comes in the form of a conviction, especially in secularist quarters, that the AKP supports the jihadists in Syria. Anatolian Alevis, in turn, perceive this as another manifestation of Sunni cruelty, even though they have no profound cultural bonds with Arab Alawites, or Nusayris.”With the AKP making no effort to find a solution, the Alevi problem is likely to deepen in parallel to the Syrian crisis, and new areas of social conflict are likely to emerge as a result.

As Koptas says, if the government “continues to resist a fair and peaceful solution to Alevi problems, the Syrian quagmire could drown Turkey, pulling it by its Alevi rein. The crisis sparked by the Kurdish problem yesterday could be rekindled by the Alevi problem tomorrow, and an all-encompassing spiral of violence could take the country hostage for who knows how many years.”

 

Selim the Grim is the Symbol of Alevi Annihilation

Picture from Bianet article

Erdo?an Ayd?n, a historian and researcher on Turkey’s Alevis, told bianet that Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim marked the symbol of the annihilation of Alevis – a group that constituted half of Anatolian population in the 16th century.

The denomination of Istanbul’s third bosphorus bridge engendered discussion in Turkey.

Turkey’s top officials including President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an participated this morning to the groundbreaking ceremony of Istanbul’s third bosphorus bridge which was named after Yavuz Sultan Selim, as known as Selim the Grim among western historians.

Erdo?an Ayd?n, a historian and researcher on Turkey’s Alevis, told bianet that Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim marked the symbol of the annihilation of Alevis – a group that constituted half of Anatolian population in the 16th century.

“After Selim, annihilation of Alevis said to be legitimate”

Ayd?n explained bianet what Selim the Grim meant for Alevi people:

“Selim is one of the most prominent symbols of despotism that was inherited from father to son in conquest-based empire. This rulership inevitably sought to dominate its neighboring peoples including Christians and Muslims.

“In the same way, this power would not let any faiths other than it own, especially Alevi faith that incorporated a culture of reflection and objection.

“For this reason, Selim’s assimilation and annihilation politics on Alevi Turkmens and Kurds was not a result of the opposition between Ottomans and Safavis, but a result of this  domination dynamics. Therefore, Sultan Selim the Grim marked the symbol of the annihilation of Alevis – a group that constituted half of Anatolian population in the 16th century.”

“Thus, religious clerks [?eyhülislam] during and after Selim the Grim’s rule wrote fatwas [islamic statements] that legitimated the annihilation of Alevis people of all ages departing that they had a different faith [than Islam]. This situation went as far as Abu Saud Efendi, the ?eyhülislam of Suleiman the Magnificent who wrote death fatwas against those who read the poetry of humanist Yunus Emre.

“Sign of no peace at home, peace outside”

Ayd?n explained the reasons behind current government’s choice to name the third bridge as follows:

“Turning the names of monarchy to heroic figures in an environment where we seek a modern and democratic mentality demonstrates how our future is being desired to be put on an antidemocratic axis. Democratic governments usually choose the names of scientists or those who served largely to the improvement of humanity.

“They know that these symbolisms aim to demonstrate what direction the society is desired to be moulded upon. Naming the bridge as Selim shows the fact that the incumbent government was unable to accept no peace at home, nor outside. For instance, it became clear that Turkey’s foreign policy on Syria reflected the neo-Ottoman mentality towards Selim’s path.”

Great article on Syria’s Turkoman population and role with the opposition, by Nick Heras: Syrian Turkmen Join Opposition Forces in Pursuit of a New Syrian Identity – Jamestown Foundation:

Syrian Turkomen Rebels (Source Demotix)

Syria’s Turkmen community is becoming increasingly involved in the country’s opposition movement. The mostly Sunni Turkmen of Syria represent a significant ethnic minority community that is located throughout the country, particularly in diverse and highly strategic areas that are currently the sites of significant conflict. The Turkmen community in Syria is charged by the Assad government of being militantly pro-Turkey, pro-opposition, and in support of the re-imposition of Turkish dominance over Syria…

Syria’s Turkmen communities are descendants of Oghuz Turkish tribal migrants who began moving from Central Asia into the area of modern-day Syria during the 10^th century, when the Turkic Seljuk dynasty ruled much of the region. Under the Ottomans, Turkmen were encouraged to establish villages throughout the rural hinterlands of several Syrian cities in order to counter the demographic weight and influence of the settled and nomadic and semi-nomadic Arab tribesmen that populated the region. Syrian Turkmen were also settled to serve as local gendarmes to help assert Ottoman authority over roads and mountain passes in diverse regions such as the Alawite-majority, northwestern coastal governorate of Latakia … After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, communities of Turkmen continued to reside in the country.

Syrian Turkmen opposition leaders, many of who are in exile in Turkey, assert that while Turkey is a cultural “Father” country to their communities, Turkmen are committed to a pluralistic, territorially intact Syria, with a polity that is representative of all of its ethnic and sectarian groups and is no longer ruled by the largely Arab Ba’ath Party… Citing strong historical and cultural ties and his country’s deep affinity for their ethnic compatriots, Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul stated that: “The Syrian Turkmen people are integrated parts of our nation, and they are the strongest bridge of humanity between Turkey and our Syrian brothers and sisters.” Syrian Turkmen leaders report that their efforts to win the support of anti-Assad Arab states were rebuffed because their community was seen by those states as already having a sponsor in the Turkish government.

Turkmen leaders assert that their community suffered discrimination and repression under Ba’athist rule. Turkmen were unable to teach the Turkish language and Turkmen cultural and historical subjects in schools, Turkmen villages were given Arab names and Turkmen land was appropriated for the use of Arab peasants … These factors, as well as tribal divisions within the community and the lack of a large contiguous area within the country where Turkmen are a plurality of the population are blamed by Syrian Turkmen leaders for their community’s lack of participation in the country’s political opposition prior to the uprising.

Turkmen leaders also assert that under the Hafez al-Assad government, their community was viewed as a potential “fifth column” for Turkey, which had a hostile relationship with the Syrian government for much of Hafez al-Assad’s rule. They also state that Hafez al-Assad’s position on the Turkmen was adopted by his son Bashar al-Assad after the onset of the Syrian uprising and the Turkish government’s consequent support for the Syrian opposition. As a result of this history of dispossession, Syrian Turkmen opposition leaders are seeking the recognition of their community as an integral part of the country and their cultural and linguistic rights guaranteed in a post-Assad Syrian constitution…

… In Latakia governorate, the Syrian military is accused of shelling and striking Turkmen villages from the air in the Jabal al-Turkman region, which is now considered to be firmly under the control of the opposition … Current fighting in and around the southern regions of the Jabal al-Turkman is reported to be fiercely contested, with overtones of communal animosity between Alawites and Turkmen … Turkmen opposition leaders allege that the Syrian government has a policy of forcing Turkmen communities out of the area in order to create an autonomous Alawite region in the event of the collapse of the al-Assad government…

Syria’s Turkmen communities are active participants in the Syrian opposition and stand to benefit from this participation in any post-Assad Syrian state. The political and diplomatic support of the Turkish government, in the context of weakened al-Assad government control over many regions of the country, provides Syrian Turkmen opposition groups with a benefactor as they position themselves to participate in a potential post-Assad transition period. Syrian Turkmen leaders appear to be pursuing citizenship-based representation in a future Syrian government and thus far appear to be carefully seeking to legitimize their community’s status as “Syrians” in a diverse Syrian polity.

This narrative of inclusion, politically important for the community as a minority without a distinct political or geographical base, may be tested in the event of a bitter communal conflict between Turkmen and other Syrian communities particularly Alawites and Kurds. In the context of potential widespread conflict in a post-Assad Syria, Turkmen armed opposition groups, relatively small in number and geographically dispersed, may be limited in their ability to protect the property and lives of their community and can not necessarily depend on the intervention of the Turkish military to support it in its interests. A pluralistic, post-Assad Syrian state that can guarantee the physical security of all its communities, and that considers Turkmen to be “Syrian,” is thus an important objective of the current Syrian Turkmen opposition.

Could the Demise of Assad Lead to an Israel-Alawite Alliance? – Fair Observer

The fall of the Assad regime could pave the way for an Israeli-Alawite alliance, argues Ghassan Dahhan.

Various analysts have suggested that if the Alawite-dominated Baath regime in Syria collapses, the country might become embroiled in a civil war between the Sunni majority on the one side and the Alawite minority on the other. Whether this scenario is likely to unfold is debatable. However, there is evidence that Israeli policy-makers are preparing to absorb refugees from the Alawite minority who are estimated to compose around 12 percent of Syrian society in the occupied Golan. “On the day the Assad regime falls, it is expected to harm the Alawite clan. We are preparing to receive Alawite refugees on the Golan Heights,” Israeli Army Chief Benny Gantz was recently quoted as saying. Interestingly Gantz has not made a similar proposal to the current stream of mostly Sunni refugees who are trying to escape the bloodshed in their country. This statement might be an indication that Israel’s long-term strategy is to seek an alliance with the sect that is currently supporting the very regime Israel hopes to see falling.

Nusra’s Chemical Weapons in Turkey

Turkey finds sarin gas in possession of al-Nusra fighters inside Turkey – RT

Turkish security forces found a 2kg cylinder with sarin gas after searching the homes of Syrian militants from the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Nusra Front who were previously detained, Turkish media reports. The gas was reportedly going to be used in a bomb.

The sarin gas was found in the homes of suspected Syrian Islamists detained in the southern provinces of Adana and Mersia following a search by Turkish police on Wednesday, reports say. The gas was allegedly going to be used to carry out an attack in the southern Turkish city of Adana.

On Monday, Turkish special anti-terror forces arrested 12 suspected members of the Al-Nusra Front, the Al-Qaeda affiliated group which has been dubbed “the most aggressive and successful arm” of the Syrian rebels. The group was designated a terrorist organization by the United States in December.

Police also reportedly found a cache of weapons, documents and digital data which will be reviewed by police.

Following the searches, five of those detained were released following medical examinations at the Forensic Medicine Institution Adana. Seven suspects remain in custody. Turkish authorities are yet to comment on the arrests.

Russia reacted strongly to the incident, calling for a thorough investigation into the detention of Syrian militants in possession of sarin gas. “We are extremely concerned with media reports. Russia believes that the use of any chemical weapons is absolutely inadmissible,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Thursday.

Russia waiting for Turkey’s explanation on sarin gas link in bomb attack – Zaman

Why Turkey is Essential for the Syrian Opposition – Atlantic

Rebel fighters rely on the country for support and weapons, but it may no longer be a secure option.

… It has been almost two weeks since the bombings in Reyhanli, Turkey that killed more than 50 people. Clean-up efforts are underway, but the incident added to the increasing tensions in the country, which opposition soldiers hiding out in Turkey say could change the dynamic of their operations.

Turkey may no longer be a secure option for the opposition because the war in Syria seems to have seeped through the border. Rebels escape imminent violence by fleeing, but they do not fully escape the watchful eye of the Syrian regime. An extension of the Syrian war is bubbling up in Turkey.

Over the past two years, the opposition has used Turkey to gather resources to aid its fight inside Syria. But the country no longer acts solely as a pipeline for money, aid, and weapons. It has become a home base for rebel soldiers to coordinate and heal before heading back to fight. It provides space for a complicated web of fractious groups that support various opposition forces in Syria.

It is unclear how many battalions in Syria have groups operating in Turkey. And there is no way of knowing who is affiliated with which opposition group when they cross the border

… Turkish officials in Reyhanli said last week that the people who carried out the bombings were connected with the Syrian mukhabarat. According to news reports, suspects admitted that the initial attack was supposed to take place in Antakya, where the majority of opposition leaders and soldiers live.

Patrick Cockburn Essay

Please read this insightful essay by Patrick Cockburn: Is it the end of Sykes-Picot? – London Review of Books

For the first two years of the Syrian civil war foreign leaders regularly predicted that Bashar al-Assad’s government would fall any day. In November 2011, King Abdullah of Jordan said that the chances of Assad’s surviving were so slim he ought to step down. In December last year, Anders Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, said: ‘I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse.’ Even the Russian Foreign Ministry – which generally defends Assad – has at times made similar claims. Some of these statements were designed to demoralise Assad’s supporters by making his overthrow seem inevitable. But in many cases outsiders genuinely believed that the end was just round the corner. The rebels kept claiming successes, and the claims were undiscriminatingly accepted.

That Assad’s government is on its last legs has always been something of a myth.YouTube videos of victorious rebel fighters capturing military outposts and seizing government munitions distract attention from the fact that the war is entering its third year and the insurgents have succeeded in capturing just one of the 14 provincial capitals. (In Libya the insurgents held Benghazi and the whole of the east as well as Misrata and smaller towns in the west from the beginning of the revolt.) The Syrian rebels were never as strong militarily as the outside world supposes. But they have always been way ahead of the government in their access to the international media. Whatever the uprising has since become it began in March 2011 as a mass revolt against a cruel and corrupt police state. The regime at first refused to say much in response, then sounded aggrieved and befuddled as it saw the vacuum it had created being filled with information put out by its enemies. Defecting Syrian soldiers were on television denouncing their former masters while government units that had stayed loyal remained unreported and invisible. And so it has largely continued. The ubiquitous YouTube videos of minor, and in some cases illusory, victories by the rebels are put about in large part to persuade the world that, given more money and arms, they can quickly win a decisive victory and end the war.

There is a striking divergence between the way the Syrian war is seen in Beirut – just a few hours’ drive from Damascus, even now – and what actually appears to be happening on the ground inside Syria. On recent trips I would drive to Damascus, having listened to Syrians and non-Syrians in Beirut who sincerely believed that rebel victory was close, only to find the government still very much in control. Around the capital, the rebels held some suburbs and nearby towns, but in December I was able to travel the ninety miles between Damascus and Homs, Syria’s third largest city, without any guards and with ordinary heavy traffic on the road. Friends back in Beirut would shake their heads in disbelief when I spoke about this and politely suggest that I’d been hoodwinked by the regime.

Some of the difficulties in reporting the war in Syria aren’t new. Television has a great appetite for the drama of war, for pictures of missiles exploding over Middle Eastern cities amid the sparkle of anti-aircraft fire. Print journalism can’t compete with these images, but they are rarely typical of what is happening. Despite the iconic images Baghdad wasn’t, in fact, heavily bombarded in either 1991 or 2003. The problem is much worse in Syria than it used to be in Iraq or Afghanistan (in 2001) because the most arresting pictures out of Syria appear first on YouTube and are, for the most part, provided by political activists. They are then run on TV news with health warnings to the effect that the station can’t vouch for their veracity, but viewers assume that the station wouldn’t be running the film if it didn’t believe it was real. Actual eyewitnesses are becoming hard to find, since even people living a few streets from the fighting in Damascus now get most of their information from the internet or TV.

Not all YouTube evidence is suspect. Though easily fabricated, it performs certain tasks well. It can show that atrocities have taken place, and even authenticate them: in the case of a pro-government militia massacring rebel villagers, for instance, or rebel commanders mutilating and executing government soldiers. Without a video of him doing so, who would have believed that a rebel commander had cut open a dead government soldier and eaten his heart? Pictures of physical destruction are less reliable because they focus on the worst damage, giving the impression – which may or may not be true – that a whole district is in ruins. What YouTube can’t tell you is who is winning the war.

*

The reality is that no one is. Over the last year a military stalemate has prevailed, with each side launching offensives in the areas where they are strongest. Both sides have had definite but limited successes. In recent weeks government forces have opened up the road that leads west from Homs to the Mediterranean coast and the road from Damascus south to the Jordanian border. They have expanded the territory they hold around the capital and trained a militia of sixty thousand, the National Defence Force, to guard positions once held by the Syrian army. This strategy of retrenchment and consolidation isn’t new. About six months ago the army stopped trying to keep control of outlying positions and focused instead on defending the main population centres and the routes linking them. These pre-planned withdrawals took place at the same time as real losses on the battlefield, and were misinterpreted outside Syria as a sign that the regime was imploding. The strategy was indeed a sign of military weakness, but by concentrating its forces in certain areas the government was able to launch counterattacks at vital points. Assad isn’t going to win a total victory, but the opposition isn’t anywhere close to overthrowing him either. This is worth stressing because Western politicians and journalists so frequently take it for granted that the regime is entering its last days. A justification for the British and French argument that the EU embargo on arms deliveries to the rebels should be lifted – a plan first mooted in March but strongly opposed by other EU members – is that these extra weapons will finally tip the balance decisively against Assad. The evidence from Syria itself is that more weapons will simply mean more dead and wounded.

The protracted conflict that is now underway in Syria has more in common with the civil wars in Lebanon and Iraq than with the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya or the even swifter regime changes in Egypt and Tunisia at the start of the Arab Spring. The civil war in Lebanon lasted 15 years, from 1975 to 1990, and the sectarian divisions which caused it are as marked as ever. In Iraq, 2006 and 2007 are usually described as being the worst years of the slaughter – three thousand people murdered every month – but sectarian killings began immediately after the US invasion in 2003 and haven’t stopped since. According to the UN some seven hundred Iraqis were killed in April: the highest monthly total since 2008. Syria is increasingly resembling its neighbours to the west and east: there will soon be a solid bloc of fragmented countries that stretches between the Mediterranean and Iran. In all three places the power of the central state is draining away as communities retreat into their own well-defended and near autonomous enclaves.

Meanwhile, foreign countries are gaining influence with the help of local proxies, and in so doing the rebels’ supporters are repeating the mistake Washington made ten years ago in Iraq. In the heady days after the fall of Saddam, the Americans announced that Iran and Syria were the next targets for regime change. This was largely ill-informed hubris, but the threat was real enough for the Syrians and Iranians to decide that in order to stop the Americans acting against them they had to stop the US stabilising its occupation of Iraq and lent their support to all of America’s opponents regardless of whether they were Shia or Sunni.

From an early stage in the Syrian uprising the US, Nato, Israel and the Sunni Arab states openly exulted at the blow that would soon be dealt to Iran and to Hezbollah in Lebanon: Assad’s imminent fall would deprive them of their most important ally in the Arab world. Sunni leaders saw the uprising not as a triumph of democracy but as the beginning of a campaign directed at Shia or Shia-dominated states. As with Iraq in 2003, Hezbollah and Iran believe they have no alternative but to fight and that it’s better to get on with it while they still have friends in power in Damascus. ‘If the enemy attacks us,’ Hossein Taeb, a high-ranking intelligence officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, recently said, ‘and seeks to take over Syria or Khuzestan’ – an Iranian province – ‘the priority is to maintain Syria, because if we maintain Syria we can take back Khuzestan. But if we lose Syria we won’t be able to hold Tehran.’ Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, made it very clear in a speech on 30 April that the Lebanese Shia also see Syria as a battleground where they can’t afford a defeat. ‘Syria,’ he said, ‘has real friends in the region and the world who will not let Syria fall into the hands of America, Israel or takfiri groups.’ He believes the very survival of the Shia is at stake. For many in the Middle East this sounded like a declaration of war: a significant one, given Hezbollah’s experience in fighting a guerrilla war against the Israelis in Lebanon. The impact of its skill in irregular warfare has already been witnessed in the fighting at Qusayr and Homs, just beyond Lebanon’s northern border. ‘It probably is unrealistic to expect Lebanese actors to take a step back,’ a study by the International Crisis Group concludes. ‘Syria’s fate, they feel, is their own, and the stakes are too high for them to keep to the sideline.’

*

The Syrian civil war is spreading. This, not well-publicised advances or withdrawals on the battlefield, is the most important new development. Political leaders in the region see the dangers more intensely than the rest of the world. ‘Neither the opposition nor the regime can finish the other off,’ Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, said earlier this year. ‘If the opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan, and a sectarian war in Iraq.’ Of these countries, the most vulnerable is Lebanon, given the division between Sunni and Shia, a weak state, porous borders and proximity to heavily populated areas of Syria. A country of four million people has already taken in half a million Syrian refugees, most of them Sunnis.

In Iraq, the Syrian civil war has reignited a sectarian conflict that never entirely ended. The destabilising of his country that Maliki predicted in the event of an opposition victory has already begun. The overthrow of Saddam brought to power a Shia-Kurdish government that displaced Sunni rule dating back to the foundation of the Iraqi state in 1921. It is this recently established status quo that is now under threat. The revolt of the Sunni majority in Syria is making the Sunni minority in Iraq feel that the regional balance is swinging in their favour. They started to demonstrate in December, modelling their protests on the Arab Spring. They wanted reform rather than revolution, but to the Shia majority the demonstrations appeared to be part of a frighteningly powerful Sunni counter-offensive across the Middle East. The Baghdad government equivocated until 23 April, when a military force backed by tanks crushed a sit-in protest in the main square of Hawijah, a Sunni town south-west of Kirkuk, killing at least 50 people including eight children. Since then local Sunni leaders who had previously backed the Iraqi army against the Kurds have been demanding that it leave their provinces. Iraq may be disintegrating.

The feeling that the future of whole states is in doubt is growing across the Middle East – for the first time since Britain and France carved up the remains of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. ‘It is the end of Sykes-Picot,’ I was told repeatedly in Iraq; the reference was to the agreement of 1916 which divided up the spoils between Britain and France and was the basis for later treaties. Some are jubilant at the collapse of the old order, notably the thirty million Kurds who were left without a state of their own after the Ottoman collapse and are now spread across Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. They feel their moment has come: they are close to independence in Iraq and are striking a deal with the Turkish government for political rights and civil equality. In March, the Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK declared an end to their thirty-year war with the Turkish government and started withdrawing into the mountains of northern Iraq. The 2.5 million Kurds in northern Syria, 10 per cent of the population, have assumed control of their towns and villages and are likely to demand a high degree of autonomy from any postwar Syrian government.

What will the new order in the Middle East look like? This should be Turkey’s great moment in the region: it has a powerful military, a prospering economy and a well-established government. It is allied to Saudi Arabia and Qatar in supporting the Syrian opposition and is on good terms with the US. But these are dangerous waters to fish in. Three years ago, Ankara was able to deal peaceably with Syria, Iraq and Iran, but now it has poisonous relations with all three. Engagement in Syria on the side of the rebels isn’t popular at home and the government is clearly surprised that the conflict hasn’t yet ended. There are signs that the violence is spilling over Turkey’s 510-mile frontier with Syria, across which insurgent groups advance and retreat at will. On 11 May, two bombs in a Turkish border town killed 49 people, almost all Turkish. An angry crowd of Turks marched down the main street chanting ‘kill the Syrians’ as they assaulted Syrian shopkeepers. Arab politicians wonder whether the Turks know what they are getting into and how they will handle it. ‘The Turks are big on rhetoric but often disappointing when it comes to operational ability,’ one Arab leader says. ‘The Iranians are just the opposite.’ The recent deal between the government and Turkey’s Kurds could easily unravel. A long war in Syria could open up divisions in Turkey just as it is doing elsewhere.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it changed the overall balance of power and destabilised every country in the region. The same thing is happening again, except that the impact of the Syrian war is likely to be less easily contained. Already the frontier dividing the western deserts of Iraq from the eastern deserts of Syria is ceasing to have any physical reality. In April, al-Qaida in Iraq embarrassed the rebels’ Western supporters by revealing that it had founded, reinforced with experienced fighters and devoted half its budget to supporting al-Nusra, militarily the most effective rebel group. When Syrian soldiers fled into Iraq in March they were ambushed by al-Qaida and 48 of them were killed before they could return to Syrian territory.

There is virtually no state in the region that hasn’t got some stake in the conflict. Jordan, though nervous of a jihadi victory in Syria, is allowing arms shipments from Saudi Arabia to reach rebels in southern Syria by road. Qatar has reportedly spent $3 billion on supporting the rebels over the last two years and has offered $50,000 to every Syrian army defector and his family. In co-ordination with the CIA it has sent seventy military flights to Turkey with arms and equipment for the insurgents. The Tunisian government says that eight hundred Tunisians are fighting on the rebel side but security sources are quoted as saying the real figure is closer to two thousand. Moaz al-Khatib, the outgoing president of the Syrian National Coalition, which supposedly represents the opposition, recently resigned, declaring as he did so that the group was controlled by outside powers – i.e. Saudi Arabia and Qatar. ‘The people inside Syria,’ he said, ‘have lost the ability to decide their own fate. I have become only a means to sign some papers while hands from different parties want to decide on behalf of the Syrians.’ He claimed that on one occasion a rebel unit failed to go to the rescue of villagers being massacred by government forces because they hadn’t received instructions from their paymasters.

Fear of widespread disorder and instability is pushing the US, Russia, Iran and others to talk of a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Some sort of peace conference may take place in Geneva over the next month, with the aim at least of stopping things getting worse. But while there is an appetite for diplomacy, nobody knows what a solution would look like. It’s hard to imagine a real agreement being reached when there are so many players with conflicting interests. Five distinct conflicts have become tangled together in Syria: a popular uprising against a dictatorship which is also a sectarian battle between Sunnis and the Alawite sect; a regional struggle between Shia and Sunni which is also a decades-old conflict between an Iranian-led grouping and Iran’s traditional enemies, notably the US and Saudi Arabia. Finally, at another level, there is a reborn Cold War confrontation: Russia and China v. the West. The conflict is full of unexpected and absurd contradictions, such as a purportedly democratic and secular Syrian opposition being funded by the absolute monarchies of the Gulf who are also fundamentalist Sunnis.

By savagely repressing demonstrations two years ago Bashar al-Assad helped turn mass protests into an insurrection which has torn Syria apart. He is probably correct in predicting that diplomacy will fail, that his opponents inside and outside Syria are too divided to agree on a peace deal. He may also be right in believing that greater foreign intervention ‘is a clear probability’. The quagmire is turning out to be even deeper and more dangerous than it was in Iraq.

Round Up

Qatar: Attention-Starved Teen of the Middle East – Bloomberg

… One of the biggest questions asked by people who watch the Middle East is a simple one: What, exactly, does Qatar want? In addition to funding Hamas and providing support for Islamists across the region, Qatar also hosts the forward headquarters of the U.S. Central Command at the huge Al Udeid Air Base. The government of Qatar also hosts, and owns, the Al Jazeera television network, which allows it to project its often anti-American ideas around the world. (The only government that has guaranteed immunity against criticism from Al Jazeera is, unsurprisingly, Qatar’s).

… Many Arab leaders think that Qatar’s leadership is motivated by three basic interests. The first is that Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (the prime minister’s boss and cousin), actually feels sympathy for Islamists. The second is that despite this sympathy, he understands that the best guarantor of his continued rule in his unhappy neighborhood is the permanent presence of the American military on his territory. The third is that Qatar will support — out of competitiveness, spite and jealousy — whatever Saudi Arabia, its much larger neighbor, opposes.

The ultimate explanation for Qatar’s behavior, however, may be that the country is essentially an attention-starved teenager, whose emotional insecurity causes it to insert itself into everyone’s business. That’s one reason the Qatari government maintains an intermittently open relationship with Israeli officials; it wants to play a central role in the Middle East peace process. This week, it spearheaded a drive to revive negotiations, reintroducing a version of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state and normalization of relations between Arabs and Israel.

It may seem improbable that the Qataris would even try to match Saudi Arabia, or any of their larger neighbors, in influence. Qatar is about half the size of Belize. But thanks to its immense oil wealth, the country’s per-capita gross domestic product is one of the highest in the world.

Qatar may also be the biggest exploiter of guest workers in the world. Of a population of roughly 1.9 million, almost 90 percent are migrant workers who, human-rights groups allege, are often treated with great cruelty by their employers and by the state. Qatar was recently chosen to host the 2022 World Cup, and it plans to use an army of exploited Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepalese to build its new stadiums.

… When his turn came, Indyk (who is a friend of mine) asked HBJ a series of direct and uncomfortable questions that prompted answers so incredible they had many of the people in the audience not on Qatar’s payroll rolling their eyes. “Whether it’s your bailing out the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, or your support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, or Hamas in Gaza,” Indyk said, “there’s the impression that you’re taking sides.”

… Indyk’s next question touched on an even more sensitive subject: Qatar’s support for antigovernment Syrian Islamists, including those with direct ties to al-Qaeda. Again, the prime minister bobbed and weaved, eventually settling on a rhetorical strategy of blaming the U.S.: “We have to do more. The United States has to do more,” he said. “But later, don’t blame us, or you blame yourself, because it will be our mistake together not to intervene.” He ended by scolding his host: “So this rumor, again, it’s between families, which are sometimes jealous. Sometimes we tease each other. Don’t go to this business, Martin.”

Iranian aid to Hamas dwindles as Hamas supports Syrian rebels – Arutz Sheva

The British Daily Telegraph reports that Hamas, which rules Gaza, is paying a heavy price in lost aid over its assistance to the rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iran has made a meaningful cut in its aid to Hamas, which had previously reached amounts as large as 15 million Australian dollars per month.

… Hamas maintained a neutral stance in the first months of the war, but when it came out on the side of the rebels, its delegation was kicked out of Syria. Its representatives in Lebanon are now feeling similar pressure from Hizbullah.

Syrian rebels and Hezbollah ‘exchange fire in Lebanon’ – BBC

A number of people have been killed in an exchange of fire between Syrian rebels and fighters from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, say reports. Lebanese security sources said the clashes took place on Lebanon’s side of the border, near the town of Baalbek. Hezbollah is fighting alongside the army in Syria, but the clashes have rarely crossed onto Lebanese soil.

Control of Roads in Syria, BBC – ISW

The Counter-Insurgency Role of Syria’s “Popular Committees” – Nick Heras

Although accused by the Syrian opposition of serving the same function as the shabiha (ghosts) paramilitary units that have earned a notorious reputation for committing massacres against Syrian opposition members, the Popular Committees, unlike the shabiha, are not generally deployed in battle outside their area of residence. They are generally armed with light weapons and are organized on the village and city district level. Popular Committee forces man checkpoints, conduct door-to-door raids and occasionally provide support for the Syrian military against the armed Syrian opposition in divided, heavily-contested areas of the country by holding areas cleared of armed opposition members

Alwiya Ahfaad ar-Rasool: A Growing Force in the Syrian Armed Opposition

Alwiya Ahfaad ar-Rasool (Brigades of the Descendants of the Prophet) is an increasingly powerful national umbrella organization of locally-based Syrian Sunni Islamist armed opposition fighting groups which are active belligerents against the al-Assad government. It is a “franchise” organization whose constituent kata’ib (battalions) announce that they are formally part of, and fight under the banner of, the national “Alwiya Ahfaad ar-Rasool.” The number of kata’ib throughout Syria stating that they are a part of Alwiya Ahfaad ar-Rasool has been growing quickly since the organization’s founding in July 2012.

Muslim Brotherhood opens direct link to rebels in Damascus

The Muslim Brotherhood recently opened direct contacts with opposition groups in Damascus, providing them with cash for the first time and promising political influence in an effort to gain their support, according to Syrians organising clandestine relief efforts in rebel-held areas of the capital.

The infusion of cash and offer of political collaboration last week came just days after the Muslim Brotherhood’s secretary general, Raid Al Shaqfa, announced the organisation would reopen offices inside Syria, after years of exile. The Brotherhood’s largesse followed a cutback of relief assistance to some groups in the capital by the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), the officially recognised opposition alliance.

The other afternoon on NPR, Melissa Block interviewed an opponent of intervention in Syria, Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma–who argues that Syria would be another Iraq– and promptly brought up Landis’s marriage to a woman from a prominent Alawite family, suggesting that Landis was guilty of dual loyalty in his ideas about Syria.

You will see that the supporter of intervention in Syria who was on the show, Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (the thinktank spinoff of the Israel lobby group AIPAC), then ran with Block’s theme; and Landis, on the defensive, was compelled to assert, “I’m an American… I’m an American trying to keep us out of another Iraq-type of venture.”

BLOCK: Joshua Landis, I’d be curious to hear your perspective, as somebody who married into what I gather is a prominent Syrian Alawite family. Alawites are the minority in Syria, party of President Assad and other elites. Help us understand the Alawite perspective on the rebel movement and the future of their country.

LANDIS: Well, as I said, this is a ethnic war and it’s devolving increasingly towards minorities, who are 20 percent of Syria, led by the Alawites, 12 percent, who have monopolized the military and security forces. They have had their foot on the throats of the Sunni-Arab majority for the last 40 or 50 years. Sunni-Arab majority has finally had enough of this and they’re trying to overthrow this regime…

LANDIS: Could I have one rejoinder? Andrew just said that I’m a regime-supporter for making this argument and therefore trying to scare Americans away. I think that’s an unfair accusation. I’m an American.

TABLER: You’ve got to be kidding, Josh. You have been one of the biggest supporters of Bashar al-Assad for a long time, and look, that’s your position. And I think the argument you make…

LANDIS: That’s completely untrue. And I’m an American trying to keep us out of another Iraq-type of venture.

TABLER: I think that you are…

LANDIS: What you are saying is that Syria’s not like Iraq.

TABLER: I’m sorry I don’t agree with you.

LANDIS: And Syria’s exactly like Iraq. This is not about the regime. This is about America staying out of a quagmire, Andrew.

TABLER: Josh, I just think that your positions have come consistently on side of the regime.

LANDIS: Well, that’s because I want Americans to stay out. I think the Syrians have to settle their own problems.

I find this fascinating. For if Landis’s marriage is fair game– and I think it is– then so are the social and ideological adhesions of neoconservatives. Are they Zionists? Do they have family living in Israel? Why did neoconservatives Richard Perle and David Wurmser– who is married to an Israeli-American– write “A Clean Break” for Netanyahu in 1996, calling for regime change in Iraq? Given these connections to a rightwing foreign regime, should these men have served in George Bush’s foreign-policy braintrust? Did not Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, who also were part of that brain trust, have family living in Israel?

What about liberal Aaron David Miller, who tells us in his book that concern for Israel was part of his “ethnic DNA.” Should he have been a peace processor? What about Chuck Schumer, who says his name means guardian in Hebrew and he is a guardian of Israel?

Do we ever hear mainstream media buttonholing these people about their connections to Israel or asking, sincerely, Can you help us understand Zionism in Jewish life? No.

Americans have a right to know about these things. From the very beginnings of political Zionism, when Herzl approached French and English Jews and had the door slammed in his face, Jews expressed the fear that Zionism would cast a question on their patriotism. Eric Alterman has said that to be a Zionist is to be dual loyal:

I was raised dually loyal my whole life. When I went to Hebrew school, the content of my Hebrew school was all about supporting Israel. When my parents who I think are here tonight sent me to Israel when I was 14, on a ZOA [Zionist Organization of America]-sponsored trip… it was drummed into me that I should do what’s best for Israel.

Dual loyalty doesn’t mean disqualification. As Louis Brandeis established, such affinities are just part of the American salad. Fine. We are worldly people. We all have adhesions– some of which go across borders. But as Melissa Block believes, it is sometimes fair to discuss those adhesions. Too bad that principle is only honored when it comes to an opponent of neoconservatism.

’67 Interview With Famous Spook About US Coup In Syria Could Easily Apply Today

Western diplomats, politicians and analysts have combined to float quite a few options to supposedly resolve the two-year civil war engulfing much of Syria right now.

Talk of everything from a no-fly zone to an all-out intervention has flown around the digital media and political sphere, and yet, it seems a very few have stated the obvious option: do nothing.

Miles Copeland Jr., a famed CIA Agent who helped the Agency stage a coup in Syria decades ago, suggested exactly that during an interview with the BBC … in 1967.

‘Do nothing,’ Copeland says, partly because interventions are messy ordeals that don’t always work out as planned (kind of like what Army General Martin Dempsey said recently).

How McCain’s Daughter Found Out her Dad was in Syria: Twitter

Would the U.S. be militarily ready for intervention in Syria? – Blogger’s opinion

Redlines and the Problems of Intervention in Syria – STRATFOR

The civil war in Syria, one of the few lasting legacies of the Arab Spring, has been under way for more than two years. There has been substantial outside intervention in the war. The Iranians in particular, and the Russians to a lesser extent, have supported the Alawites under Bashar al Assad. The Saudis and some of the Gulf States have supported the Sunni insurgents in various ways. The Americans, Europeans and Israelis, however, have for the most part avoided involvement. …

Bashir Abazed

The boy prankster who triggered Syria’s bloody genocide with slogans sprayed in his schoolyard

It was a typical day for the teenagers, with school followed by a game of football – no different from millions of other boys around the world. Afterwards, they sat about chatting and joking, with one eye on television reports of the revolutions that had flared in Egypt and Libya.

There were seven boys, good friends who had grown up together on the same streets of a suburb of Deraa, a prosperous agricultural city in the south of Syria. They talked about the uprisings engulfing the region and their frustration that their nation, ruled by the repressive Assad family for four decades, had escaped the waves of unrest.

Suddenly, one of them had an idea – to paint graffiti on the school walls to annoy the security forces. So the boys waited until after evening prayers. Then, on that February night two years ago, they sneaked into their schoolyard and began spraying slogans of protest.

Bashir Abazed, 15, painted in huge letters the words ‘Ejak el door ya Doctor’ (It is your turn, Doctor)…

Amazing set of photos from the front line, highly recommended… and heartbreaking.

New Resources

The Turkish-Syrian Border Dispute: A View From the Past
With Secret Documents from the Files of the Syrian Foreign Ministry
By Meir Zamir

 
Hafez Asad’s thirty-year rule in Syria (1970-2000) concealed the fact that since independence in 1946, and even before that, Syria had been a vulnerable state, and that because of its geopolitical position and internal divisions, it had become an arena for regional and international conflict. In the past year Syria has once again become a source of instability and concern for its neighbors, including Turkey in the north.

Turkish-Syrian relations have deteriorated as a result of the civil war in Syria, which has had a direct impact on Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees have crossed the border into Turkey; Turkish citizens have been killed by mortars fired from Syrian territory; two Turkish fighter planes have been shot down by Syrian missiles; and leaders of the Kurdish minority in the Jazeera, on Syria’s north-eastern border with Turkey, are seeking to exploit the disintegration of the Syrian state to form a Kurdish autonomous region similar to the one formed by their brethren in northern Iraq. Those ambitions are particularly worrisome to Turkey, which is facing its own Kurdish problem in its eastern region. Turkey is therefore leading a bloc of Arab and western countries in support of the Syrian opposition’s efforts to force Bashar al-Assad out of office.

The tension on the border between Turkey and Syria, the Kurdish problem, and Turkey’s efforts to replace the regime in Syria are not a new phenomenon, as the attached documents demonstrate. These documents were obtained by French intelligence in Damascus from the files of the Syrian Foreign Ministry and are published here for the first time. They shed light on the endemic use of covert operations and clandestine diplomacy in the Middle East in the 1940s, of which few traces can be found in official documentation. Indeed, intelligence can be termed the “missing dimension” in international relations, as well as in the records of Britain’s retreat from its colonies after World War II. British intelligence organizations were deeply involved in Britain’s Middle East policy in those years, when they made extensive use of covert operations and clandestine diplomacy to secure their country’s vital strategic and economic (oil) interests in the region. The Syrian documents, uncovered a few years ago, highlight the need for historians to study the 1948 war in Palestine in the context of Anglo-Arab and inter-Arab rivalries rather than Anglo-Jewish or Arab-Jewish confrontations. They reveal, for example, that British agents exploited the Zionists’ aspirations for a Jewish state to scare and coerce Arab leaders into acquiescing in Britain’s military presence in the region; that the question of Palestine had become deeply entangled in the Saudi-Hashemite conflict; and that French and Zionist intelligence organizations conducted a joint secret war against Britain and the Arab states.

The attached documents demonstrate that there is a “missing dimension” in the established historiography of the Middle East in those years. They cover the period between October 1945 and December 1946 and address Turkish-Syrian relations against the backdrop of the inter-Arab and Anglo-Soviet rivalry over the future of Syria in the early years of the Cold War. Then, as today, the weakness and lack of stability of the Syrian state prompted Turkey to intervene in Syria in an attempt to replace the anti-Turkish republican regime headed by President Shukri al-Quwatli (Doc. 8) with a friendly Hashemite monarchy under King Abdallah, which was to include Syria and Lebanon in addition to Transjordan and was to be linked with the Hashemite kingdom in Iraq. (Docs. 12, 13)

The borders between Turkey and Syria are not, as far as we know, an issue today, but after World War II the two countries were engaged in a territorial dispute. Their quarrel over the province of Alexandretta became a source of tension in Turkish-Syrian relations, and also played a part in the Anglo-Soviet secret war in the Middle East. The province of Alexandretta (Hatay), with its strategic port city of the same name, had been part of Syria under the French mandate in 1920-1936. Turkey claimed the province, arguing that its Turkish inhabitants comprised the majority. On the eve of World War II, France, seeking Turkey’s cooperation against Nazi Germany, tacitly agreed to relinquish the province, despite strong protests from the Syrian leaders. In June 1939, Turkey took over the province, causing thousands of Arab and Armenian refugees to flee to Syria. After the war, the Syrian nationalist leaders sought to exploit Britain’s designs to incorporate their country in a regional defense alliance with Turkey and Iraq against the Soviet Union, to demand the return of the province.

British officials in the Middle East tried to resolve the dispute by proposing that the city of Alexandretta and its port become a free zone under Britain’s control, allowing Syria to use it for trade, and that the border between the two states in the Jazeera be modified. The latter proposal was intended to reinforce Turkish control of the restless Kurdish population. (Docs. 3 , 4) This early initiative failed, but the secret Turkish-Hashemite negotiations in November-December 1946 reveal that, apart from Alexandretta, Turkey harbored territorial designs over Aleppo and Kamishli, the main Kurdish city in north-eastern Syria. (Doc. 14) For its part, the Soviet Union exploited the Turkish-Syrian dispute over Alexandretta, as well as the Kurds in the al Jazeera, to pressure the Syrian government not to join the British-sponsored anti-Soviet regional defense alliance . Soviet agents provoked the Syrian Communist Party to stage wide-scale demonstrations for the return of the “lost province” and encouraged Kurdish leaders in the al Jazeera to demand autonomy within the Syrian state. (Docs. 1,2,5,9) Another tactic was employed after King Abdallah’s visit to Ankara in early January 1947, when Soviet intelligence agents in Damascus handed over to President Quwatli copies of the secret agreement and correspondence between the Turkish president, Ismet Inonu, and King Abdallah, as well as Inonu and Nuri al-Said, the Iraqi prime minister. (Docs. 12, 13)

Britain was involved not only in the efforts to solve the problem of Alexandretta, but took part behind the scenes in the negotiations on the secret agreement of December 1946 between the Turkish, Iraqi and Jordanian leaders to form a Hashemite Greater Syrian monarchy. (Docs. 11,) This was part of a more elaborate plan devised by British intelligence agents with the tacit agreement of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. Its first step was implemented in November and December 1946 and entailed the removal of the anti-Hashemite and anti-Turkish Syrian prime minister, Sa’adallah al-Jabiri, and his replacement with Jamil Mardam, who was secretly collaborating with the British agents and Nuri al-Said. Its more ambitious goal was to solve the conflict between the Hashemite and Saudi royal families by forming two large monarchies – one under the Hashemites in the Fertile Crescent in the north, and a Saudi monarchy that would extend over most of the Arabian Peninsula in the south, including Yemen. Bevin informally proposed such a plan to Prince Faisal, Ibn Saud’s son, in January 1947, but the Saudi king turned it down. Apparently, even after World War II, British agents in the Middle East continued to see the region as an arena for conducting their experiments, including redrawing existing borders to serve their country’s interests. The aspirations of the local inhabitants were invariably ignored. Another idea was to attach Kyrenaica in eastern Libya to Egypt, in return for which King Faruq was to give up his claims on the Sudan. It was informally put forward in the summer of 1947, but was turned down by the Egyptian king.

The attempt by King Abdallah and Nuri al-Said to involve Turkey in Arab affairs, and King Faruq’s intervention in the Turkish-Syrian border dispute (Docs. 6,7) reflected the Arab world’s ambivalence towards Turkey, then, as today. On the one hand there is Arab aversion to the “return of the Ottoman Empire” to the Arab world, and on the other, readiness in certain instances to seek Turkish intervention. In this regard, the present Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in a better position to intervene in the Arab world than was President Inonu, who represented the nationalist secularist Kemalist Turkish Republic. The Egyptian president Muhamed Morsi, like King Faruq before him, sees his country as a leader of the Arab world, and it is doubtful whether he is willing to share that role with Turkey. But he is pragmatic enough to realize that (Sunni) Egypt and Saudi Arabia need the support of (Sunni) Turkey to withstand the Iranian Shiite threat in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf.

Almost a century has passed since the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France. The two victorious colonial powers divided the Fertile Crescent between them, forming five new states: Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. After three decades of colonial rule and seven decades of independence, these states still face an uncertain future. Lebanon, Iraq and now Syria have undergone devastating civil wars which threatened their very existence as viable states. The Hashemite monarchy in Jordan is becoming increasingly unstable and faces growing internal and external threats, while Israel, with its large Palestinian population, has not yet been able to solve its fundamental dilemma of whether to remain a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state, or become a bi-national state. It is unclear if the Turkish prime minister harbors “Ottoman” ambitions, but if he looks southwards, he might conclude that the record of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East was not so negative after all.

Document 1
Secret

From the President of the Council, the Foreign Minister, Damascus,
to H.E. the British Minister Plenipotentiary

The information I have and which is based on official reports proves that the Soviet Legation has so far made contact with a large number of Kurdish leaders in the various regions of the Syrian Republic.

In drawing Your Excellency’s attention to this I know that you are perfectly aware of what is happening and that your specialized departments are not unaware of the maneuvers that are being prepared despite our willingness and yours.

However, the duty that I have towards you brings me to remind you that the Syrian Government, rightly concerned about the consequences of this Soviet activity, can only continue to reject all these activities and inform you of the inability in which we find ourselves to take any measures whatsoever against this Legation. It invites you, in your capacity as the official responsible for maintaining security and peace in this country, to take the measures you judge fitting.

The Syrian Government gives its agreement in advance to whatever you decide.

12 November 1945 The President of the Council of Ministers

s/ Sa’adalla al-Jabiri
 
Document 2
Secret

From the President of the Council, the Syrian Foreign Minister, Damascus
To H.E. the Minister Plenipotentiary to the USSR

Your Excellency,

My Government, which wishes to maintain good relations with your Legation, finds itself forced to draw your attention in the friendliest way possible to the protests it has received from international Arab and non-Arab sources.

These protests indicate that your Legation has recently encouraged determined intrigues among the Kurds of northern Syria.

Also, the Syrian security services have noted special activity to which certain Kurdish and Armenian communist elements, in permanent contact with officials in your Legation in Damascus, have devoted themselves.

I can forgive all this agitation, but ask Your Excellency to stipulate now that certain of its Legation officials be more respectful of the position and complete neutrality of this country.

Yours etc.,

2 December 1945 The Syrian Foreign Minister

s/ Sa’adalla al-Jabiri
 
Document 3
Secret

From the Minister of Great Britain in Syria, Damascus
To His Excellency the President of the Council of Ministers

The Syrian Foreign Minister

Your Excellency,

The Turkish Government has asked us through diplomatic channels for our intervention in favor of the removal of the Kurdish leaders from the Turkish border and the reduction in the activities of Kurdish and Armenian extremists within Syrian territories.

This legation had already written to you about this. We are confirming it to you today and we are informing you that the authorities charged with military security will intervene in the matter of Syrian nationals who are working to upset good Syro-Turkish neighborly relations.

I believe that at the moment you share our opinion which is designed only to maintain peace and security, and to deflect from Syria the threat of trouble which is currently being fostered in certain regions of the Middle East.

With my deepest respect,

8 December 1945 s/ T. Shone

Minister Plenipotentiary
 
Document 4
In code -Secret

From the Syrian Minister in Cairo
to H.E. the Syrian Foreign Minister, Damascus

Lord Killearn [British Ambassador to Egypt] visited me today to clarify the proposals they presented about our conflict with the Turks. He believes that the British Government is determined to put an end to this dispute. The understanding between us and the Turks is necessary in the interests of our common defense.

The Province of Alexandretta cannot return to Syria.

Syria will be able to profit from the oil from new regions.

Creating a Kurdish bloc in the Syrian North-East would form an obstacle to the Russians who covet the North of Syria.

The proposals presented to us today were done in an officious, but not definitive, manner, but they express London’s point of view. It is to be hoped that the Syrian Government will give its agreement to them with the required speed, so that it will then be possible to consider Syria and Turkey as forming a common defensive unity.

24 December 1945 S/ Jamil Mardam Bey
 
Document 5
Secret

From the Chargé d’affaires of the Soviet Legation in Damascus
To H.E. the Syrian Foreign Minister

Your Excellency,

Following on from the verbal note I gave you about the future of the Province of Alexandretta, its current situation and the future that the Government of the Soviet Union wants for it, I draw your attention to the activities of nationalist Kurdish elements on the future they want for themselves and on the desire for unity, progress and emancipation the Soviet Union is formulating for them.

Right now I can give the Syrian Government the assurance that these elements, which are dispersed among a number of states and enjoy the Soviet Union’s sympathy, will not ever adopt a position unsatisfactory to the government and people of Syria.

Thus, I will have unequivocally expressed to you, from now, the reality of our intentions.

30 December 1945 Yours sincerely,

The Chargé d’affaires of the Soviet Legation

s/ Cherniaguin
 
Document 6
Secret

From the President of the Council of Ministers of the Kingdom of Egypt
to H.E. the President of the Council of Ministers of the Syrian Republic, Damascus

Your Excellency,

An unclear future awaits the Muslim states and common dangers threaten them. I believe that it is Egypt’s duty to intervene in any misunderstanding arising between two brothers, two neighbors and two friends when understanding is needed in the interests of the Muslim brotherhood.

It has reached me through a reliable source that Great Britain has intervened in different ways to regulate the Arab-Turkish conflict. First, I think that intervention by Great Britain would not have come about if this power did not intend to gain something: the port of Alexandretta. I imagine that it is dangerous for Syria itself that this important port should be taken from Turkey to fall into the hands of Great Britain.

All I am asking at the moment is that you accept the intervention of the Egyptian Government or refer the whole matter to the Council of the Arab League. If that happen, the British danger would first be dissipated and Syria would draw benefits that it could not obtain through British intervention. In such a case, the League could rely on the complete help of Russia, America and even France. We would then be able to grant control of Alexandretta to a common Turkish-Arab Committee (or the League would be represented and not only Syria).

I have put the matter to His Majesty the King. My proposal drew his utmost praise.

In anticipation of your generous reply, please accept my sincerest good wishes,

5 January 1946 S/ Mahmud al-Nuqrashi

President of the Council of Ministers
 
Document 7
Top secret

His Excellency Shukri bey Quwatli, may God protect him
May the benediction, mercy and blessings of Allah be upon you.

I am informing you that the Turkish Government has asked me to intervene to persuade Syria to forget its fears and mistrust with regard to its neighbors the Turks and to conclude an agreement of good neighborliness with them in view of their reciprocal interests and advantages, according to their way of putting it.

As I knew the legitimate rights of the Syrians, my reply was that Syria was ready, without intervention, to come to an understanding and to cooperate on condition that its rights are preserved, that the wrong it has undergone is recognized and that what was torn from it is returned.

The Turks, to my mind, are at long last inclined to satisfy the rights that you have, on condition that you do not show any negligence or let-up, no matter the extent of the pressure the British bring to bear on you.

I wish, on this occasion, to tell you that Syria is a piece of us ourselves and that if we are keen to see the satisfaction of its rights, it is because for us it is a duty vis-à-vis men who are our brothers in religion, language and nationality.

Greetings Sincerely,

Faruq
Written in Abdin, 14 October 1946
 
Document 8
Top secret

His Majesty King Faruq, may God preserve him

Your Majesty,

I read your noble address with tears in my eyes and I thank God for giving Syria a champion and a helper it can have recourse to and who defends both it and its rights.

The Turks, my Lord, have evil designs with regard to us and whatever the changes in the situation, the spirit of oppression and domination rules them. All their dreams are of the restoration of the Ottoman Empire, but weakness is what restrains them: injustice is buried in their soul; strength reveals it, weakness hides it.

The Turks want at all costs to reach agreement with us and the English want us to do it, but what is the use for us Arabs, and especially for us Syrians? Absolutely nothing unless becoming a millstone, losing Alexandretta and losing our unknown future. I thank you, in the name of all Syrians for your noble defense of our legitimate rights…. Syria only sees any danger to itself from its old oppressors, Turks and French. God preserve it from concluding an agreement with one of them. God preserve you as champion and Treasure of the Arabs.

3 November 1946 Shukri al-Quwatli
 
Document 9
Top secret

His Excellency the Muhafez of al Jazeera
to His Excellency the President of the Council

Your Excellency,

For 20 days the Turkish-Syrian border has been lined with Turkish troops. According to information from our services, these concentrations on the borders of these muhafazat number about 20,000 men. Here we are worried about this collection of Turkish troops who are engaged in digging trenches along the whole length of the border, without being able to learn the reason for this activity.

Yesterday I was in touch with the Turkish Vali of Mardin and asked him what all this meant. He replied to me,

“We fear that the Kurds of Syria or those of Turkey who have taken refuge there will cause trouble.”

I think we should attach a very great importance to this concentration of troops on our borders, because of the rumors which accompany them in this Muhafaza. People are saying in effect that the English have left the hands of the Turkish and Iraqi Governments free and that they have promised the first some of the oil from Syrian al Jazeera.

The atmosphere in which we live here is very difficult. The strangest thing is that the Turks are distributing considerable funds to individuals and to partisans they have here but that we have not yet been able to catch any of these agents, even though what I am suggesting is well established. Please let me know your orders.

[n.d. early November 1946] The Muhafez of al Jazeera

Abd al-Kader al-Midani
 
Document 10
Top secret

The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Damascus

The atmosphere here is becoming more and more somber, and although Russia is not openly applying pressure, the pressure on the Turks continues and with some force. The English encourage the Turks each day in a new way and the latter refuse to concede anything to Russia.

On the other hand, what is certain is that they refuse to recognize that we have any claims on Alexandretta.

I am convinced that our interest now forces us to reach an understanding, even if it were with the Russians, to preserve our rights, as long as our friends the English refuse to help us, for in fact they would leave Alexandretta with the lion’s share.

The Soviet ambassador here has, in conversations with me, expressed the desire of the Soviet Government to persuade the Arabs that no danger threatens them from their side and that the Moscow Government is inclined and even wants to help us take back from Turkey the rights it has snatched from us with the help of France and England.

I am convinced that an intention from this side will never be detrimental and that if it cannot be used to persuade the English of our importance, it can, however, not do us any harm.

26 November 1946

The Minister Plenipotentiary in Turkey
 
Document 11
Top secret- In code

The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Damascus

The Turkish Government, despairing of being able to conclude an agreement with us, has finally turned towards Iraq, Transjordan and the international Jewish coterie which at the moment is acting in close agreement with these two countries.

Nuri Pasha Said, who enjoys a not negligible influence here, has finally promised Turkey, in the name of King Abdallah, that he would recognize the annexation of Alexandretta and that he would agree with Turkey the adoption of a common line of defense.

For all these reasons, I am able to inform you that the Turks are no longer interested in us and that they no longer wish to negotiate with us.

For my part, I can only attribute this change of heart to the British who, it seems, have made the Turks understand that this agreement with us would only be necessary if they did not reach an agreement with King Abdallah. The Turks do not hesitate in maintaining today that the Syrian regime is far from being solid.

The Minister Plenipotentiary

2 December 1946 Ihsan al-Sharif
 
Document 12
“Top secret

His Hashemite Majesty King Abdallah Ibn Hussein

The Government of the Republic of Turkey, for the greatest good of all, will ensure its protection of the legal regime of the Arab Hashemite kingdom. And I remind you, in the name of the Government of the Republic of Turkey, that we are the first to speedily recognize you as the legal king of Syria, as soon as the moment comes. You also know that we hope for your entry into Damascus soon, God willing.

[n.d. December 1946] Signature

Delivered by the Russian Legation Ismet Inonu
 
Document 13
Top secret

His Excellency President Ismet Inonu

I am aware of your noble letter in which you inform me that you recognize in me a legal king for Syria and I thank you for the deep sincerity of your noble statements.

I recognize in particular the border as it exists between Syria and Turkey, and that the question of the current borders must be accepted with no turning back to the past. If the need to modify the Turkish-Syrian borders becomes apparent, this will have to be done on the basis of a perfect understanding.

[n.d. December 1946] Signature

Delivered by the Russian Legation Abdallah
 
Document 14
Top secret

His Excellency President Ismet Inonu

The Iraqi government must, for the moment, despite its desire to see a royal Syrian government established and facing the possibility of seeing the problem of the government of the Syrian Republic in its current state resolved, study with a degree of reserve all the proposals you have made to it regarding the question of the Turkish-Syrian borders and particularly as far as the regions of Aleppo and Kameshli are concerned.

The greatest difficulty really rests with this claim you have made and which is the annexation of Aleppo to Turkey. But I can assure you, with authority and from now that your claim regarding the border at Kameshli can be accepted, so long as it does not exceed in depth the adjustments imposed on the borders from 70 [probably 1870], as regards fortified land in relation to the current borders.

So I must also now obtain an assurance that the lands for which you accept cession to Syria are the equivalent of lands you are demanding. And you will indicate the detail of the matter to me.

[n.d. December 1946] Signature: Nuri al-Said

Sheikh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi Interviewed by Syria Comment

by Matthew Barber

Matthew Barber interviews Sheikh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi in Rabat, Morocco, April 2013. Photo: Syria Comment

In a previous post I revealed that Sheikh Muhammad al-Ya’qoubi was elected as the first non-Ikhwaan-linked religious figure of the National Coalition. This event did take place, even though his followers were disappointed to discover that his tenure would not see the light of day, as his appointment was subsequently canceled at the very opposition conference in which his participation was to be announced. This is not the first time that he has been excluded from the opposition. His name has previously been on draft lists of Coalition members, but deleted for unknown reasons. It raises many questions when an influential figure (but one that cannot compete with the funding of the Muslim Brotherhood) is excluded in favor of admitting other, largely unknown individuals. Despite being blocked again by Ikhwaan-aligned figures, his influence is not going to disappear. For those curious about his background and views, I believe it will be useful to publish here the full interview I had with the Sheikh (April 2013; Rabat, Morocco; in English). Our entire conversation is provided below, but it is quite long, so at the outset I list a few of the key topics covered within it:

• The kind of intervention he’d like to see take place in Syria
• The problem of Salafi-Jihadism in the Syrian resistance
• The significance of fatwas in conflicts like Syria’s; his fatwas on violent tactics; the difference between fatwa and qadaa’
• His position on personal status law
• The conflict between experienced judges and Islamists over law
• Jihad in the conflict: the opposition’s vs. the Grand Mufti’s
• Sheikh Bouti
• An Islamic perspective on ‘Alawi–Sunni coexistence
• Mercy rather than revenge

Sheikh Muhammad Abu al-Huda al-Ya’qoubi is a leading religious leader of Damascus. A descendent of the Prophet Mohammed and a Sufi of the Shadhiliyya order, he is a key figure of Syria’s Sunni ‘ulema [the class of religious scholars with the traditional role of interpreting Islamic scriptural sources; the singular is ‘aalim]. In the Syrian conflict, Sheikh Ya’qoubi is notable for his role in giving some important sermons critical of the regime, early in the conflict from mosques in Damascus, and for being the first sheikh to issue a fatwa against the regime, for its violence against demonstrators and civilians. An Arabic article discussing that fatwa was published here.

Jawad Qureshi, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, has written an important account of the ‘ulema’s actions and reactions during the first year of the uprising. The article (“The Discourses of the Damascene Sunni Ulama During the 2011 Revolution”) offers insight into the backgrounds of significant ‘ulema figures and analyzes excerpts from their important speeches. Qureshi also discusses Sheikh Ya’qoubi’s role as the first ‘aalim to take such a pronounced position of denunciation of the regime. I have made the paper available here.

Fluent in English and Swedish after studying and spending time in Sweden, the UK, and the U.S., Sheikh Yaqoubi is also an important figure for Islam in the West, collaborating with such figures as Hamza Yusuf (who also studied under Yaqoubi) in producing Islamic literature for Western readers. He has his own website where he offers materials teaching his understanding of Islam.

A sense of his understanding of Islam can be found in his recent statement condemning the Boston Bombing:

——————-

As Muslim leaders representing Islam and Muslims worldwide, it is our duty to speak up and denounce terrorism and terrorist actions regardless of who is behind them. However, it becomes more incumbent upon us to do so when it is done in the name of Islam.

We strongly condemn the most recent terrorist attack in Boston, USA, and offer our sympathy to the victims. These types of attacks are but signs of cowardice and self-defeat.

Our goal as Muslims is to improve the image of Islam and establish a better understanding of our religion, culture, and history. Unfortunately, this attack, if it turns out that Muslims are behind it, will definitely be detrimental to this lofty goal.

Islam brings about mercy not cruelty, and spreads love not hatred. According to our Holy Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, a true believer is “He who does not harm anyone, neither with his tongue, nor with his hand.”

——————-

He also condemned the recent killing of British soldier Lee Rigby.

This approach informs his role in the Syrian Uprising, and the kinds of fatwas he has issued regarding the dilemmas of war and the behavior of belligerents. Of fatwas he has issued during the uprising, here are 11 examples:

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2 – ???? ????? ??? ???????

3 – ??? ?????? ????? ???????? ???????????

4 – ????? ??????: ??? ??????? ???????? ??????

5 – ???? ????? ???? ????? ?? ???????

6 – ??? ????? ???????? ?? ???????

7 – ??? ????????? ??? ???? ???? ?????? ???????? ?? ??????

8 – ??? ????? ????? ????? ???????

9 – ??? ?????? ?????? ?? ??????? ???????

10 – ??? ??? ??????? ?? ??????? ???????

11 – ????? ??????: ?????? ???? ???? ????? ?? ????? ????? ?? ?? ?????

These are: 1) Legal ruling on killing POWs of the army of the Assad regime in Syria; 2) Fatwa forbidding the kidnapping of foreigners; 3) Legal ruling on suicide car-bombing; 4) Getting the permission of parents before going on jihad; 5) The prohibition of killing prisoners in Islam; 6) Fatwa on saying “Allah-u-Akbar” aloud in mosques; 7) Ruling on the use of explosives to kill army officers when their family members might be killed with them; 8) Ruling on detonating a bomb in the car of an army officer who has his children with him; 9) Ruling on fighting the regime in inhabited areas; 10) Ruling on using land-mines in inhabited areas; 11) Ruling on a woman who loses her husband and requests a divorce.

I have made available a .pdf of the full text of these fatwas in Arabic here. There are English translations of a few of them around the Net.

Sheikh Ya’qoubi’s fatwas influence those Syrian rebels who are Sufis and moderate Sunnis. He and 60 other leaders and sheikhs have formed a coalition of Sufi rebel groups, called Movement for Building Civilization (???? ???? ???????), which they intend to have operating soon out of an office in Jordan. A draft document (Arabic) containing the principles of the movement is available here. Rebel groups wanting to join this coalition must sign and agree to adhere to the principles, some of which include: 1) Removing the regime while not destroying the state—protecting public institutions; 2) The rejection of revenge, retaliation, and execution during the uprising: keeping the trials of war criminals for after the collapse of the regime and the establishment of a new government; 3) After the collapse of the regime, rebel groups should cease to carry arms and their members should return to civilian life or join the national army; 4) All ethnic and religious communities are to be defended as equal citizens under the law; 5) No ethnic or religious group is to be held responsible for the crimes of the regime; 6) A future Syrian government must operate according to a separation of judicial, legislative, and executive powers; 7) The future government must be a democracy of political multiplicity and the 1950 Constitution should be in effect during the interim period until a new parliament is elected and a new constitution is agreed upon.

Many rebels and sheikhs in Syria are becoming frustrated with Islamists as the sole option, and are reaching out to the ‘ulema, but without funding the ‘ulema are limited in offering anything beyond ideological support. One young sheikh, ‘Omar Rahmoon, has established his own rebel force in consultation with Sheikh Ya’qoubi on the ethics and principles that should rule the group’s tactics and approach. I have put the founding document for that group (???? ????? ??????? ????????? – Movement of the Free Sufi Muslims) here.

A few observations on the interview.

1) Sheikh Ya’qoubi often uses the word “we.” Sometimes this is a self-referential use of the “royal we,” other times he is speaking from the perspective of the segment of Sufi/Sunni ‘ulema who share similar positions to his.

2) I hear a tension in Ya’qoubi’s narrative between: “Islamists have little presence, power, popularity as they do not represent the outlook and religion of Syrians;” and, “Islamists are a grave threat controlling everything, having risen to prominence through targeted, external support.”

3) Sheikh Ya’qoubi recognizes that this is a war, and that Salafi-jihadists pose a grave threat to the future of Syria. He does, however, make the statement that “the whole conflict will be solved by him [the president] being removed.” For myself and many others, this conflict is about far more than the leadership of a single individual; it represents a much deeper struggle about the future definition of the state. Simply removing one person, even one as symbolic as the president, will not likely provide the solution that can put an end to it. That doesn’t mean he should stay, but it shouldn’t be ignored that his departure may mark a beginning, rather than an end, to a larger struggle for regional identity involving contenders from Iraq to Lebanon. As Syria Comment reader Observer framed it: “We are… witnessing the death of Sykes Picot, violently, and with a messy outcome, and with pure sectarian hatred.”

4) It’s obvious that the vast majority of Sunnis will not view Grand Mufti Hassoun’s call for jihad as legitimate, but I believe this is more about one’s positioning within the conflict, and less about any technical or doctrinal problem with the call itself. The concept of “theology” (as typically understood in the West according to a Christian framework) doesn’t correspond to an exact equivalent in Islam, but I felt comfortable using the word in this discussion after Sheikh Ya’qoubi used it first. I pressed the Sheikh about the issue of the Grand Mufti’s jihad only because I wanted to understand if there was a particular religious basis for claiming it was invalid, rather than the mere fact that it serves the side of the opponent.

5) In a recent interview, the Economist asked some Nusra fighters about their position on the Alawi minority community. The response was:

Allah knows what will happen to them. There is a difference between the basic kuffar [infidels] and those who converted from Islam. If the latter, we must punish them. Alawites are included. Even Sunnis who want democracy are kuffar as are all Shia. It’s not about who is loyal and who isn’t to the regime; it’s about their religion. Sharia says there can be no punishment of the innocent and there must be punishment of the bad; that’s what we follow.

At issue here is the notion in Islam that the apostate (someone who leaves Islam), must be killed. This is not a position held only by extremists; it is the mainstream position considered correct by the majority of Sunnis. The portion of my conversation with Sheikh Ya’qoubi dealing with the Alawi community is important, because he asserts that they are not apostates.

Full Interview

Sheikh Muhammad, it’s a pleasure to meet with you today.

I’m very happy to speak with you. You know, we still need America’s help to make it out of this conflict. What kind of help are you thinking of?

About 14 months ago, I believe, at a conference in Bulgaria, I signed a statement in the presence of the Bulgarian prime minister with some top politicians asking for the implementation of Chapter 7 of the UN Charter for military intervention by the Security Council. We could have avoided much of the undesirable developments concerning the growth of ideological military groups.

Groups based on ideology, I believe, now constitute a great threat to the unity of Syria, to the very fiber of Syrian society, and even to Islam; you know Islam in Syria is very moderate! Shafi’ites, Hanafites, Sufis—they love the ‘awliya, the Saints. Now someone is coming to brainwash them by force? To tell them that the shrines of the ‘awliya have to be destroyed? Issuing fatwas for this? They already destroyed 3 of them (I issued a statement about this). And killing on a religious basis such as takfir? This is very dangerous and I think the international community let it go.

There has to be a greater power that either unifies, unites the military groups—some Syrians are patriots, they are good people and no one can blame them for forming small groups to defend their honor, their families, their villages… But the absence of any greater authority allowed for the growth of ideological groups.

I think there’s a sense that a US presence in another Muslim country would not be a successful operation… I think Americans learned from Iraq that Muslims do not believe that a non-Muslim force should fight on the ground in a Muslim country; they will be viewed as another enemy.

That’s right, and that’s understandable. And my suggestion was to have international backing for a force comprised of troops from the region, with air force cover. Probably Jordanian troops, Saudi troops, Turkish troops. They would come together under an international umbrella to create safe military passage for besieged areas, like Homs. Step by step: I’m not talking about invading the country, but about imposing no-fly zones, for example.

Of course, a Security Council intervention based on the UN Charter would lend it legitimacy, instead of a U.S. or NATO intervention that would lend the regime legitimacy, enabling it to claim that they are fighting the good cause of resisting foreign occupation—and we won’t give them this legitimacy. But we have to weigh the pros and cons [even of other forms of intervention]. I issued a statement calling on Jordan and Turkey to intervene. I don’t believe they will do it on their own, but I want Syrian people to be prepared for an international intervention spearheaded by NATO, or the UN Security Council, or by the U.S., because I believe that’s more realistic. I believe we’ve reached a point where the Syrian people are ready to accept international intervention due to several reasons, including the levels of human tragedy, as well as Jabhat al-Nusra giving bay’ah [allegiance] to al-Qaida.

No one would deny that they [Jabhat al-Nusra] had some sympathy from the oppressed—not from all Syrian people; wise Syrians were always aware of the fact that these people are alien in their ideology. Probably the majority of them are foreigners—their ideology is alien to the Syrian religious culture… but one could say they had some sympathy, because they made some achievements, though we never sympathized with them; we made it very clear that car bombs are forbidden and such. But now, they lost—morally—their reputation… because no one wants a new Afghanistan in Syria, no one wants such… Now that people see the need to get rid of them, they see them as a burden, as a cause of harm.

We’ve seen this before and wise people should… but sometimes you wonder… For example, I was sitting behind Mu’az al-Khatib at the Friends of Syria conference here in Marrakesh, and I didn’t like his statement when he criticized the U.S. for listing Jabhat al-Nusra as a terrorist group. I felt that he rushed. In my opinion, the Ikhwaan are going to lead the battle against such extremists in the future, exactly like they are doing now in Egypt. The Ikhwaan want to reach power in Syria. And Jabhat al-Nusra will present a challenge to that. Exactly. And most of the Syrian politicians are afraid of making statements against them because they want to get in and out and Jabhat al-Nusra can assassinate them anywhere in Syria. So this is a reason for them being slippery in their statements… because they are afraid of being assassinated when they go in, either now or later. So this is one reason. But he rushed actually, and I thought it was unwise. Al-Nusra is al-Qaida; for us this was very clear.

Speaking of that, you issued a very compassionate and sensitive statement of sympathy for the victims of the Boston bombing: knowing that al-Qaida would not share your attitude of compassion, but in fact advocates the use of that tactic for political gain, how did you feel about the announcement that Jabhat al-Nusra is al-Qaida?

I’m not surprised. The ideology is the same. The ideology is against mainstream Islam. And I would stress that this is a sect now. This ideology does not represent 1.5 billion Muslims and it is contrary to the rulings of the four Sunni madhabs on jihad, on going against oppressive rulers or non-Muslim rulers, and on contracts and truces between countries. It’s not about whether I like the U.S. or don’t like it—this is something else. I may agree with U.S. policies or disagree with U.S. policies, but I cannot legally put any Muslim country at war with the U.S. There is not a single Muslim country at war with the U.S. now (or the UK, or France, or any of these “Western targets” of al-Qaida). So legally, I have to say that when they [Westerners] visit us, we have to safeguard their property and respect their freedom; when we visit there or live there we have to respect the same; Muslims don’t stab in the back. So there’s no justification for their ideology at all.

So Jabhat al-Nusra joining al-Qaida, as I said, really destroyed its own reputation in Syria, its future in Syria.

But they didn’t join it; they revealed that their group was created by or in conjunction with al-Qaida. And not only that, but they are Syrian, and the members who would later form al-Nusra were working with al-Qaida in Iraq during the Iraq war. That’s right. They gave bay’ah. Giving bay’ah is like joining. They are part of it now. They under the command of Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Why did he decide to reveal this now? It seemed that al-Nusra weren’t ready to announce this, but Ayman al-Zawahiri—

To be honest they are to be asked this question, but from what I read, there was a conflict between al-Qaida in Iraq… and al-Nusra in Syria. So they didn’t want to give allegiance to the Iraqi wing of al-Qaida…

Regardless, they all represent the Devil, I believe. The damage they do to Islam is much worse than that done by any outside force or group or anything that could be imagined, and it’s our responsibility as religious leaders—doctors of the law, theologians—to explain what Islam is. I’m not afraid… I’ve been known, probably, quite well, for criticizing Western policies in the past, but now I ask for Western intervention [because of the extremists]. [smiling] Because we really have to see what’s right and what’s wrong. Ok, I can criticize Western democracy—this is my right, just as many Western and American professors and politicians criticize Western policies.

Do you believe a new Syria should be a democracy?

Of course! We had the earliest democracy in the Middle East, after independence from France in ’46; we had a Christian prime minister, Fares Khouri; we had a very smooth political system… it was interrupted by some military coup d’état…

So do you believe in creating an “Islamic state”?

Syria is an Islamic state. People are talking about an “Islamic state”; if you mean a state “ruled by shari’a,” let me tell you that 80% of the rulings of the laws in Syria now are based on shari’a. These people who are calling for [Islamic] reform are ignorant. Even the civil law, taken from the Napoleonic corpus of law, intact in 1949 and taken from the Egyptian civil law with some modifications—85% or more of it is compatible with the shari’a.

In Syria, like most Arab states, shari’a law simultaneously is and is not in play. You have a single, codified personal status law that governs family matters, informed by and based on traditional, Medieval shari’a rulings. So for example, a Muslim woman still cannot marry a non-Muslim man, polygamy is allowed, a wife can lose her mahr if she is disobedient, and women do not have the same access to divorce that men have. But this is codified and modernized shari’a that all courts must implement; there’s no place for individual rulings on the part of religious jurists who can dole out punishments like hand-cutting or public whipping, stoning. And certain new modifications for the protections of rights, particularly women’s rights, like a minimum age for marriage, restrictions on polygamy, a few expanded options for female-initiated divorce, and the prohibition of forced marriage—those exist in modern Arab family codes. So you have shari’a, but it’s modified a little bit. In a new Syria, do you favor maintaining the use of standardized family law, or would you want to return to the system of shari’a governance implemented by traditional ‘ulema and individual jurists that existed prior to late-Ottoman codification and the modernization that accompanied the advent of the nation-state?

We do not recommend, generally speaking, after the collapse of the regime, any radical change [to Syria’s laws], because that would create more chaos in the country. Considering personal status law, I do not recommend changing it. The liberals are calling for a change toward more freedom, from, let’s say, the so-called shari’a. I think in Syria we have quite a relaxed system where various sects have their own personal status, and are not forced to follow the shari’a. So on that issue, I do not demand, or recommend, any change in the personal status law. As you described, it’s quite moderate, and it is fully compatible with the shari’a.

The one that was intact before 1949 (I believe the change was around that year, if I remember right) was based on the Hanafi madhab, taken from the ahwal shakhsiya [personal status] of Qadri Pasha of the Ottoman time. The change was also made to take [rulings] from the other madhabs. And outside the four madhabs, two issues were taken [apart from or in contradistinction from the rulings of the jurists of the four madhabs]:

[Sheikh Ya’qoubi here described 2 issues: one regarding the number of instances and timing of verbal repudiations uttered by a husband to divorce his wife—a ruling from a student of Ibn Taymiyaa was adopted apparently due to the influence of Tantawi and other Ikhwaan in the ‘50s; and the second regarding the adoption of a ruling from the Zahiri madhab on wasiyya waajiba, part of inheritance law.]

What about the goal of Islamists to create new codes of “Islamic law” in the areas they govern?

They can’t write them. They are not scholars; they are not experts. The League of Syrian ‘Ulema (which is a cover for Ikhwaan) held a week-long course for judges. But a judge has to study and be trained for years, to be able to practice. I gave a lecture before his Majesty the King of Morocco here, last Ramadan. It was on fatwa and qadaa’ and the difference between them in Islam. Very crucial. I received a lot of praise for it.

Just yesterday I received a question from inside Syria about two groups of peasants who were fighting with each other. There was a truce, but one group had prevented the other group from cultivating their land, for one year. What would be the ruling? So I issued a fatwa: the ruling in the shari’a is that the rent is not applicable; the peasants don’t have to pay the rent to the landlord, because they were prevented from cultivating it, and the other party has to pay them compensation for the damages. But this is not the point. At the end of the statement, I said “This is a fatwa, not a judgment.” A judge cannot use this fatwa unless he hears both parties and obtains proofs regarding the case.

They [inexperienced Islamists applying “shari’a”] are using the fatwas as judgments! A fatwa is an opinion, and it comes from a mufti. A qadaa’ is a judgment, and it comes from a qadi. A fatwa is just a piece of news. It’s optional; people may apply it or not, inasmuch as they fear God or trust the mufti. But a judgment coming from a judge in a court of law carries force.

So many of the people who give fatwas now (even some ‘ulema) are unaware that their fatwas could be used by the common people… and people kill each other because of the fatwas! We have to be careful.

There was a discussion between me and a few scholars over the net, a few weeks ago, regarding a fatwa I had issued. When three Italian journalists were kidnapped, I issued a fatwa prohibiting the kidnapping of foreigners, anywhere, and specifically inside Syria. And I listed the reasons for it [according to the shari’a]. Now, I had generalized by saying “all foreigners” (and referenced credible legal texts from Hanafi and Malaki jurists, and especially from Hanbali jurists, because Salafis tend to use the Hanbali school [chuckling])… Now several scholars starting writing to me, saying “You didn’t write about Iranians and Russians. The fatwa is wrong; the Iranians and Russians are foreigners inside Syria supporting the regime.” I replied, “I cannot give a weapon to the common people or to the military commanders for the killing of supporters of the regime. Because then, they will decide—on their own, on the ground—who is a supporter and who is not. The positions of a country change between one day and the next, and sometimes two different politicians from the same country make two different statements.”

Shall we give military commanders on the ground authority to kill by telling them “You cannot kill foreigners—it’s haram—unless they are supporters of the regime”? Are all Iranians or Russians supporters of the regime? I said that when issuing fatwas, especially regarding blood, the ‘ulema have to be very careful. And to be honest, most of the young ‘ulema now, even some who are good ‘ulema, are not very well trained. They didn’t accompany great scholars. My father and grandfather were great scholars and I’m the 4^th in the Umayyad Mosque as instructor (in the family) in 100 consecutive years. From this, you develop a lot of sensitivity, and understanding of the true spirit of fatwa, because one has to be very careful not to be trapped—someone comes and asks you for a fatwa and then you say “this is allowed and this is not allowed” and then people kill!

How influential are your fatwas, and when you issue a fatwa, what impact does it have in Syria?

I actually wasn’t aware of the level of influence of my fatwas until a few months ago. There’s a huge influence. First of all, my fatwas are given a high level of respect by Sunnis, and my going against the regime was crucial for hundreds of young ‘ulema who turned against the regime because of my position, and the trust they have in us. (This was because of the well-backed fatwa I gave supported by many texts concluding that no one should support this regime.) No one should support this regime from a shari’a point of view; the president has to be removed.

So considering the fear you mentioned on the part of Syrians about the future, and considering the way that Jabhat al-Nusra, for example, is implementing what they call Islamic law over the areas that they control, it seems that in an apparent reaction to this phenomenon, Mu’az al-Khatib in the last few days has announced a project to prepare a kind of code of Islamic law that would be a more moderate alternative to that of Nusra and al-Qaida, to be implemented in rebel-controlled regions of Syria. What do you think of this?

I believe that the Syrian people agreed on the personal status law that has now been in effect for many decades, and the civil laws. I believe the same laws should remain in effect for now, and any changes should be done after the collapse of the regime, by referendum, after a new parliament is elected, a parliament that forms a constitutional committee for legal reform. Once a constitution is established, it will have a basis for establishing the legal committee that will tackle legal reform. I think that legal reform conducted under the barrels of guns is very dangerous.

So what laws should they be using in rebel-conquered Syrian territory? They are saying they need to establish Islamic law to maintain order.

They should be using the same Syrian laws. I am not for permitting any military group to make their own laws. Now, if Sheikh Mu’az al-Khatib wants to form a committee to establish a new code of law, is it going to be passed by the Coalition? By votes? On what authority? Are people in the liberated areas going to vote on it? These are the important questions we need to ask. The Syrian people have been ruled by these laws for some time: whether they are right or wrong laws, let’s make the changes after the collapse of the regime. It is now premature to decide on a new legal system.

But since there seems to be this “rush toward shari’a” (at least in territory controlled by Islamists), perhaps Mu’az’s effort is necessary to counter what’s taking place?

He’s probably trying to be in the middle. Yes, he’s trying to be in the middle. I had this discussion with Qadi [judge] Muhammad Anwar Mujanni, a magistrate who defected from the regime. He is now the head of the Majlis al-Qudaa al-‘Aala—the Supreme Legal Council. I had a discussion with him in Egypt, while supporting this majlis. There have been some attacks against this council by the Hay al-Shari’a in Aleppo. The conflict between the two was that the Hay al-Shari’a wants to establish “shari’a,” while the Supreme Legal Council is ruling according to the already established laws. They did a lot of damage to the Legal Council, but it [the latter] has now gained more reputation. Under whose authority does it operate? It consists of a group of qualified judges. Are they working under the National Coalition? Not for now. They work independently. They were all qualified legal magistrates and judges working previously within the legal system who defected. They formed it during the uprising and are thinking of the future of the Syrian legal system. Exactly. They are in communication now with the Arab League, and they are calling for international recognition for their council. Shouldn’t the Coalition support that? It should, it should. But the Coalition doesn’t want to get too far away from Jabhat al-Nusra and from this desire to “establish Islam.” We all want to establish Islam, but what version of Islam? What school? What madhab for each area? I would consider this not establishing, but imposing Islam. So there is dialogue between the Supreme Legal Council and the Hay al-Shari’a in Aleppo? They threatened the Legal Council, I think they kidnapped one of their judges, they invaded their center—there has been some real conflict.

So in the future, there is going to be an inevitable conflict between what you represent, and the Islamists who are actually controlling territory. If the regime were to fall, and the conflict with the regime were to end, those fighters will look at any opposition leadership and say “We were here fighting. Where were you? We have the guns. We control this territory. We have Islamic law here.” How is that conflict with leaders like you going to play out?

[Chuckling] Unmanned aircraft are going to hunt them! That’s what reports are saying America is planning now. Yes, there has been talk of drones. It’s so discouraging to think of Syria looking like Afghanistan. For me, our line is very clear. As long as we have lived, we have opposed such ideologies. We didn’t like these extreme ideologies, takfir ideologies, even the Ikhwaan ideology of Sayyid Qutb who is the father of all of these movements and ideologies, and we haven’t changed over time. Now, the biggest challenge for the Ikhwaan will be which side to take. There will be a huge decision for them to make when the regime collapses about what form of government will be there, and they will have to face the fact that the Islamists are the strongest on the ground, organizationally, politically, in funding. The liberals in the opposition are very small. Ikhwaan have a long history and many resources. Either way, they are going to be affected. If they side with Jabhat al-Nusra and support it, they’re going to lose, and if they choose to fight it, they’re also going to pay a huge price. Morsi took a decision to confront the Salafi-jihadis in Sinai. But this is a marginal issue in Egypt; it’s not the biggest problem. But in Syria, it’s the central issue. Jabhat al-Nusra is in control of major cities and oil wells now.

So when we consider this future problem, what is your opinion on how intervention can help? You mentioned that you still support the international community’s help with intervention. What kind of intervention, and how would order be restored in those areas controlled by rebels?

Well, the purpose of international intervention must be to assist the Syrian people in establishing law and order. Toppling the regime can be done by the Syrians, if the right help is provided. But after that, there will be a threat to the Jordanian Hashemite Kingdom, and many reports are coming out now about possible scenarios. There are Americans in Jordan now training Syrian rebels, and we’ve been working for this. I support this. I’m in contact with almost 70 military groups who consist of Sufis. A recent military group was formed, “The Free Sufi Movement,” and they consulted with me about their principles. I gave them a set of principles that they should use if they want to operate. One of the major issues was the necessity of handing over their weapons to the next Syrian government. They must swear by God that they will accept this.

So you believe international intervention could help establish the National Coalition’s authority over such groups in Syria.

Well, the National Coalition’s role ends upon the election of first government.

Right, but in areas controlled by rebels who may not recognize the authority of that government or of the Coalition’s transitional role, what kind of practical intervention could be conducted?

Some support for the Free Syrian Army. The exact form of it has to be discussed.

You were just elected to the National Coalition. Mu’az al-Khatib notified you of that, but now, soon after, he has resigned.

Well, he had already submitted his resignation when he notified me of my appointment.

Who do you think was responsible for your election?

Well, it is several factors. First, as Sufi leaders, we have been working together with a group of Sufi sheikhs of Sufi orders on an initiative to establish a political movement, a movement that would unite the Sufi powers, disciples, supporters, along with the Sunni ‘ulema. When did you start that initiative? Five months ago. Alongside the establishment of the Coalition. I made three trips to the area, including Cairo and Istanbul, holding meetings with Sufi sheikhs. We reached a point where we picked up 60 people: sheikhs and activists who are pro-Sufi. We contacted military groups. We now have the support of approximately 200 military groups of varying sizes. We set our principles in a document to be agreed upon and signed. We denounced violence, we denounced working in secret cells. We agreed to call the movement Tiyaar Binaa’ al-Hadara, Movement for Building Civilization. Some people wanted to call it “Islamic civilization.” I said no, just “civilization.” I specifically did not want it to have the name “Islamic” to keep it inclusive. Islamic civilization was also built by Christians, Jews, and others. But of course, included in its principles is that Syria is an Islamic state: the president should be a Muslim. Regardless of whether we achieve this or not—because this is the democratic process—the idea was to offer an alternative to Ikhwaan and Salafi political power. Those who are advocating the Islamist agenda in the Syrian political arena are three, currently: 1) Salafis (both ‘ilmi and jihadi), 2) Hezb ut-Tahrir, and 3) Ikhwaan (with several wings). And we believe that the three of them have no majority, no control, no popularity in Syria. They having been pushing in the last two years with a lot of money, and it can probably be said that Salafis have had the most success of the three—the ‘Ilmiya, not the jihadists, though the Salafi-Jihadis, like Jabhat al-Nusra, have been successful in building groups and using money to develop organizations. Ikhwaan would be next in terms of gains, and Hezb ut-Tahrir last. This is the main challenge that our people have been talking to us about over the last two years. Our people are religious and moderate by nature. Now, they will not stand behind someone who works against Islam or calls for the destruction of Islam. But they are complaining to us saying, “We are your students; we love you; we are not these people. What are you doing for us?” They are complaining about your absence in the armed opposition or the political opposition? Both. More than complaining, they are demanding results from us. Of course, people like me have been deliberately excluded, until now. When the SNC was founded in Istanbul, I had already been there for 3 months, before coming to Morocco. And I was excluded from all meetings and invitations. Even up until now: they recently held 3 conferences, and I was not invited to any one of them.

I don’t hear a lot about Hezb ut-Tahrir’s activity in Syria. Are they really that involved?

They are trying to make themselves bigger, and they’re pouring money [into the pockets of the rebel groups they want to win over]. I’ll give you one example: there’s a military group operating outside of Damascus in the Ghuta called Liwa Habib Mustafa. They consist of 2000 fighters. The majority of them are of the people, moderate people, fighting for their own villages, for their honor, for the property of their families, for their blood. And their leaders are, you could say, close to us; some of them might be influenced by Ikhwaan or Salafis, but in general they are moderate. Over six months ago I was contacted by one of the founders, begging for my help. They said “money stopped, we don’t have any funds.” Where was it coming from before? From Saudi Arabia. Every fighter had been receiving a salary of $200. At one point approximately six months ago, money stopped. (A lot of military groups complained that they stopped receiving funds around that time. I believe that a reassessment of the situation took place.) So they were in dire need. And Hezb ut-Tahrir came in, offering 20 million Syrian pounds, which at the time was about $100 for each fighter as salary, but requiring them to work under their umbrella, with the stated goal being the establishment of a khilafa¸ and pledging to fight until the goal is accomplished. Hezb-u-Tahir has its own corpus or interpretation of shari’a. Their founder wrote several books and they consider him as the only valid authority. Hezb ut-Tahrir has its own ideology in terms of ‘usuul al-fiqh; they have their own books, their own references.

So people were asking us for help, “please help us!” And I think they went ahead and took the money from them.

Speaking of the reassessment you mentioned, we’ve been reading that a lot of money stopped coming when parties began feeling that the opposition was too Islamist, and yet the non-Islamist fighters are complaining that parties like Qatar are giving money only to Islamists, sidelining the very groups that would be seen by others as legitimate recipients of support.

That’s right; several people are contacting me, even some members of military groups who receive through Qatar. They tell us “Qatar is paying money, why are you not getting anything? We don’t like it; we know that the leaders of our military groups are getting this money. But we are there just because we are getting paid. We can change sides and help form any new group, and we will be on your side.” To be honest, if we announced now a “Sufi Military Front,” we could easily get 50,000 fighters and a few hundred military groups together. So what are you waiting for? Funds. They can’t join if we don’t pay them. And it will be better for those more qualified with military experience to handle it—I don’t want to get involved in running the military myself; I’d rather stay on the political side.

Now you’re saying Islamists are a minority in terms of popularity and power inside Syria, but they are a majority in the political opposition. The Ikhwaan formed the political opposition and controlled it from the beginning, and they made sure that no other opposition figures would penetrate it. They are trying to make it appear that they represent all the Syrian people; this is why they do not want the ‘ulema to participate on any council, because people would turn to the ‘ulema. This is why good people left the opposition. There has been a hidden war against me personally, to block my access to these institutions. Al-Jazeera hosted figures affiliated with the Ikhwaan and excluded me, even though my name was suggested and recommended several times for appearances.

So coming back to the point about what has now led to my entry into the National Coalition: Sheikh As’ad, me, Dr. Mahmoud Hussein, a few others—we all wrote a draft letter to the Coalition a month ago and got the signatures of 25 Sufi figures on it. It is a good letter that demands several things from the Coalition. We demanded representation. We assert that we are a huge bloc of the social and religious tissues of Syria. That letter was sent to the chairman, Dr. Mu’az al-Khatib, and to the vice chairmen—this was before he resigned. We are now a group with 60 active leaders, ready to establish this movement. All we need is funds. We will be opening an office, hosted by Jordan.

What should the Syrian opposition look like, generally?

It should be made up of individuals, expertise, advisors from all sides and groups: religious and secular. The future of Syria is not bound by victory over the regime. I believe the future of Syria has to be looked at from different points of view, creating a unique opportunity between all members of Syrian society, and all religious and ethnic groups. We need to consider the non-Muslim vantage points. Consider yourself for a moment a non-Muslim Syrian citizen who is looking at the future of Syria. We need to look at how others see it, why others are afraid of us. It doesn’t mean that if I’m a Muslim, or a Muslim scholar, or a Muslim thinker, or a Muslim leader who happens to lead the uprising, that it should then be shaped or framed as in a religious way, or that I alone decide on the future of Syria. This is one point that I believe should be quite important. I don’t mind starting a political speech without “In the name of God.” Here I am in politics—I can mention the name of God on the way there, in my heart, as much as I wish, but now I am at a political event. However, some politicians around the Arab World do so, like Hosni Mubarak used to when he began speeches. It’s a cultural feature. Yes, it’s a cultural thing, but sometimes it shapes your discourse; we don’t want to shape our discourse that way. [By this] we are not running away from our religion! But we don’t want to threaten others. We don’t want others to believe that we are going to establish a shari’a-based state that is going to execute or exclude others. I believe we still have a huge margin of the Syrian people who are afraid to rebel against the regime, just because they are afraid of the future. Or they don’t have enough trust in the recent oppositional leadership. Mu’az won a huge margin—a lot of people who had been concerned before, joined the uprising because of his joining. And we need to give more assurances, I believe, from inside the Coalition. The expansion of the Coalition needs to continue until it reaches its best balance.

Now that you’re part of it, can you help make that happen?

Hopefully, hopefully. Even now that I’m part of it, I’m not claiming that I represent the Syrian people. I don’t have authority from the Syrian people to represent them, either in the Coalition or somewhere else. I am there to help the process of getting through this period, toppling the regime, organizing relief, trying to manage the areas now under the control of the opposition—whatever help we can offer. But the representatives of the Syrian people will be elected. Those who are elected after the fall of the regime will rightly claim to be representatives of the Syrian people.

Tell me your impression of Hitto.

I met him for the first time four months ago in Hatay Airport. He seemed to be quite well-educated. He’s head of the relief unit, the aid unit. I had a good impression of him. Now some people say that he is Ikhwaani, but I don’t know the history of his family. Even if he is, I don’t mind. We may have to deal with an Ikhwaani prime minister in the future Syria. That is democracy. But the real question is: will the government be of all one color, or will it be inclusive?

Tell me about your leaving Syria: why did you leave and why did you leave at that time?

Here’s what happened. Just to give you the picture before I get into this: I was well known for being a trouble-maker for the regime in Syria. At one point I had lost my job at the mosque for 6 months for criticizing [Grand Mufti] Hassoun. I had been offered several positions in the government when I returned to Syria in 2006 [after teaching for a period at Zaytuna College in California], and clearly they wanted me to serve as the mufti of Damascus. They negotiated and said, “This is the job for you.” But I always kept away because I was expecting the fall of the regime. So I did not accept the position to be mufti of Damascus; I was offered this and I refused. They appointed me as member of a council for just one month. Then I resigned. Hassoun was the head of the committee, overseeing the companies of Islamic insurance. I was there only one month and then I resigned after my conflict with Hassoun. This was in 2008. They were trying to woo me to the side of the regime, this is how they do it, by offering them jobs, money, compensation.

Hassoun is also a traditional ‘aalim. Yes. But the authority that appoints muftis in Syria is not ‘ulema-based but rather the regime.

This has changed since Kuftaro in 1960; before that it was a council of muftis that would sit together and elect a mufti. This is how Sheikh Abu al-Yasir Abideen, the mufti before Kuftaro, was elected, and it was how Kuftaro himself was elected as a mufti. So he was the last one elected. Exactly. But at the time he was elected, the term of a mufti was four years. Kuftaro was elected, and afterwards Hafez al-Assad made a presidential ruling that he would be mufti for life. So he became mufti for 40 years, almost.

So the regime was wary about me. And before the uprising, I had been called for interrogation 4 times. This was in 2010 and in January of 2011, because of the subjects of my speeches. In one of them I spoke about the Tunisian uprising (and it had also recently begun in Egypt), and I spoke about corruption. I criticized Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi doctrine and at the time they were trying to beg the Saudis for good relations, so they called me for interrogation.

That is very ironic.

Yes, very ironic!

So I was known for being a trouble maker. Every time there was a special occasion for the Ba’ath party, like an anniversary or such, I would do a speech against the Ba’ath party.

So when the uprising started, I thought, “Let’s not rush.” We heard the president giving promises of reform; let’s wait for the reform. This was wise, but at the same time I wrote a plan of two pages of suggestions for the president and gave it to a friend who was a friend of the president and asked him to give it to him. These requests included the basics: removal of those responsible for the killing of demonstrators in Dera’a, reform of the security system, and other things. The Friday after that I didn’t deliver a speech. Then killing started; I delivered a speech (it’s on the net) about the danger of murder and killing innocent people. When was that? That was in April. It was a full speech, a half-hour on the issue of killing people and how dangerous it is and how this culture is spread by the regime… You specifically said that “the culture of killing is spread by the regime”? Well, not exactly like that, more to the effect of the “army killing people” or the “government killing people,” but it was very direct. The following Friday, they sent over 200 security people to the mosque, with arms [concealed arms, men not in uniform]. I was not planning on giving the khutba. I had appointed one of my students to deliver the sermon in my presence (I was at the mosque). When I saw that over 200 people had come 15 minutes beforehand [who were not those who usually frequent the mosque] sitting with the worshippers— Everyone was scared. They came prepared to fight. It was obvious that they were waiting for any slight provocation or controversial text to be mentioned so that they could start beating people. So I told my student, “Let me go up; I’ll do the khutba” because I thought he wouldn’t be able to handle it. So went up to the pulpit, said the prayers and introduction to the khutba, and then I said “That’s it.” I didn’t do a khutba or speak about any subject! You have to be wise: I had approximately 1,200 people praying in the mosque and I didn’t want a massacre. If you want to make a statement, you have to make it at the right time. So on the following Friday (the 5^th of May), I delivered a disastrous speech for the regime, a big slam to the regime. When they were not expecting it. Exactly. And there is a video of it on Youtube with English subtitles that you can watch. No one dared to say something like that. I described what was happening, gave a story of a man who was killed at a military checkpoint in cold blood, his father was prevented from giving emergency aid to him, I mentioned his name Mu’taz al-Sha’ar, I mentioned how people are tortured in prison, I mentioned how people are killed in hospitals… I described what was happening and I said “In any conflict between the people and the government, the people will win.” Just look at history.

So it was really… people were afraid for me! I couldn’t go home after the khutba. I had been planning to say something, so I had already sent my wife and kids to my in-laws, and after the speech I went into hiding. And the security force came to my home that evening, and the next day, three times total according to the neighbors. So for about 25 days I kept moving from one place to another. I don’t think that the government expected me to leave the country, or perhaps there is always some gap [between an event that makes a person “wanted” and the awareness of border security that such a person should be detained]. But on my passport, I didn’t have my profession specified, because I travel a lot, and every time I want to travel (as a scholar) I’m supposed to get permission from the minister. So the last time I renewed my passport, I went to my father-in-law who is a businessman and got a certificate saying that I am a sales manager. So I had my passport issued with “sales manager” on it. So that when I wanted to travel back-and-forth from the country, I wouldn’t have to get permission from the minister [the wazir al-awqaaf]. And my name was not yet on the list of people who were banned from traveling. But someone finally came and warned me saying, “Sheikh Muhammad, some of the top generals in the security services are speaking ill of you, sooner or later things are going to escalate, you have to make a choice: if you stay in the country, they’re going to get you.” So I traveled immediately. I traveled from the airport; my name was not on any list at that time. (I checked before I went—there are people to whom you can pay money and they will check the computer system for you and let you know if your name is on the list. I wouldn’t have gone without checking.) I think two or three weeks after that my name was on the list. After a few months, I got my family out, through Jordan.

In my first appearance on al-Jazeera, I issued a fatwa saying the regime has to be toppled, because there was no justification in the shari’a for oppression. That was from Istanbul, after leaving Syria. After it I did several other programs on the situation, on BBC world, etc. But now they are banning me from al-Jazeera.

Can you say something about the Sufi ‘Ulema? Approaches to policy?

Sufis generally prefer monarchy [such as Morocco’s], but they don’t trust Saudi Arabia, because of the anti-Sufi Wahhabi movement. They hate socialism, so they would tend more towards America than, say, Russia or China. There was fear in the past that some Sufis would be pro-Iran, as Egypt has had Sufis that are pro-Iran. But in Syria this doesn’t exist. Sufis in Syria have no love for Shi’ism. Probably one quarter of the Syrian population is Sufi. This is far beyond ten-thousand members of the Ikhwaan. We don’t allow working underground in secret cells. We work in the open. We don’t need organizations, because the ‘ulema rely on the trust they build with people, through their life of uprightness, knowledge, reputation. So we don’t need, and we prohibit secret organizations. Because the moment we get into secrets, we get into the Batiniyya. They are sects which hold to hidden meanings, hidden dogmas, hidden interpretations: this leads to hidden policies and agendas. Secrecy is forbidden in Islam. Everything we do is in the open; we don’t have a secret organization. I’m at the age of 50 now. I started preaching at the age of less than 15, formally at the age of 17. They discovered that I was under the legal age for a preacher in Syria (18), so the mudiir of awqaaf in Damascus wrote me a paper that he signed, saying “next year we’ll appoint you,” and the age of 18 they appointed me. Since that time I’ve been teaching, preaching, giving fatwas, to varying degrees; we get more knowledge the older we get. And I haven’t seen any need for or good come from secret cells or organizations. It’s very dangerous and people are brainwashed. We are ‘ulema. People come to us; if they don’t like us they go to another scholar—a fourth scholar, a fourth mosque. No one is forcing them to attend a particular mosque; they can choose for themselves. People like scholars of different styles, but at the same time, we work for the same Islam. Hanafi or Shaafi’i—minor differences—but the major issues are wellbeing, protection of life… even the issue of going against the regime: it is very difficult to get a fatwa for rebelling against the regime. And I couldn’t give it, in any circumstance. But the Syrian case is really different. This is why Dr. Bouti—Allayirhamo—and others couldn’t understand the complexity of the danger of the Syrian regime remaining in power. So they went with the classical position of the four madhabs that you can’t go against a ruler—which is very true in the four madhabs! So why does this case qualify? Well, here is the point: The ‘ulema reference a hadith of the Prophet that says “Even if the ruler is oppressive—takes your money and beats you…” Not me, but other scholars have talked about how oppression operates at various levels: when it is levied only at individuals, the statement of the Prophet applies, because an individual cannot rebel against a ruler, even if (and I would say especially if) he is influential, who then creates chaos because he was a single individual of influence who half the people would then follow causing a civil war or great chaos—just because he was oppressed as an individual. Here, the statement of the Prophet applies because you can’t rebel for your own sake, even if you are oppressed. The issue is: when oppression is against the nation, it conflicts with the very reason that this ruler is a ruler. As a president, his job is to protect people’s honor or blood or wealth. How do you decide when a ruler oppresses the nation? We have had many dictatorial Arab regimes with various levels of oppression. Some might say the oppression is directed at individuals or groups who threaten their status or positions of influence within the society. Others might conclude that it is against the entire society. How do you come to the decision that the Syrian case qualifies as this kind of oppression that delegitimizes the very purpose of rule, and calls for a revolution? To be honest, when I issued the fatwa, I sat, writing down—the fatwa from Istanbul, after you left? Yes. It had been in my mind, and I spoke about it in private sessions when I was still in Syria. So it was something already known. I would not have gone against the regime if—according to the shari’a point of view, I had not been backed. The point is, first we have the history of the regime, which gave indications about what would happen [in the future]. We all know that in the 80s, the Ikhwaan were wrong in their assassinations of some top Alawite officials of the time; but the regime’s reaction was beyond measure. It destroyed the city of Hama and killed between 10 and 40 thousand people; we don’t know the real figures. Even at the lower figure of 10,000, I would put no trust in such a regime for reforms—with this history. But briefly, that fight was with a kind of radical Ikhwaan movement that posed a threat to the legitimacy of traditional ‘ulema, like you, and even at that time, that group was ready to use weapons against the regime, prior to the massacre in Hama, which, by your definition would be an illegitimate rebellion against a ruler. If Hafez al-Assad was an oppressive ruler, but targeted specific individuals or groups who threatened his domination (rather than committing statewide massacres), then the Hama incident could be viewed as a reaction against an illegitimate rebellion on the part of the Ikhwaan who began provoking the regime with weapons—which of course did involve a large, brutal massacre in their crackdown. No, you’re right; it’s very coherent. The ‘ulema at the time—my father was alive—he passed away at the end of ‘85—we witnessed and had discussions with many scholars and I was very active in the intellectual debate, and the ‘ulema were against the position of the Ikhwaan. Not because the regime had legitimacy; it had reached power through coup d’état. But if a change is to be made, it has to happen by consensus of the representatives of the nation. Not by a small group. The Ikhwaan acted on their own. They didn’t consult with the ‘ulema. You know from the history of revolutions that you must prepare people before making a change. If there is oppression, you have to prepare people so that they accept the change or call for a change. Now in the 80s, I delivered a speech (I was a Friday speaker) in Salhiye, in the heart of Damascus at the al-Tawusiyya mosque. (My father was a Friday speaker in that mosque. And I was as well, from 1980 to 1990. Then I resigned from all my duties and left the country to study English in the UK , then I studied in Sweden—this was also after a conflict with the regime! A conflict with the Ministry of Religious Affairs.) So we used to deliver Friday speeches at that time. There were three elements of the regime we didn’t like: socialism, nationalism (Ba’ath ideology), and the sectarian character of the regime. We used to put hidden criticisms of the regime into our speeches. I remember giving a speech in which I said “Until when will our children repeat every morning ‘wahda, hurriya, ishtirakiyya’ [the Ba’ath motto, “unity, liberty, socialism”], and how are we going to liberate the Golan Heights and Palestine while our children are being brainwashed?” Things of that nature. Over 10 people immediately took their shoes and ran away from the mosque, in that moment. So people were not ready. And the ‘ulema are the ones who are in contact with people. If any scholar had called at that time for rebellion or demonstration, not 10 people would have gathered around him to support him. In the West they recently wrote an article about Sunni business people supporting Assad so that he reached power, and to be honest, that’s very true! It was Sunni business people who supported him for their own business interests. They didn’t mind working with the devil. This allowed Hafez al-Assad to become stronger and stronger. And over time those business people wouldn’t object to or express disagreement with anything he did… but now things have changed. With the advent of satellite TV channels, people have been changing; they are not numb any longer. They began asking, “Why should I forfeit my freedom to this political regime?” And you shouldn’t expect people to oppose a regime in the early years of its creation; it takes a generation or two. In our case it took one generation, for the Soviet Union it took three. So the ‘ulema have to be wise in finding the right time. When the time was right and I delivered my speeches in the al-Hassan mosque (at the beginning of the uprising), people were coming to me and embracing me, thanking me for making such statements. The Arab Spring was the first cause of this, the second was the regime gradually revealing its truly nasty image. If similar speeches even 10% to that tune of opposing the regime had been delivered five, six, seven years ago, especially in the early years of Bashar, for example, people would have attacked me for every word. So returning to why you decided that this was the right time to issue a fatwa against the regime when traditionally in Islam a ruler is not to be opposed? I’ll give you some historical observations on what has been going on. Either the president rules or he doesn’t rule and the heads of secret service / security are ruling. We heard testimonies all over the news of how people were executed in hospitals, how tanks ran over demonstrators, how people were killed in prison, tortured to death—this savagery wasn’t something done by mistake. It was a systematic policy of the secret service, and people revealed this to the president. I wasn’t among the people who met with the president at the time. But several people met with the president and some of them came to my home after the meeting, the delegation from Deir Ezzor, the mufti and others, for example. After they met with the president they came to my home and had dinner, and we discussed it. I heard from others as well who had met with the president. The president would sometimes express unawareness about these events; other times he would agree that they were occurring but maintain that they were isolated events. Sometimes if cornered and pressured significantly, he would say “give me the names of the people responsible and I will sue them.” This is an interesting issue: some people feel that the president himself is personally responsible for the killing, that he is the one issuing the orders, that he is a murderer of women and children. Others feel that he’s not really in charge of the regime but is just a figurehead, a face for the regime. It is deeper than this, but the simple answer is that yes, he is issuing orders, orders for military responses. Major decisions are usually made by the president himself. For example, no military unit can move from one place to another unless there is a presidential order. But we all agree that when he first became president, he didn’t have any power. He didn’t become president because of any power of his own; the people who made him president, I’m sure, have authority over him. Still? Well, still or not, this is another issue. He could sack Abd al-Fattah Qudsiya, or Ali Mamlouk, or Jameel Hassan from the Air Force Secret Service; he can sack one of them and appoint another person and I don’t think there will be a coup d’état against him or that there would be an assassination against him. But the main issue is that ideologically, he is justifying for himself everything he is doing. He thinks that he is really defending the country against terrorists.

Is he entirely wrong when we see, at this point, that Jabhat al-Nusra is with al-Qaida, and they are willing to commit killings based on a takfiri ideology?

I think he knows very well that he is not right. In his early speech in April 2011, he mentioned that there were 64,000 criminal outlaws—how did all of a sudden 64,000 come from nowhere? This was in April, 2011. These were demonstrators, people going to demonstrations. Why did people form military groups? Mainly they were the people who had gone to demonstrations, were captured, tortured in prison, and then released. After what they went through and witnessed in prison, they opted for fighting the regime, afterwards. So I’m sure the president knows what’s going on, especially with the secret service: the cook knows what’s going on in the kitchen. Abu Mus’ab as-Suri was handed over by the U.S. to the Syrians after being captured in Afghanistan. And then he disappeared in the Syrian prisons. We heard reports that Fira’ Falastin [??? ??????– the “Palestine Branch” of the Syrian mukhabaraat, secret services] released the ex-al-Qaida fighters from Iraq who had been captured, and those were the early ones who began forming al-Nusra.

So they would have released them in 2011? Yes.

How solid do you believe that evidence is? This conflict is full of rumor, and it’s difficult for me to believe that the regime wanted to escalate the conflict (which threatens its very existence) just to bolster the principle of its legitimacy. Sure, it’s to the regime’s advantage that it can now point to real terrorist elements within the opposition, but to create jihadist networks and car-bomb its own cities—destabilizing the very country it still wants to control—seems contrary to its goal of restoring order.

The regime was betting on something, taking a chance. As long as the uprising was peaceful, the regime would be losing. We heard verified statements that some security and military officers started selling arms in Dera’a, in the south. And in another instance, I heard (something I can’t verify) that people were offered weapons deals. The other statements that can be verified claim that they left Kalashnikovs and other weapons, for demonstrators to carry, in order to justify the regime’s actions. In Bashar al-Assad’s most recent interview, he said that this is a war. And when he calls this a “war,” he has considered it a war from the beginning. A “war” means he’s not dealing with “people” (who are demonstrating, who are defending their honor); in a war he can resort to any means necessary. So they wanted it to turn into a war.

But that strategy does not work, because the other side of that war has captured areas like Raqqa, Deir Ezzor; the Kurdish area is no longer under state control; Dera’a is going back and forth between regime and opposition control with areas near Jordan and the Golan out of regime control; the fight in Idlib is very tough; Aleppo is divided… Though not necessarily losing, the regime is not really winning right now. So a strategy to convert an uprising of opinion and dissent into a war—Did not work. It worked on one level but not for the best interest of the people. Although I was asked, and I issued a fatwa saying that people may defend themselves, in Homs, when Homs was attacked in Bab al-‘Amr; I said that jihad was obligatory, at the time. I was one of the earliest people who did so. For me, if our people carry guns and defend themselves under the Free Syrian Army it is better than having either military intervention or having ideological groups proliferate. But unfortunately the down side is that—yes, it’s a war now—probably 50% or so (I don’t know exactly how many on the ground) are extremist groups, whose goal is not just to topple the regime, but to establish their “shari’a states”  and have their own warlord-like control on the streets. The point is quite interesting. These people, especially foreign fighters, and including some of the extremist Syrians (I’m sure they will find some to brainwash and recruit) they won’t care about finishing off the regime or not; all they are interested in is their military activities, training, building secret cells, in order to move to other countries and to work against U.S. interests and some other countries. Someone drew my attention to this after having been inside and talking to some of them. He came back out with this impression. He said they don’t care whether the regime collapses or not; they are just building their own organization, cells, and strategic planning for future work. I believe that in the end, this will force the West to intervene, in order to get rid of them.

What did you think when Grand Mufti Ahmed Badr al-Din Hassoun issued the call for jihad on the part of the Syrian army?

[Laughing] Some have suggested that the Chechen brothers who conducted the Boston bombing were responding to this call for jihad! But that would mean that those brothers were somehow supportive of the Syrian regime! Yes, yes, this is the talk of Syrians who want the West to feel that the Syrian regime is the gravest threat to the U.S. Anyway, the call was very serious and very stupid. Ahmed Badr al-Din Hassoun is considered to be pro-West, pro-America. He was welcomed by the European parliament. He delivered a historical speech there, though I criticized him for some statements he made. I received a lot of damage myself, for criticizing him. Even in the U.S. some try to depict me as an extremist for criticizing him. Because they saw him as so moderate. Exactly. And this issue was related to the Prophet Mohammed; this, you know, is something serious. He made a mistake, he has to admit it—he did admit it. A few weeks before the beginning of the uprising, one of the top business people in Syria, Ammaar Sahlool contacted me and said “I want to come and visit you with him.” I said, “You are most welcome and I will honor him in my place when he comes.” He wanted to put an end to it, just to have a picture with me showing that things are settled, because my speech against him had had a huge impact. He admits that the toughest strike he received was from me. So anyway, I offered him condolences when his son was assassinated; death is something that when it comes, we must stand by each other. I respect him as a scholar, as a Sufi. I didn’t expect this to happen.

So my question is, is it possible for people on that side of the conflict to declare a jihad? There are many Sunnis still with the army, for example. They believe they are fighting for the protection of Syria from al-Nusra and other groups. Can those people not consider their struggle a jihad?

Yes, they can. So the call is legitimate. Not by the Mufti. We are talking about Sunni soldiers in the army who are brainwashed and are banned from any media except that of the regime. I would be lenient toward a soldier fighting in the Syrian army and accept his jihad if he believes in it; but not the Mufti. The Mufti knows what’s going on; he’s aware of the worldwide media, he watches it. You know he denied on al-Jazeera, live in an interview, that scud missiles hit Aleppo University. He denied it! He said, “Did you see it?” An empty argument! His call for jihad cannot be considered legitimate and no one is taking it seriously at all. But he’s an ‘aalim, he’s a mufti. Why can another call for jihad but not him? Okay, because he’s on the side of the regime. Calling for jihad for what reason? Well, from their perspective for the protection of Syria from certain threats. Well, if any people would be influenced by that, people who are brainwashed, people who have restricted access to the media, those who live within the army without a single day of leave and only watch Syrian channels… I think the fatwa is to serve these people. But I’m asking, from an Islamic perspective, theologically, is anything wrong with his fatwa. Yes, of course it is wrong. Everything is wrong with it. Why? Because the regime has no legitimacy, so why would you defend the regime? Why doesn’t it have legitimacy—in a theological sense? First of all, because the president went against his duty. I told you before: his job is to protect the country, protect the people, protect honor, protect wealth, protect sanity, and he did not perform this duty, at all. He had an opportunity to make reform, to bring criminals to justice. He formed a committee to study the case of Dera’a, Douma, and later on Lattakia, and the results of this committee’s analysis never came out. So it is very obvious that he is not on the side of the people; he is on the side of the criminals. So such a president, along with his assistants, has no shari’a backing or support for continued leadership of the country. Besides, from a shari’a point of view, let’s say there’s a controversy about him. He should resign, and hand leadership over to others—if the cause is right. If the cause is right, and there is a controversy, all that people are asking for is that he be removed. Ok, let’s bring someone else. Why not? Why is he sticking to the chair so? We see that the whole conflict will be solved by him being removed. So remove a nation (killing 100,000 people), or remove a single person from the presidency. It’s very obvious.

Sheikh al-Bouti echoed Hassoun’s call for jihad and referred to people fighting in the Syrian army as ashaab an-Nabi [companions of the Prophet]. All his statements supported that position of jihad on behalf of the Syrian army. I wonder about your relationship with Sheikh al-Bouti: he was an internationally respected scholar, and at the same time he supported the regime. It must be difficult and uncomfortable to reconcile that, and I wonder how you do it.

I wrote six articles refuting Dr. Bouti, in the past year. Dr. Bouti, as you said, is an international figure with a great reputation. His followers outside of Syria are millions of Muslims. His books have been translated into several languages. He was not my teacher, though I have to give him due respect as an elder scholar with a lot of experience and knowledge. He was a student of my father, studying for a while under him. He offered a great eulogy for my father in 1985 when my father passed away. I disagreed with him, with his positions, from 1990 on (or around that time). What positions? He went with the regime, and supported the regime. Hafez al-Assad succeeded in pulling him towards him, started sitting with him for hours and hours, especially when Hafez al-Assed was diagnosed with cancer. When Hafez al-Assad discovered that he had cancer, he began to spend more time with him?

In one session, he sat with him privately for seven hours; no one else was there. So this was when his health began failing; was he seeking something spiritual, that wasn’t about politics? Something like that. But probably, there were some politics in it. One of the strongest statements of Dr. Bouti in support of the regime came when Bassel al-Assad was killed (or died in a car accident). He prayed at his funeral, and made statements suggesting that he was in paradise, and that he saw him or that he would see him—I don’t recall the exact words, but his supporters claim that the opposition distorted his own statements. Is it a problem for him to make that statement about Bassel? It is problematic. Because he was Alawi? Not just because he was Alawi, but just because people were not ready to see anyone praising President Assad or his regime. It was very bitter. So the problem was a political problem, not a religious problem? Both, probably, both. Common Muslims are not really aware of theology. What affects them more is politics. No one was ready to see someone siding with the regime. If they had been able to get the Devil to come and replace Hafez al-Assad at that time, they would have welcomed the Devil. The image of Hafez al-Assad was so dirty that anyone who would shake hands with him would be rejected by people. And Sheikh al-Bouti’s relationship helped his image. It helped a lot. And then he prayed at the funeral of Hafez al-Assad himself, and he appeared on TV crying. And I saw him swearing that Hafez al-Assad was a Muslim. Now that funeral was in 2000. Yes. So why did you start disagreeing with him in 1990? The first public appearance of Dr. Bouti in support of the regime (or I would say, in the presence of Hafez al-Assad) was in 1980. That was the first event for the millennium festival for the 15^th century hijri. It was at the University of Damascus’ theater. That was the first speech he delivered before the president. He offered sharp criticisms and pointed out the wrong that was happening within the government. He gave him strong advice, he didn’t praise him. But the government was smarter than was thought. They knew how to pull him. The people responsible for pulling him are two: Mohammed Khatib, ex-minister of awqaaf, and Alawite General Mohammed Nasif who was then head of internal security services. Now he is advisor to the president. He is one of the top Alawite rulers of the country now. What do you mean, “they pulled him”? Dr. Bouti was just a professor at the University of Damascus. He had two lectures weekly—Mondays and Thursdays in a small mosque. They succeeded in pulling up to that position and getting him close to the president. These two people. These two people. I don’t know Mohammed Nasif; people tried to have a meeting between him and me in the past few years because my name was growing. I said I have no interest in meeting him. I kept away from the regime, myself. But Mohammed Khatib, ex-minister—I know him very well. Mu’az’s family? No, a different family, from the south. He was minister from 1980-87. He was one of the greatest minds. And he is the one who got al-Bouti into supporting the regime. Now, Dr. Bouti is very emotional. He has some qualities which are good sometimes, but in politics they are not good. He believes anyone who gives him a statement; he doesn’t believe anyone would lie. He trusts people beyond what is reasonable. So little by little he established strong ties with people in the regime. They convinced him—Hafez al-Assad, for example convinced him that every morning and evening he was making extra prayers. He [Sheikh Bouti] gave him some texts to read, and every time they would meet, Hafez al-Assad would point out to him: “This is a text you gave me that I’m reading every morning and evening.” And these types of things lured him. So Dr. Bouti is different from Hassoun. Dr. Bouti really believed every word he said. This is why, when he died, I made a statement in his eulogy, and I consider him a martyr. And the bulk of the rebels disagreed with me, and I don’t care, because this is justice. Other scholars, even Ikhwaani scholars, kept silent, because they don’t want to lose popularity with the rebels. For me, I’m considering history: we have historical ties with Dr. Bouti. I disagreed with him on the theological and legal issue of whether rebelling against the regime is allowed or not allowed; I said this on a TV interview. But people should not be killed for their opinions. He died in a mosque, while giving a lecture, Friday night: he’s a martyr, from that point of view.

Tell me, what would be the place of the Alawi community in a new Syrian state?

My position and the position of the ‘ulema: We do not hold responsible any community or group, religious or ethnic, for the atrocities committed during the tenure of the Ba’ath regime or Assad rule. Every individual is responsible for his own actions. I think it is very important to emphasize the rights of all minorities, especially in the midst of this extremist violence, these winds of extremism blowing through the uprising. The ‘ulema in general have no problem with the minorities, and are probably the safeguard for the unity of the country, for the solidarity of the nation, for the coexistence between all groups—to give a guarantee for these. I recently suggested to the Danish Foreign Minister (I met him here at the Friends of Syria conference in Marrakesh) that someone should organize a conference and invite Sunni scholars and religious leaders from the Christian minority, from the Druze minority, from the Alawite minority, and we should agree on a common, historical statement for the future of coexistence in Syria. Between all of us. And I stress that this hasn’t been done until now. There was an attempt to do so by a U.S.-based organization, a good organization, called Religions for Peace, who invited me—Dr. William Vendley who is based in New York. They organized a conference in Istanbul, this last Monday. I was invited, but I couldn’t travel because of my papers here, which I have to have processed.

In a new Syria, regardless of whether it becomes a democracy or a system run by Ikhwaan or other Islamists, power is going to be Sunni. They are the majority and power is going to be in their hands. Under Islamic law, what kind of protection can there be for ghulaat sects? I don’t know if they are seen as ahl al-kitaab or not.

Let me first say that I don’t have an agenda to “Islamize” the law after the uprising succeeds; the law in effect would be applied for all citizens and I don’t think the law discriminates now. Yes, but it allows Christians and Druze to have separate ahwaal shakhsiya, so would ‘Alawi then be allowed to have their own?

Well, the question is about the very existence [identity] of the ‘Alawite minority. There is a long discussion about this issue—whether the ‘Alawites want to be depicted as ‘Alawites, number one. Under Hafez al-Assad they wanted to be identified as Muslims. As Ja’faris. As Twelvers. As Twelvers, exactly. Hafez al-Assad himself contributed to this. He allowed, for example, Sayyid Hasan Shirazi from Lebanon to come and do da’wa in order to open mosques and make ‘Alawites Ja’faris. And Hasan Shirazi at the time started establishing ties with the ‘ulema, and he came and visited us in our home in 1975. He visited my father and I attended the meeting. And the discussion was about ‘Alawites being Twelvers. And what was the attitude of your family and the ‘ulema in Syria at that time? Of course we would welcome this; this is much better, if they become Twelvers. But they were not Twelvers, they were just telling the public that they were. But here is the point: when you come to the ‘Alawites and ask them “Do you want personal status law,” they don’t have law. As a sect they don’t have it—it’s just a set of myths. Yes, but neither do Christians. Christians also don’t have “law,” but ahwaal shakhsiyya for Christians is necessary because the sphere of family law in Islamic societies is governed by shari’a. But the Torah is often included as part of Christianity, and it has many laws, including laws on marriage. But it’s a vastly complex legal system not followed or considered binding by almost all Christian communities. Christian legal systems that existed previously evolved when church institutions acquired political power, and where those institutions no longer have power those systems have generally fallen by the way. Christianity does not have a self-contained legal system like shari’a or Leviticus. But in Islamic societies where family law is governed by shari’a, it creates the necessity to give Christians ahwaal shakhsiya because they can’t be made to follow laws that are specific to Muslims. That’s right. But ‘Alawites have an internal conflict with themselves—whether they wanted to stay ‘Alawite, whether they wanted to change to Twelvers. If they wanted to write their own personal status law, I wouldn’t oppose it. If they do, it could distinguish them from Muslims. You see, their identity is not fixed. They themselves haven’t yet decided on their identity. But I question this idea that they “haven’t decided” on their identity. They are one of the oldest ghulaat sects in Islam. They are very old and they’ve existed in this area for many centuries. It seems that it was only in the 20^th century that their identity began to be in flux, largely because of Hafez al-Assad coming to power, when they then had to wrestle with legitimacy. In terms of legitimacy, in the Hanafi school we consider them like the People of the Book. I didn’t know that. The Hanafi school has considered Magians as People of the Book. And similarly in the fatwas of the Hanafite scholars, such sects as the ‘Alawites and Druze are considered like the People of the Book, in a way that is quite simple, but which also has restrictions. Which scholars and in which period? I’m referring to scholars of the Ottoman period. I know you’re thinking about Ibn Taymiyya and others. I know he wrote against them. Exactly. So scholars after him in the Hanafi school—In the Hanafi school you also find books considering the ‘Alawites, and the Druze, and the Batiniyya in general as non-Muslims. Even a scholar called al-Mahdi from the Hanafi school authored a special book on them. (It has recently been re-published, just because of the uprising.) Now for me, mixing theology with politics is something very dangerous. When we say they are non-Muslims.. I was asked this question and some people misunderstood me. What I told them was that we teach theology in a class on theology: who is a Muslim, who is not. Who is a believer, who is an unbeliever—this discussion takes place in every religion. In Christianity: who is baptized or not baptized, who is entitled to salvation and who is not; it exists in every religion. But to have it in a political or a social law, this is different. When we say they are non-Muslims, it doesn’t mean they have to be killed. If we go to the books of politics: kitaab al-siyaasa, or kitaab al-jihaad, or kitaab al-whatever, or the books of fiqh, you’ll see that the muftis agreed on them living, agreed on giving them full rights. These were Ottoman muftis after Ibn Taymiyya; the Ottomans didn’t exterminate them. Now they had restrictions on them, which they [the ‘Alawis] considered oppression. Because they considered their religion falsehood, they were not allowed to proselytize for it. But no non-Muslim religion is allowed to proselytize. Exactly. The other point is that because of their use of taqiyya, they were not allowed into higher positions, where they would harm the state. But you don’t see the phenomenon of Hasan Shirazi’s legitimization of them as a possible strategy for taqiyya? I think we have to differentiate between two things. There are some educated ‘Alawites, and I know some of them in Syria. I was in contact and in discussions with some of them including one of the greatest figures, Abd al-Rahman al-Khayir. Abd al-Rahman al-Khayir is from a scholarly ‘Alawite family and they consider the al-Assad family as a low family. The al-Khayir family are like the Sharifs of the ‘Alawites and there are several sheikhs from the al-Khayir family. The family and Abd al-Rahman al-Khayir himself was a friend of my father’s and other sheikhs. He presented himself as a Twelver. Now, I read some of his statements, and we believe that he was true in his statements. Now if others pretend, I don’t know. And I believe it was in the interest of the Iranian government to “Shi’atize” them.

Now I could be mistaken, but isn’t it the case that although ‘Alawis advertise themselves as Muslim, they often don’t make a point to portray themselves as Shi’i, but actually seem more aligned with Sunnis, even expressed through the president’s marriage to a Sunni woman?

Anything about ‘Alawites was banned. Books, media, newspapers, articles, radio programs, TV shows—anything. The word Alawiyya was banned. For 40 years! (From 1970.) They didn’t want people to discover the truth: that the regime was sectarian. Anyway, in terms of the future of the minorities, we have already set principles for all to participate in the civil conferences, and all citizens are equal before the law. We only reserve one right, which I advocate, and I think rightly; it is unspoken in most Western countries: the president has to represent the religion of the majority of the people. In Syria I think there is a need to satisfy people, and I think that would be good. When Kennedy was elected it was a big deal. Apart from that one item, I will rise to defend the minorities’ rights, even before defending the majority’s rights, because we don’t want anyone to be oppressed in the name of Islam.

Those with a takfiri ideology will say that ‘Alawis are the descendants of apostates, and therefore should be killed. They are also attacked with accusations of polytheism. Those who maintain these views would see them as unqualified for dhimmi status. When greater numbers of Muslims are being exposed to these views and are saying “hmm, that sounds right,” how does a scholar respond?

From a theological point of view, we oppose this because people may be unbelievers, they may be polytheists, but they may not be killed. These extremists who pose this “challenging” ideology—it doesn’t challenge anything. Their numbers are very small and everyone opposes them, all scholars including Ikhwaan. Here is the major difference between the Hanafi school and the opinion of Ibn Taymiyya (whose positions are not adopted by any of the four schools, but only by the Salafis): Although ‘Alawis are considered kufaar in the Hanafi school, as a sect we accept their legal presence within the Muslim community. They are not to be executed as murtadiin [apostates], because they were not Muslims who rejected Islam. They were born within their sect!

Regarding the future of minorities, we need more representatives of their communities taking a stand against the regime now. The best guarantee for them is someone from that minority coming out in support of the uprising. We remember in Homs, people carried the cross in the demonstrations of Easter Friday. Muslims carried the cross in honor. Muslims will carry priests and honor them when they see them joining the uprising. The same with ‘Alawites. We haven’t seen highly prominent voices expressing regret and joining the uprising. That would be the best guarantee. However, our job as religious leaders is not to highlight the oppression that was carried out by ‘Alawites. In fact, we should prevent people from taking revenge. For example, Saudi sheikhs issued fatwas saying that women and children of the Nusayris should be killed. I said no. Around ten months ago or so, I was consulted for a fatwa on a military operation. Someone had planned an operation to kill a regime general, who was responsible for torture and such. He happened to be an Alawite. Anyway, they had put a bomb in his car, but when he got into the car, he had two sons with him. And there was a dispute as to whether they should detonate the bomb or not. After abandoning the operation, one of them said “let’s consult the sheikh” regarding what would be the right course of action. So he called me for a fatwa. I said “No, there is no way that you can kill him and kill his children.” Ok, do you have proof about him, that he is responsible, a criminal, an enemy in the war? But you can never kill his children. I’m very strict on this. There was another Alawite general who was captured in Douma. This was probably over a year and a half ago, early on in the uprising. And Douma has a mix of Salafis and others—Salafism is strong there. They also asked for a fatwa to kill him. I said “no way.” There is no way to kill a captive. Prisoners of war are to be protected. They tried to give examples from history, or from the Qur’an suggesting that prisoners of war may be killed. I said “this is not directed to you, it is to the ruler of the country!” If he decides that a prisoner of war is dangerous, he may be killed, and this is also based on the treatment of the opposition.

Myself and some others I research with found possible evidence of the killing of a bus full of prisoners in Raqqa, regime soldiers who had surrendered.

Oh, I have a number of stories also, of rebels accepting people’s surrender and then killing them afterwards.

It happens in every war. When people are angry and view the prisoners as those who are killing them, it becomes difficult to restrain the impulse for revenge amidst all that emotion.

This is why I never give a fatwa for the killing of anyone. A fatwa is more dangerous than a weapon itself, when you put it in the hand of angry people. In my last statement on kidnapping being forbidden, I said “a fatwa is a dangerous weapon when put in the hand of an angry man fighting on the ground—you will never know the extent of its effects.”

What role do you see yourself playing in a future Syria, when the country is rebuilt? What function would you like to perform?

Well, first of all I would like to go back to Syria to return to my work. One of the dearest things to me is to sit in the Umayyad Mosque; I want to continue teaching there. I was teaching al-Ghazali’s book Ihya’ ‘ulum ad-Din. Al-Ghazali is one of my favorites. And as a Sufi, I was teaching in the Sheikh al-Akbar Mosque, Ibn Arabi’s mosque [formally the “al-Salimiyya Mosque” after the Ottoman caliph]. I have very strong spiritual ties with him, and I was teaching Sufism there. I long for these places that have so much spirituality, such fragrances of history. Being there lets me perform a great service for Islam, which is a real honor for me. To continue teaching is the most significant role I can perform. At the same time, whenever there is conflict that I can resolve, a problem I can solve, I will always make a positive contribution when I can. Thanks to God I’ve been a good force in creating balance, influencing a lot of people in the uprising toward the right track. Wallah, I listen to so many angry people, receiving their anger; I try to absorb their emotion, their anger, and to transform it and produce something good from it. I tell them, “As Muslim believers if you’re going to treat your enemy in the same vengeful way that they do, you’re no different from them.” As Muslims, we’re unique for our mercy, for our pardoning, for our love, the love we have toward others. In the midst of anger, it is very difficult to control one’s emotions. I’m proud that through my talks, discussions, fatwas, that I’m spreading this orientation. We don’t have enough resources and support, and someone said to me, “In order to be popular, you need to be radical.” [smiling] I said, “I’m not going to change.”

That is going to be the most important thing in the future. After war, there is so much trauma. People suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, leading to problems in families, problems in connecting emotionally. Domestic violence increases after war, and the war-violence people experience affects all of their human relationships. Healing from that is very important, and your effort to absorb anger and produce something good from it is significant.

It is what people need most right now. Is any of the anger directed at you personally for saying or not saying certain things? No, it is just anger against the regime, anger at the atrocities. People need a guiding voice, we must embrace them, direct them in the right way, offer them solace. You know, the focus must not be on taking revenge. Revenge is not cured by further revenge; violence merely begets violence. The best way to treat it is by showing more love, showing mercy. This is what we can offer. If we were to really show it, no one could match Muslims in our mercy, but unfortunately, it’s disastrous now. We have to make a huge effort to heal hearts, to heal people’s hearts after the uprising.

Lebanese soldiers patrol Tripoli, Lebanon. Photo: Daily Star

We previously discussed the advent of Lebanese Sunni and Shi’ite fighters facing off on Syrian soil. Increasingly, this fight is moving home, as well. Just as the Syrian conflict has involved foreign fighters (jihadists from many countries fighting with Syrian rebels since 2011, and the growing participation more recently of Hezbollah troops fighting with the regime), outsiders are active in Lebanon as well, as al-Nusra’s involvement there grows. The clashes in Lebanon are largely along sectarian lines—sad but undeniable. A Lebanese friend wrote several days ago:

The situation in Tripoli is reaching a new level. The Alawites in Jabal Mohssen, who have been fighting with Sunni Bab el Tebeneh for the last few days, are now shelling all parts of the city and not just Bab el Tebeneh. I’ve been communicating with my family all day and none of them got any sleep last night, the shelling reached their neighborhood several times and there was several explosions throughout the night. Even Morning prayer was accompanied by shelling and gunfire. By all accounts, the last 24 hours were the worse the city have seen since the end of the civil war. Mosques were calling on people to run away. Both sides accuse each other of starting the fighting. Ashraf Rifi (Harriri crew), the former head of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, issued a statement today saying that Tripoli is proud of its sons who are on the front and that Tebeneh is in a state of self defense. The 8 of march, pro-Syrian regime/Hezbollah block has always accused Rifi of supporting the fighters in Tebeneh and creating a battle front whenever Harriri felt some political pressure. The statement he issued today leaves no doubt that he had a role in keeping the Jabal Mohssen/Bab el Tebeneh front alive. 

People were expecting the army to broker a cease fire and take control at 6 am, but that didn’t happen and the fighting carried on. And now there’s reports that Salafi groups have issued a warning to the Lebanese army to leave all battle fronts because they want to enter Jabal Mohssen tonight. Facebook pages from Tebeneh, cheering the arrival of the Salafis, are now claiming that Jabhat al Nusra has arrived and reported that a group called “Katibat Ahfad Al Rassoul” are entering the battle for the first time tonight. I’ve heard of Ahfad Al Rassoul in Syria, this is the first mention of them in Tripoli. Mikati tried to organize a meeting with heads of the groups on the ground in Tebeneh to urge them to respect a ceasefire but the meeting didn’t happen. Everyone is expecting Tonight to be worse than yesterday.

Three Lebanese Army soldiers were killed Tuesday in an attack on their checkpoint in the eastern border town of Arsal, security sources told The Daily Star.

Despite the cheerleading and support of Western nations, the Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s military suffered a serious setback on Tuesday. The Syrian army killed the leader of the al-Qaeda-allied Nusra Front in the Syrian city of al-Qussair during all-out-combat between the Islamist-led rebels and government troops, according to an Israeli source.

According to Benjamin Weinstein, an expert on Islamist terrorist groups, the Nusra Front chief Abu Omar was killed along with a dozen subordinates. He was shot-to-death as the Syrian army continued to plow through the rebel defenses for the third consecutive day in order to achieve Assad’s quest to regain control that city which is located adjacent to Lebanon’s porous borders, al-Mayadeen TV said.

It looks like there are leftists in the Lebanese militias fighting along with the Syrian army, one of them is a sunni from Sayda:
???? ?????? ? ???? ??? ???? ????? ??? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ??? ?? ????? ????? ???? ?????? ?? ???? ?? ????? “???? ???????” ???????? “???? ????? ??? ???? ??? ????”! ???? ??? ??? ????? ?????? ??????? ????? ???? ???? ??????? ?????? ??????? ???? ?? ?????? ??? ???? ?? ??????.
when I asked one of my Lebanese friends how is that possible, he said that many Lebanese believe that if Assad falls and Syria is lost to Al-Qaida they will be next, another guy told me a number of stories about how Syrian rebel militias earned the animosity of many Lebanese, shia and sunni, after acting like thugs and thieves and bombing civilian areas in Lebanon at random.

Appointment of New Members Reversed

The opposition talks in Turkey have ended in disappointment for many. A Reuters article reports:

A crisis in Syria’s opposition deepened on Monday when liberals were offered only token representation, undermining international efforts to lend the Islamist-dominated alliance greater support.

To the dismay of envoys of Western and Arab nations monitoring four days of opposition talks in Istanbul, the 60-member Syrian National Coalition thwarted a deal to admit a liberal bloc headed by opposition campaigner Michel Kilo.

Liberals were not the only ones disappointed. In the last post, I revealed Sheikh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi’s appointment to the National Council as its first major Sufi figure. This appointment was a fact over a month ago, confirmed by the NC’s Membership Committee, and this was reaffirmed to Sheikh Ya’qoubi personally in April by both Mu’az al-Khatib and Riad Seif, but it was not announced publicly. The announcement was to be made officially at a meeting of the General Assembly. Later, the Coalition’s Political Council met in early May and confirmed a total of 31 new members. Some new members traveled to Turkey at that time for a meeting of the General Assembly, but the meeting was postponed due to political arguments. For the current talks that have just been held, the 31 members traveled again to Istanbul, had rooms booked for them and were officially hosted in anticipation of the announcement of their membership. Ostensibly for the preparation ahead of the Geneva 2 conference (in which the regime and opposition could actually sit at the same table, if both would agree to such), the talks descended into significant intrigue regarding the expansion of the Coalition. Scheduled for Thursday through Saturday, the quarreling didn’t end until early Monday morning. In a major reversal of earlier decisions, the membership of many new members was denied (or revoked). Pending confirmation, it seems that only 8 of the original 31 have been publicly designated as new members, despite previous affirmations of membership. Though it seems unsurprising that the Coalition would go back on its word, it is nevertheless striking that it would occur to this degree. Such a sweeping, last-minute reversal was unexpected by many.

At least one new Muslim Brotherhood figure has been appointed, and consistent with the previous pattern, there is no representation of the Sufi, Sunni ‘ulema who would represent far greater numbers of Syrians.

Syrian opposition shake-up falters ahead of peace conference – Reuters

The failure to broaden the coalition, in which Qatar and a bloc largely influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood has been playing the driving role, could undermine Saudi Arabian support for the revolt and raise the specter of a rivalry among Gulf powers that could further weaken the opposition.

Its Western backers have pressured the Coalition to resolve its divisions and expand to include more liberals to counter domination by Islamists. The plan also had support from Saudi Arabia, which had been preparing to assume a bigger role in coalition politics and has been uneasy about the rise of Qatar’s influence, coalition insiders said.

Its apparent failure to do so came hours before the European Union was scheduled at a meeting in Brussels to discuss lifting an arms embargo that could allow weapons to reach rebel fighters in Syria seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

… Kilo’s group received an offer of only five seats – instead of the more than 20 it had been looking for – after a session in Turkey that stretched nearly to dawn, coalition sources said.

The move left the Coalition controlled by a faction loyal to Qatari-backed Secretary-General Mustafa al-Sabbagh, and a bloc largely influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. That group led resistance to the rule of Assad’s late father in the 1980s, when thousands of its members were tortured and executed.

“We were talking about 25 names as the basis for our negotiations, then there was agreement on 22 and then the number dropped to 20, then to 18, then to 15, then to five,” Kilo said, addressing the Coalition. “I do not think you have a desire to cooperate and hold our extended hand. … We wish you all the best.”

A member of the Kilo camp said his bloc would meet later to decide whether to withdraw from the opposition meeting, although he said the coalition may still make a better offer.

Please see this good article by Hassan Hassan: Inside Syrian opposition’s talks in Turkey:

The Syrian opposition is holding talks in Turkey to restructure and expand the National Coalition (NC). As I reported earlier this month, the talks follow a visit by 12 members of the NC to Riyadh this month. It’s important to remember here that the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy leader, Mohammed Tayfour, met the Saudi foreign minister in one-to-one talks and agreed to the expansion plans – the members even suggested that Ahmed Touma becomes the NC but of course after “election”.

On Thursday the NC members, including Tayfour and the NC’s secretary general Mustafa Al Sabbagh, agreed to include some 32 new members into the coalition as part of the expansion. The new members would represent individuals and forces from outside the coalition, mainly Michel Kilo and allies.

But on Friday, Al Sabbagh came back and said that he and others refused the plan. They offered an alternative plan: 21 new seats will be added; seven for Michel Kilo and his allies, seven for representatives of “local councils”, and seven for the Muslim Brotherhood. That means the Muslim Brotherhood will effectively get two thirds of the new expansion plan. Not only does the MB want to reduce the number of new seats but it also wants to use the occasion to expand its influence further. How is that?

“Local councils” are already represented in the NC by Al Sabbagh, a Syrian businessman and Islamist backed by Qatar and MB. He was appointed as the Coalition’s Secretary General in November after he claimed that he and a group of men represented various areas in Syria. I wrote this before: “The appointment of Mustafa Sabbagh as the National Coalition’s secretary general came after he showed up in Doha, before the formation of the coalition in November, with 16 people he falsely claimed represented provincial councils across Syria. In fact many of them were his employees in Saudi Arabia, or his relatives.”

It gets better. Qatar, Turkey and MB are insisting that Al Sabbagh heads the NC. Syrians know who Al Sabbagh is and, if that happens, the move will be self-defeating – the point is to make the coalition more representative to help it to build credibility as the world consider options for solving the Syrian conflict. American, French and Gulf representatives are still trying to push the coalition to let go of Al Sabbagh and accept the expansion plan. The MB, Qatar and Turkey are digging in their heels.

The MB can insist on saving its influence within the coalition but one thing is clear: support for the Syrian opposition is on hold until the coalition is expanded. The core group of the Friends of Syria insists that the coalition must be expanded and representative if any help is to be provided or steps are to be taken.

This is not the first time that Qatar’s allies within the National Coalition go back on their words shortly after they agree on something. During talks in Cairo to restructure the Syrian National Council in July last year, Tayfour sat with US ambassador Robert Ford for two hours. He finally agreed to the plan but went back on his word shortly after – apparently after he spoke to Qatar.

The Brotherhood has consistently opposed any plan to reform the political bodies, for a rundown of how it has done so, read my article here. The dominance of the Brotherhood over the political and military bodies was made possible by interferences from countries like Qatar and Turkey. The Brotherhood has not dominated these entities because of its popular base or because Syrians chose them.

It seems that pressure from outside powers to reverse that dominance will not work unless the Brotherhood has no choice, in the same way that any political solution will not work unless Assad has no choice.

Addendum

Saturday: The talks are expected to be finalised tonight  (Saturday) or probably tomorrow morning.  Still, the talks can drag on, even be shelved for now. No progress has been made. But two important developments are worth mentioning.

The first one is that 12 prominent members of the non-Brotherhood groups signed a document/ultimatum yesterday vowing to withdraw from the Coalition if the Brotherhood and its allies do not agree to the expansion plan.

The second one is that the Brotherhood presented a new idea (like amazing idea): George Sabra becomes the lead of the National Coalition, Ghassan Hitto remains the prime minister of the interim government and Mustafa Al Sabbagh as the NC’s general secretary for another six months. So basically, if more members are to be added, these three must lead the coalition and the interim government.

Six months, an interesting period. The pressure from Geneva 2 organisers might be the reason for insisting on this for now. They probably think that by that time things would be clearer. Both the Qataris and the Brotherhood promised recently (first week of this month) that they would not stand against any expansion plan. It’s unclear what has changed since.

But there is still pressure on the Brotherhood and its allies to accept the expansion plan. Although far-fetched, they might agree on some plan tonight or tomorrow. Because all sides disagree deeply on all issues, the talks may drag on. But because many members threatened to withdraw, the talks might be delayed as a way to avoid such an outcome. We will see what happens over the coming days.

Sunday: (see tweets from @the_47th on this too) Al Sabbagh is now the one digging in his heels and blocking the expansion of the National Coalition. He insists on representing one third of the new seats. He wants to remain the  Coalition’s secretary general AND gets one third for any expansion according to this quota he set:  one seat for any two new seats.

His insistence upset most of the attendants. When he was asked in front of the foreign ambassadors: “What is your priority? Especially that we are facing the challenges of Geneva 2. These demands will lead to the failure of the plan or even the fracture of the coalition which might consequently lead to Bashar Al Assad staying in power”. He answered with this (literally): “My conditions are more important and urgent”.

There is also this update from @The_47th: “I heard that no decision will be made (or letting go from MB) until they see if EU really lifts ban on arming”. That could mean that Al Sabbagh, and the Qataris and Brotherhood behind him, want to postpone the talks to avoid the expansion. As I mentioned above, they are under so much pressure to include more forces and some 12 prominent members threatened to withdraw which will potentially lead to the collapse of the coalition; so one way to avoid this and avoid a campaign against them, they probably came up with that populist demand: we won’t accept any expansion until the EU lifts the embargo on arms to the opposition. What does that have to do with making the coalition more representative?

One final note for now: why are members insisting on “votes” to pass any plan. Isn’t the point that the current people who can vote represent a specific group and its allies? Just absurd.

The Shadow War Behind Syria’s Rebellion: Foreign Backers Jockey for Influence in Turkey – Rania Abouzeid

While the diplomatic grouping known as the Friends of Syria met in the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday to discuss a U.S.-Russian plan for peace talks, a low-key yet perhaps equally important gathering was being quietly held in Istanbul between Saudi officials and half of the 30 members of the Free Syrian Army’s Higher Military Command, which claims to represent most of the rebels fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The informal talks, which were held at a seaside hotel, marked the first gathering of the rebel group’s Military Command and Saudi officials since, according to senior members of the Military Command, Saudi Arabia stepped up earlier this month to become the main source of arms to the rebels. In so doing they nudged aside the smaller Persian Gulf state of Qatar, which had been the main supplier of weapons to the opposition since early 2012. Saudi officials have simply been meeting with the rebels on their own, without involving the Qataris.

The change is significant because Qatar and Saudi Arabia each favor different rebel factions. The Qataris have backed more Islamist rebel groups, while the Saudis—despite Saudi Arabia’s ultraconservative form of government—have opted to support more moderate groups that may have an Islamist hue but are not considered conservative. The strong conservative Islamist current within rebel ranks may be weakened if support is increased to more moderate factions.

… All of the commanders TIME spoke to were optimistic that the Saudis would ferry more help to more moderate groups, but few thought the Qataris would stop supplying their favored battalions. “The difference is that the battalions who are against Jabhat al-Nusra will be strengthened,” said one young commander. “A fight with Jabhat al-Nusra is coming, we can no longer delay it.” That’s an unattractive prospect to many in the opposition, which was formed to fight the regime, not fellow rebels.

Both the regime and the opposition have suggested that they could participate in the Geneva 2 talks:

Syria confirms role in peace process – BBC

Syria’s foreign minister says President Bashar al-Assad’s government has agreed “in principle” to take part in peace talks in Geneva planned for June. Walid Muallem told reporters in Baghdad that the conference was “a good opportunity for a political solution to the crisis in Syria”. Russia and the US hope the talks will bring a negotiated end to the violence.

Syria’s main opposition coalition has said it is willing to take part if President Bashar al-Assad steps down.

Syria, opposition agree ‘in principle’ to attend peace conference – CNN

Both the Syrian government and the opposition Syrian National Coalition indicated Sunday they are interested in a peace conference next month in Geneva, Switzerland, though both sides tempered any optimism about the summit with caveats.

“We have in principle agreed to participate in Geneva, pending hearing more clarity about the purpose and the intentions of the Syrian regime — the Assad regime. So far, the signals have been not positive,” coalition spokesman Louay Safi said from Istanbul, where opposition leaders have been meeting to discuss the pending summit and to determine new leadership for the coalition.

“The Assad regime has to make it clear that they are there to engage in talks about transition to democracy, and as part of Geneva, understanding that would mean that all the powers that resides today with Bashar al-Assad will be given to the transitional government. Until this point, this is not clear,” he said.

Abdul Basit Seida, a senior member of the group meeting in Istanbul, said in a statement Sunday: “Talks are still ongoing with no final resolution. There is also no final decision yet on attending the conference in Geneva.”

The Syrian government has tentatively agreed to the June peace conference, Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said earlier Sunday.

Speaking at a joint news conference in Baghdad with his Iraqi counterpart, Hoshyar Zebari, he said, “I informed the Iraqi prime minister of Syria’s decision that the government agreed in principle to send an official delegation to the Geneva peace conference that will take place in June.”

The Rise of the Sufis

by Matthew Barber—This story first appeared on Syria Comment

Newly-elected to the Syrian National Coalition, Sheikh Mohammad al-Yaqoubi is moderate, influential, and ready to go to work

From the beginning of the uprising, mainstream Syrian Sunni ‘ulema—the traditional scholars who have spoken for Islam for centuries and who most Syrians recognize as the quintessential voices for religious interpretation—have been marginalized in the Syrian opposition, as Islamists of Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood persuasion steamrolled their way to dominance in both the SNC and the National Coalition. But an emerging Sufi current within the Syrian resistance could soon provide an alternative to Muslim Brotherhood hegemony and change the dynamics of the political opposition.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Ya’qoubi has just been elected to the National Coalition, the first figure of the Sufi ‘ulema to break through the Islamist exclusivity that has kept them out until now. His appointment will be announced shortly at a National Coalition conference. Along with other Sufi sheikhs, al-Ya’qoubi is heading up efforts to solidify a Sufi bloc of political leadership and nationalist-oriented rebel groups fighting in Syria who give allegiance to the leadership of Sufi ‘ulema. He also supports efforts to train Syrian rebels in Jordan.

Early on in the uprising, the Muslim Brotherhood worked to dominate the political opposition. The SNC primarily consisted of parties loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood. The National Coalition was later created to break this one-sided disparity, but ended up being dominated by others with Muslim Brotherhood connections, as well.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi

While this was the reality of the external opposition, an imbalance also formed on the ground inside Syria, as Islamist rebels received more foreign support and rose to prominence. Sheikh al-Ya’qoubi feels that the U.S. made the mistake of “leaving of the ‘Syrian file’ to the regional powers,” which allowed this trend to intensify as Gulf powers targeted Islamist groups with their aid. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been primarily involved in arming rebels, but the Saudis recently pulled back their level of support. They have an ambivalent relationship with Islamist movements; on the one hand, they support the proliferation of one of the most extreme and anti-Sufi forms of Islam, Wahhabism, throughout the Muslim world. Simultaneously, they fear Islamist movements such as the MB who pose a political threat to monarchy. As the character of the militarized opposition has evolved increasingly toward Islamism, with a recent climax of Jabhat al-Nusra announcing allegiance to al-Qaida and declaring an Islamic state in Syria, reports suggested that the Saudis decided to cut off support they had been offering.

Declining aid, however, has ironically resulted in the end of much of the support that nationalist-oriented rebels were receiving, and many rebels have complained that the remaining contributions from Qatar are reaching only the Islamist fighters. Continuing trends solidifying Islamist domination of both the political and military oppositions have further weakened the desire of the international community for intervention in Syria, though the fact that several regions are now controlled by al-Qaida-linked groups has prompted some to call for the preparation of a drone strategy for Syria, prompting fears that it will end up looking like another Afghanistan.

Sheikh Muhammad al-Ya’qoubi’s entrance into the political opposition marks a development running counter to the dominant Islamist trend. Al-Ya’qoubi is respected as one of the leading scholars and Sufi clerics in Syria, and has been ranked as the second-most influential Muslim religious figure of the country. The brand of Islam he represents is expressed in a statement of sympathy he issued following the Boston Bombing. He studied in the West and is fluent in English and Swedish.

Traditional ‘ulema like Sheikh al-Ya’qoubi served for centuries as the interpreters of Islamic sources and traditions, but after the fall of the last Islamic empire, the process of modernization that accompanied the rise of the nation state presented a challenge to their role of traditional authority. The erosion of their power was further aggravated by the emergence of Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood who introduced new interpretations of Islamic texts, contrary to the classical traditions that had existed for centuries.

Under the Ba’athists, some of Syria’s ‘ulema became seen as coopted figures who stayed close to the regime and lent it legitimacy. Others however, remained at arm’s length from the regime, and when the uprising began, they asserted their criticism of it, as did Sheikh al-Ya’qoubi. In addition to his widespread recognition among Syria’s majority Sunni Muslims, his credibility is bolstered by being the cleric who issued the first fatwa against Bashar al-Assad, in July of 2011.

After publically criticizing the regime’s violence against demonstrators in two sermons delivered at mosques in April and May 2011, he fled Syria and issued his fatwa against the regime. Sheikh al-Ya’qoubi represents the kind of moderate, traditional Islam that most Syrians are familiar with, the Islam challenged by both the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists. Though taking an unambiguous stance against the regime’s violence, injustice, and terror, he also continues to exert his influence encouraging rebels to avoid terrorism through fatwas condemning tactics such as car-bombings, kidnapping, landmines, the killing of prisoners, and violence against non-combatants politically aligned with the regime. Sheikh al-Ya’qoubi has combatted the fatwas of extremist clerics who have called for the targeted sectarian killing of Alawite women and children by issuing his own fatwas prohibiting the killing of civilians of the Alawite minority. He maintains a very clear position defending the rights of all minorities, including those condemned by extremists as heterodox.

Sheikh al-Ya’qoubi also differs with the Islamist agenda to “Islamize” Syria’s laws. The Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups promote a kind of activism that seeks to implement a greater degree of Islamic law in the state. The growing use of “Islamic law” by Jabhat al-Nusra and other Islamist groups in territory controlled by rebels likely prompted the announcement by Mu’az al-Khatib of an effort to introduce a “code” of Islamic law sanctioned by the opposition that the rebels could implement—an apparent attempt to assuage this desire manifesting in a stampede toward “shari’a” while ensuring that such a law would be relatively moderate. Where does Sheikh al-Ya’qoubi stand on this issue? He thinks Syria’s current family laws are just fine, and are already sufficiently compatible with the shari’a. He also believes that legal reform should not be pursued before a constitutionally-based committee can be formed which would tackle any needed changes, after the regime has fallen and a new Syrian government has been created.

Despite being well-known in Syria and playing an important role in the history of the uprising, Sheikh al-Ya’qoubi and other Sufi ‘ulema like him have been excluded from the political opposition. Desperation following the slow, groaning crisis of the opposition’s ineffectiveness, as well as fears that figures like al-Ya’qoubi may band together and form an alternative opposition have led to his appointment to the National Coalition, following a letter he drafted to Mu’az al-Khatib, signed by 25 Sufi sheikhs and containing an ultimatum about the need for their participation in the political process.

One obvious question is: what level of real influence will the Sheikh have? Does his participation mark the beginning of a trend, or will he merely be the NC’s token member of the ‘ulema?

In addition to having already played an important role throughout the uprising, Sheikh al-Ya’qoubi and other Sufi leaders have been building influence lately, working together for about six months to form an umbrella organization for rebel groups comprised of Sunnis and Sufis aligned with Syria’s mainstream values, rather than Islamist agendas. The organization is called the Movement for Building Civilization. He and his peers have produced a charter document which rebels groups can sign, pledging agreement with a set of foundational principles, including:

1. Removing the regime while not destroying the state—protecting public institutions;
2. The rejection of revenge, retaliation, and execution during the uprising, keeping the trials of war criminals for after the collapse of the regime and the establishment of a new government;
3. After the collapse of the regime, rebel groups should cease to carry arms and their members should return to civilian life or join the national army;
4. All ethnic and religious communities are to be defended as equal citizens under the law;
5. No ethnic or religious group is to be held responsible for the crimes of the regime;
6. A future Syrian government must operate according to a separation of judicial, legislative, and executive powers;
7. The future government must be a democracy of political multiplicity and the 1950 Constitution should be in effect during the interim period until a new parliament is elected and a new constitution is agreed upon.

Many young sheikhs who joined the Syrian uprising are frustrated with their lack of options regarding conservative political movements to be aligned with. The three main options are Salafis, Hezb al-Tahrir, and Muslim Brotherhood movements, none of which well-represent mainstream Syrian Sunnis who look for the legitimacy of ‘ulema leadership. This concern was a primary motivation for the creation of the Movement for Building Civilization. Al-Ya’qoubi and the sheikhs he works with are in contact with over 200 rebel groups who consult them regarding principles, goals, and methods, but many of these groups are disillusioned with the inability of the Sufi and ‘ulema leadership to offer them any kind of practical monetary support. Lacking funding, groups that would like to follow moderate figures of the ‘ulema will remain vulnerable to recruitment by Islamist forces.

The formation of a Sufi bloc within the opposition could provide an alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood, one that would represent far greater numbers of Syrians. Sheikh Ya’qoubi has stated that he supports a government in which the Muslim Brotherhood can operate, but that he opposes a monopoly of any one faction. He told me in a recent conversation: “We may have to deal with an Ikhwaani prime minister in the future Syria. That is democracy. But the real question is: will the government be of all one color, or will it be inclusive?”

There’s no question about which demographic will win this war: the next power in Syria will be Sunni. And the question goes beyond “how big” a Sunni win will occur. The real question is: which Sunni group’s brand of Islam will define the political paradigm of the new state? The influence of ‘ulema who respect Syria’s diversity, promote a tolerant social sphere, and support an inclusive government structure will be extremely important in the nation’s future, and the international community should be in conversation with them.

by Aron Lund for Syria Comment

There’s been some very interesting reports about conflicts within Jabhat al-Nosra, the salafi-jihadi rebel group that has been designated an al-Qaida-connected terrorist organization by the USA and several other countries.

The background

If you follow Syria, you’re already familiar with the outlines of this, but here’s the very short version:

In a recorded voice statement released online on April 10, 2013, Jabhat al-Nosra’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Joulani confirmed that his group had been created with assistance from the Iraqi al-Qaida wing (called the Islamic State of Iraq, ISI). He also ”renewed” his pledge of allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the international al-Qaida leader, leaving little doubt that he had been a sworn al-Qaida member all along. At the same time, Abu Mohammed distanced himself from the suggestion that a total merger had been agreed between Jabhat al-Nosra and the ISI. This was in response to a statement put out on the previous day (April 9) by the ISI emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had said that both groups would now merge into something called the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (let’s abbreviate it ISIS).

In sum, there was no dispute between the Syrian and Iraqi leaders about the fact that Jabhat al-Nosra is an al-Qaida faction ultimately loyal to Zawahiri, but they differed on whether it would be absorbed into a regional umbrella (ISIS) constructed from the Iraqi franchise (ISI) or retain its own separate identity within the international al-Qaida framework.

Syrian opposition groups reacted negatively, including the main Islamist formations, although most tempered their criticism by stressing the positive contributions of Jabhat al-Nosra to the uprising so far. For some responses to the Abu Mohammed and Abu Bakr statements by Islamist groups in Syria, see a previous post of mine on Syria Comment, and these translations on Hassan Hassan’s site.

Says Sands

After Abu Mohammed al-Joulani’s strange semi-rebuttal to Abu Bakr on April 10, both groups fell silent, and everybody seemed to be waiting for an explanation. None came. Now, suddenly, several media reports have been published, suggesting that the dispute hasn’t been resolved but is in fact growing worse. In some of these reports, purported Jabhat al-Nosra fighters even talk about the group splitting apart or losing members, although they differ on who is leaving and for what reason.

Phil Sands – who wrote this sadly beautiful last letter from Damascus a couple of months ago – offers one take on these events in The National.

He quotes a Jabhat al-Nosra member from Damascus as saying that ”everyone I know was surprised by the statement; it was more than we’d expected to hear”, meaning the pledge of allegiance to Zawahiri. The Jabhat al-Nosra member now worries that there will be clashes between Jabhat al-Nosra and the Western/Gulf backed factions grouped under the FSA label, after Jabhat al-Nosra came out of the closet as an official al-Qaida franchise.

The gist of Sands’s article is that locally recruited and/or pragmatic fighters are upset with Abu Mohammed al-Joulani’s pledge of allegiance to Zawahiri and al-Qaida, because it will make it harder for them to focus on fighting Assad. (They’re probably right about that.) There’s no claim of an open split in the group, yet, but it does indicate internal tension between locally-minded grassroots fighters and the globalist, Qaida-connected leadership.

Claims Karouny

Writing for Reuters, Mariam Karouny has a much more spectacular take on what is going on. She also quotes people in and close to Jabhat al-Nosra, as well as some rivals to the group.

The narrative that emerges is one of a full-blown split within the group, threatening to unravel the Syrian al-Qaida network. According to this version, Jabhat al-Nosra is now torn between the adherents of Abu Mohammed al-Joulani and his Iraqi counterpart and self-styled superior, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

In this version, the ISIS project is going ahead despite Abu Mohammed’s objections, and has already incorporated a significant chunk of Jabhat al-Nosra’s organization. Abu Bakr is said to have moved into the Aleppo region to rally his own adherents, while fighters loyal to Abu Mohammed refuse to submit to his dictates or surrender the Jabhat al-Nosra brand. Karouny quotes a Nosra source close to Abu Mohammed al-Joulani as trying to minimize the pledge of allegiance to Zawahiri and saying that it came about in an “attempt by [Abu Mohammed al-Joulani] to keep his distance from Baghdadi.” According to another Nosra source quoted in the article, ”The situation has changed a lot. Baghdadi’s men are working but Nusra is not working formally anymore”.

If this is true, we’re talking about a Fukushima-level ideological meltdown in one of Syria’s most important rebel groups.

ISIS vs. Jabhat al-Nosra?

Phil Spencer in the Daily Telegraph makes a similar claim, based on Aleppo sources outside of Jabhat al-Nosra, and says that its fighters are withdrawing from the Aleppo frontlines. An opposition activist in Raqqa is cited by the AFP. He makes the same case, depicting an Iraqi takeover that is being resisted by a rump faction of Jabhat al-Nosra:

The activist said that in Raqa, even within jihadists’ ranks there is division.

“The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria is becoming more powerful than al-Nusra Front in some areas,” he said.

He said the [Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham] had tried to bring the jihadist al-Nusra Front under its full control, but could not.

“Now they are two groups, competing against each other for influence,” said the activist, who is well-informed on political developments in rebel-held areas.

al-Manara al-Beida clams up

Meanwhile, Jabhat al-Nosra’s only approved source of public communications, the online media organization al-Manara al-Beida, has fallen silent since the April 10 release by Abu Mohammed al-Joulani. The ISI’s media wing, al-Furqan, is also out of commission since the April 9 statement by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. (I’m thankful to Aaron Zelin, who helped me check this. His invaluable site Jihadology provides a full list of Jabhat al-Nosra and ISI statements in PDF format, drawn from the main jihadi web forums.)

Jihadi communications can be very irregular indeed, for all sorts of reasons, but the total shutdown of both these media offices simultaneously is such a striking coincidence that of course it is no coincidence. al-Manara al-Beida used to publish a batch of field reports about their (oh! glorious!) victories almost weekly, with occasional video releases and the odd media statement in between. But now, when it seems they would be most eager to explain what is going on, there’s been nothing but ghastly silence for a month and a half.

The only thing we’ve heard from Jabhat al-Nosra since April 10 has come through unofficial channels, like leaders speaking to the media, contrary to their own stated policy. There’s also been two statements purportedly from Jabhat al-Nosra’s section in the Deraa region, published on May 7 and May 22. But they didn’t arrive through al-Manara al-Beida. The Deraa statements aren’t reporting attacks either. Rather, they are an odd-sounding laundry list of complaints and sharia rulings about stuff that the Deraa jihadis are fed up with, such as people spreading rumors, fence-sitting Druze people, out-of-control salafi clerics posing as Jabhat al-Nosra representatives, swindlers scamming jihadis for money, and low-quality recruits from Jordan. As if fighting Assad wasn’t enough! But they include nothing directly related to the al-Qaida brouhaha.

Confusion all around

In the absence of any clarification from the actors themselves, nobody seems sure about what is actually going on. Does ISIS exist? Has there been a split in Jabhat al-Nosra? If so, is it between Abu Mohammed al-Joulani and his locally recruited followers, who take issue with his declaration of allegiance to Zawahiri? Or is it between Abu Mohammed and the Iraqi emir Abu Bakr, who has mounted an internal coup against his leadership? And to whom would Zawahiri give his blessing, as supreme commander of al-Qaida?

Maybe it isn’t a nation-wide Syrian split, but a division which plays out differently in different parts of the organization? Maybe it’s just a little local rebellion? Or maybe it’s a huge deal, and the undertow from an ISI thrust into Syria will seep back across the border, and onwards through the global Qaida network?

Maybe. Maybe! Or maybe this is all a simple misunderstanding, a little communications mishap which will be sorted out once the three leaders involved – Abu Mohammed al-Joulani of Jabhat al-Nosra, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the ISI, and Ayman al-Zawahiri of al-Qaida’s general command – have decided on the proper language for a joint statement.

Despite the fact that both the Jabhat al-Nosra and the ISI media wings seem to have been knocked out cold by the April 9-10 controversy, the fighters themselves are still soldiering on. Some Jabhat al-Nosra members are said to have died in the battle in al-Quseir just the other day. And bombs are still going off at an impressive pace in Iraq, leaving little doubt that ISI is still around. Meanwhile, a thin trickle of videotapes in the ISIS name has started to show up online, although not through “official” channels, making it doubtful what or who they really represent. (On the fine Brown Moses blog, Aymenn Al Tamimi writes a guest post about this.)

Un-conclusion

So what to make of it? Oh, I have no idea. And my guess is that no one else does either, despite the tsunami of speculative hypotheses that is already starting to build at the far end of the Internet.

As far as I’m concerned, the only thing we can assume with a reasonable degree of certainty is that (1) the contradictory statements, and (2) the sudden interruption of Jabhat al-Nosra and ISI communications, and (3) the flood of reports about internal discontent and splits is means that there actually is or has been a significant internal disagreement between two or more of these Qaida factions.

And whatever it is, because of (2) and (3), they will now have to deal with rumors and hostile propaganda too. Even if they’ve now sorted it all out, they have a serious public relations crisis on their hands. That’s no small matter in a situation as media-driven as the Syrian conflict.

Perhaps we will now simply get a statement setting the record straight by affirming that Jabhat al-Nosra and the ISI either have or haven’t merged into ISIS. And if so, maybe they’ll shutter al-Manara al-Beida and al-Furqan and present a new media wing for them both, explaining the long silence.

If, on the other hand, there are indeed irreconcileable differences between two or more of the players involved, then I guess there will be several statements, which will make for very interesting reading. Zawahiri should have the final word, but he’s off in Pakistan somewhere, and who knows how long he can keep his Mashreqi lieutenants in line after they’ve outgrown him politically and militarily.

At some point we’ll certainly know more about what’s happening, and then we can start to draw conclusions. But right now, we don’t, and we can’t. So let’s just sit here and listen to the eerie silence of al-Manara al-Beida – the sound of one of the worst Syrian communication gaffes since March 30, 2011.

— by Aron Lund

Where the war still echoes is a documentary produced by IRIN, a news service run by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs .

The documentary series follows a family of Syrian refugees over the course of a year, from their arrival to Za’atari camp in Jordan in December 2012. Selim and Leila were farmers in Der’aa, southwest Syria, until the day their village was shelled by government forces and they decided to leave the country. After a terrifying nighttime journey on foot through government-held territory, escorted by the Free Syrian Army, Selim, Leila and their eight children arrived in Za’atari, a sprawling tented camp which is now home to more than 110,000 refugees.

The series provides an intimate view of their struggles to adjust to camp life and the traumatic effects of the conflict back home, as well as the pressure felt by Selim to return and join the rebellion.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Coming soon

Do the Massacres in Bayda and Banyas Portend Ethnic Cleansing to Create an Alawite State?
by Joshua Landis, Syria Comment, May 13, 2013

Map showing the cities of Latakia – Baniyas – Tartus on the Syrian coast

This question is taken up in two thoughtful articles by Hassan Hassan and Michael Young. Hassan Hassan argues that “sectarian cleansing is not being conducted for the purpose of establishing a potential state, but rather for other strategic purposes, including recruitment of Alawi fighters, deepening sectarian tensions in Assad’s favor, and ensuring a popular base of support,” (see Elizabeth O’Bagy). Michael Young sees them as a possible prelude to what may be coming if the Alawites begin to lose, but for the time being, he suggests that “ethnic cleansing” may not have been the intended result, but the massacres did serve as a shot across the bow of the Sunni population of the coast.  (see extended quotes below).

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Davutoglu claimed that Syria’s army has begun ethnically cleansing Banyas because it is losing elsewhere in the country. But Assad’s forces are not losing. According to both Liz Sly of the Washington Post and Reuters reports Assad’s forces are gaining ground in Syria, at least for the time being. This can only be cold comfort to the Sunnis along the coast who speak of their fear of ethnic cleansing.

The fighting in al-Bayda began when a bus carrying pro-regime militants, or Shabiha, was attacked, by rebel militiamen, killing at least seven and wounding more than 30, according to activists quoted by DPA. After the rebels attacked a bus, the village became “the scene of fierce fighting between the army and rebel battalions.” The brutality of the shabiha revenge on both al-Bayda and Banyas was depicted in a series of photos and videos that even by the standards of this war were shocking. The religious passions that have now colored every aspect of this fight ran out of control.

How likely is ethnic cleansing along the coast?

The likelihood of ethnic cleansing in the coastal regions is high. It will rise even higher should Assad’s troops begin to lose. The Sunni populations of the coastal cities will be the first to be targeted by Assad’s military, if it is pushed out of Damascus. Should the Alawites be compelled to fall back to the predominantly Alawite region of the mountains stretching along the western seaboard of Syria, the Sunnis of the coastal cities and eastern plan will be the first to suffer. Should Sunni militias, which are perched only kilometers from Latakia, penetrate to the city itself, Alawites may turn against the region’s Sunnis fearing that they become a fifth column. There are many precedents for this sort of defensive ethnic cleansing in the region. Zionist forces in Israel, cleared Palestinian villages of their inhabitants in 1948, rather than leave them behind Israeli lines. Armenians were driven out of Eastern Anatolia by Turks and Kurds, who claimed self-defense in their struggle against Russia in WWI. The Greek Orthodox Anatolians were driven out of Anatolia following the defeat of Greek forces which sought to conquer Anatolia in the early 1920s in an effort to resurrect the Byzantine Empire.

The Sunni cities of the Syrian coast — Latakia, Jeble, Banyas, and Tartous — had no Alawite inhabitants in the 1920s, when the French began taking censuses in Syria. Certainly, Alawite, servant girls, day laborers and peddlers may have worked in the cities, but they were alien to them. Sunnis and Alawites did not live together in any Syrian town of over 200 people, according to Jacques Weulersse, the French academic who published the most thorough and reliable study of the Alawites, Le pays des Alaouites, in 1940. Their demographic segregation was profound. The deep mistrust and hostility that separated the two communities was caused largely by religious differences. Alawites see themselves as the truest Muslims, who possess secret knowledge of God. Sunnis view Alawites to be not Muslim at all, and indeed, not even People of the Book. The many prejudices that were suppressed or attenuated during the modern national era have now reemerged and threaten to divide the two populations anew.

During the modern era, Alawites came down out of their mountain villages, migrating to the cities. Today, most of the coastal cities are only half Sunni because of the growth of Alawite neighborhoods and migration. But that population is new. Most is no older than 60 years and much of it is much newer. The same is true for Damascus, where in 1945 only 400 Alawites were recorded to be living in the capital.

An abandoned kitchen in Salma village situated in the Latakia Province (Warren Allott)

Ethnic cleansing may turn against the Alawites, as easily as it may against Sunnis. If Sunni militias win in their struggle against the regime and penetrate into the Alawite Mountains, Alawites will flee before them, rather than be vanquished. This has already been the case in six Alawite villages north of Latakia. When rebel militias entered the towns, the Alawite families hastily grabbed their possession and fled, leaving dinners on the kitchen table. Not a soul was left in them. In all likelihood, they will run to Lebanon, which is no further than an hour’s drive, The border is open.

Western policy planners have gamed out these possibilities, making them reluctant to arm rebel militias for a total victory. Although opposition leaders plead for more and better weapons to bring them a speedy victory, Western leaders have held back. The fear that three million Alawites could flee into Lebanon, destabilizing the country for decades, undoubtedly plays a role in Western reticence.  This sort of population transfer could be as disruptive to the region, as was the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. Just as the Palestinians have not been permitted to return to their ancestral land, neither, in all probability, would the Alawites.

The fear of ethnic cleansing has increased among all populations of Syria and with good reason. Sunnis claim today that the regime is effectively trying to clear many areas of its Sunni inhabitants. One only has to look at the overwhelmingly Sunni population of the refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan to see the reason for these claims. The Assad regime has devastated whole urban neighborhoods.

Policy Implications

The strong possibility of ethnic cleansing means that foreign sponsors of both sides are proceeding with caution. If Assad’s forces are pushed out of Damascus and toward the Alawite Mountains, they could ethnically cleanse the Sunni inhabitants of the coast. If rebel militias penetrate into the Mountain villages, Alawites would almost certainly be cleansed, if they did not simply up and flee to Lebanon.

If Assad reasserts his control over rebel held parts of Syria, large populations of Sunnis would likewise flee. They would fear ruthless retribution and possible massacres.

For this reason, Western powers are searching for a political solution. It is hard to imagine the politics of compromise prevailing in Syria any time soon. Both sides remain convinced of their rectitude and eventual victory. All the same, it is not impossible that a new ethnic balance will eventually emerge in the years, if not months, ahead.

Much depends on whether rebel forces are able to unify their ranks. Their weakness is their profound fragmentation. Much too depends on external powers and their willingness to arm and finance their Syrian allies. Most Western and even some Middle Eastern leaders seem to be growing resigned to the necessity of a political solution, even as their rhetoric remains highly partisan. Erdogan, despite his bluster, seems poised to distance himself ever so slightly from Syria’s rebels. He is eager to allay Kurdish and Shiite discontent within Turkey, just as he fears any real head-butting contest with Russia and Iran over Syria.

Doha, too, seems to have hit the pause button, but continues to supply salafist militias, according to some. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are withholding arms from radical Islamist groups which have been the most effective fighters.  When the Syrian rebellion first broke out, many western pundits urged Obama to intervene if for no other reason than to seize the opportunity to eliminate Iranian influence in Syria and to crush Hizbullah in Lebanon. But to do so, would necessitate defeating the Shiite population so completely as to make it vulnerable to ethnic cleansing. What is more, the US is perhaps wiser to allow a regional balance of power to emerge between Shiites and Sunnis. If the US presses down on the scales of power too dramatically in one direction, as it did in Iraq, bad things can happen. Because the Sunnis in Iraq were so thoroughly purged from state institutions and driven from positions of authority, they have gone on the warpath and remain radicalized. What is more, the US will withdraw, causing the balance of power to swing back toward a balance reflecting regional power arrangements. Better for America not to intervene itself, but to work through regional allies. In the case of Syria, these allies are Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. They have more permanent interests in Syria and will balance Iran and Iraq out of necessity, rather than out of some momentary fit of anxiety or altruism.

Mihrac Ural, sometimes called Ali Kyali, who has emerged as a leading Shabiha leader.

Key to the heightened fear of Sunnis along the coast, is the growth and power of the Shabiha, or Alawite militias, which have been adopting a raw religious and increasingly Alawite nationalist rhetoric. No one stands out among the Shabiha leaders more than Mihrac Ural, or as he is often called, Ali Kyali, of late. He is a Turkish Alawite who fled Turkey around 1981 and was given Syrian citizenship by Hafiz al-Assad. He is credited to have introduced Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader, to the Assads and to have married a secretary of Rifaat al-Assad. The PKK’s first conference took place on Syrian territory in July 1981. Turkish authorities are accusing Ural of masterminding the recent bombing in Reyhanli, Turkey. He is in all likelihood, the leader of the Banyas incident as well.

In this video recorded a few days before the Banyas massacre, Mihrac Ural explains why Banyas is key to the defense of the coastal region and must be cleaned of rebel combatants.

“Banias is the only route for these traitors to the sea,” he says in this video. “Jableh, due to the national forces surrounding it, cannot become a pathway or a coastal headquarters for the enemy. But Banias could, and the whole game in Banias is playing out based on this calculation.”

It is necessary, as soon as possible, to surround Banias, and I mean (someone in audience says “cleanse [tathir] sir”)…surround Banias and start the cleansing….

…The title of the Syrian Resistance is the “cleansing and liberation”, these two. We do not have any political or governing ambitions, as long as the state exists and the governing power exists. We don’t interfere in criminal or civilian matters…..

…The aim of the Syrian Resistance is the liberation of the country (watan) and if we’re needed within this week, we will join the battles in Banias and perform our patriotic duty. Everyone will see how the Syrian Resistance fights.

We fought from Amani, Kassab to Nabii Al Mir…Point 45, Qastal Al Maath, Al Mazraa. Mafraq Al Saraya, Al Mafrqah Al Bassit, Al Arjaa, Al Maydan, Bayt Fares, Al Rawda, Markaz Al Hataab, Borj Al Shaqra, Bayt Hnayn and I was ambushed in Bayt Hnayn along with my comrades and I’m still injured from that ambush. [These villages are situated to the north of Latakia]

Within this line (the cities he just listed), this is the front-line that’s always on fire. The Syrian resistance fought in all these places and collected realistic information from the enemy on the ground. It taught them a lesson. The resistance gave 27 martyrs.

Our plan has always been attack, attack, attack. Those who ask us “OK, so you entered the village, who’s going to hold it”, it doesn’t matter, our job is to cleanse and liberate and its up to the army to hold the ground, when the time comes when the army can’t hold the ground, then it will be a different story, and the Syrian Resistance will have to take additional measures….

You need to pay attention to the story of Banias, the only route from these traitors to the sea. It should be surrounded, liberated and cleansed as soon as possible, and al salam alikum.

Ali Kyali speech about Banias – Original Facebook posting

Destroyed Alawite Shrine of Saydna al-Khidr

According to “Terrorism, 1992 – 1995: A Chronology of Events and a Selectively Annotated Bibliography By Edward F. Mickolus, Mihrac Ural had become leader of the outlawed Turkish People’s Liberation Party Acilcier Organization. The group espouses a Marxist-Leninist ideology and holds an anti-U.S., anti-NATO position. It considers that the Turkish government is under the control of Western imperialism. He seeks to destroy this control by both violent and democratic means. The DHKP-C splinter group called Acilciler, or “Urgent Ones,” has about 500 members and operates from Syria under the name of the “Hatay Liberation Army.” Mihrac’s past connections to the Kurdish Marxist group, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), is discussed here as well as his possible connection to the US embassy bombing in Turkey.  He is now a wanted man and has $100k bounty on his head.

Mihrac Ural is not an out and out Alawite nationalist. He is loyal to the rhetoric of Arab nationalism and defers to the “Syrian Army.” All the same, Turkish Alawites have a particular sensibility. They have not been imbued with Arab nationalist ideology and retain a less self-conscious connection to their religion and traditions. A number of my Turkish Alawite friends have a much deeper knowledge of Alawite religion than do my Syrian Alawite friends. Most Syrian Alawites have internalized the Syrian, Arab nationalism of the regime, such that they deny Alawite nationalist ambitions vehemently. They also cling to the notion that they are good Muslims, rejecting any notion that they believe in Ali as the supreme creator or have a separate religion. Most Turkish Alawites have fewer qualms along these lines. Some have turned away from religion altogether, embracing the secularism of Kemalism, but others have turned inward and embraced Alawite religion as a wellspring of their identity. This makes the emergence of Mihrac Ural particularly interesting. He embraces Alawitism, is proud to sit with Alawite religious sheikhs in his photos, and to defend religious shrines. Some of his photos show him sitting in front of a large library of books and are designed to depict him as a man of wisdom and deep learning. Turkish Alawites may play an important role in leading their Syrian coreligionists toward Alawite nationalism. If so, Mihrac Ural is a man to watch. There is no doubt that he speaks the assurance of a leader on a mission if not a prophet. The original Alawite founder of the Baath Party – Zaki Arsuzi – was from Alexandretta (Hatay). His conversion to Arabism was shaped by Turkey’s takeover of his region. It would be ironic if a Turkish Alawite led the spiritual and possibly nationalist awakening of the Alawites.

[End – Personal News]

I will be traveling in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon for the next six weeks and may not be able to post. Matt Barber, the Syria Video team, and Aron Lund will be able to keep posting on Syria Comment, although not frequently.

News Round Up

Lessons from a massacre that Assad looks to exploit
Hassan Hassan, May 08, 2013, the National

The recent carnage in the Syrian coastal city of Banias over the weekend, among the most grisly in the country’s two-year-long conflict, offers lessons into the grim calculations of Bashar Al Assad. Read Article

Syria Update: Assad Targets Sunni along Syria’s Coast
May 10, 2013 – Elizabeth O’Bagy

Although Assad has attempted to consolidate the Alawites behind him and to fortify his position in the northern Alawi coastal mountains and Tal Kalakh in the south, conditions on the ground contradict assertions that Assad is creating an Alawi rump state…..

in a video posted on YouTube, the leader of an Alawi militia in the coastal region, along with an Alawi religious leader, discusses plans to “cleanse Baniyas of the traitors.”

New phase in Syria’s war will bring blood to the coast
Michael Young, May 9, 2013, The National

….If the Alawites ever decide to create a rump state, one of their objectives will be to ensure that Sunnis do not challenge this plan. That means Sunnis must either be terrorised into silence or, in the worst case, forced out of coastal areas. The Baniyas and Bayda killings, while extraordinarily brutal, seemed primarily designed to achieve the first aim. Thousands of Sunnis reportedly left the city in fear, but appeared to be heading toward other coastal cities, namely Tartous, south of Baniyas, and Jableh, to its north.

However, the massacres were a reminder that worse may come, especially if the regime makes headway in Homs and Qusayr, allowing it to seal a major Sunni evacuation route. Sunnis in the north-east increasingly feel isolated from their brethren elsewhere in Syria. That is how the regime wants it. The Sunnis’ sense of vulnerability will make them more reluctant to side with the rebellion, and their presence as potential hostages will make Mr Al Assad’s enemies think twice before mounting military operations in coastal areas.

This may be the best the Assad regime can hope to achieve, since wholesale ethnic cleansing would be a major endeavour. There is still a significant Sunni population in coastal cities such as Tartous and Latakiya, and in the latter, Sunnis form a majority. Even if they were driven out for some reason, the consequences could be disastrous for the city itself, which would lose not only a large portion of its population, but many of its most dynamic economic actors…..Mr Al Assad has no plans to abandon Damascus. However, we are witnessing a consolidation of the Alawite statehood option as a fallback position. The Syrian conflict is entering a new phase, where long-term territorial plans and alliances are taking shape. And the ensuing violence can only increase as the stakes become higher.

Recent violence against Sunni communities in Syria’s coastal region raises new concern over sectarianism in Syria. It also suggests to some that Assad will move to form an Alawi state. In fact, these events are perpetrated to demonstrate force and to drive a sectarian narrative that strengthens Assad’s base. Assad’s support in Qardaha has weakened, an influx of internally displaced persons has transfigured the coastal region, and there are opportunities to exploit these fluctuations in Assad’s position there.

Possible ethnic cleansing in Iraq if new sectarian war starts: Ned parker – “the threat of more bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites and the eventual breakup of the country”

Askari said he doubted there would be a new civil war because Sunnis know how much they lost in the sectarian conflict during the U.S. occupation.

“Without the American Army, no single Sunni could have stayed in Baghdad. They would have been cleansed,” he said. “Now there are no Americans. If sectarian war ignited, for sure they would lose Baghdad and most of the other provinces.”

All that would be left is their stronghold, Anbar province, Askari said, where Al Qaeda would gain strength and terrorize the Sunni population.

Those Arguing US Should Stay Out of Syria

With or Without Us
By Fareed Zakaria, Monday, May. 13, 2013 – Time Magazine

Those urging the U.S. to intervene in Syria are certain of one thing: If we had intervened sooner, things would be better in that war-torn country. Had the Obama Administration gotten involved earlier, there would be less instability and fewer killings. We would not be seeing, in John McCain’s words of April 28, “atrocities that are on a scale that we have not seen in a long, long time.”

In fact, we have seen atrocities much worse than those in Syria very recently, in Iraq under U.S. occupation only few years ago. From 2003 to 2012, despite there being as many as 180,000 American and allied troops in Iraq, somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Iraqi civilians died and about 1.5 million fled the country. Jihadi groups flourished in Iraq, and al-Qaeda had a huge presence there. The U.S. was about as actively engaged in Iraq as is possible, and yet more terrible things happened there than in Syria. Why?

The point here is not to make comparisons among atrocities. The situation in Syria is much like that in Iraq–and bears little resemblance to that in Libya–so we can learn a lot from our experience there. Joshua Landis, the leading scholar on Syria, points out that it is the last of the three countries of the Levant where minority regimes have been challenged by the majority. In Lebanon, the Christian elite were displaced through a bloody civil war that started in the 1970s and lasted 15 years. In Iraq in 2003, the U.S. military quickly displaced the Sunni elite, handing the country over to the Shi’ites–but the Sunnis have fought back ferociously for almost a decade. Sectarian killings persist in Iraq to this day.

Syria is following a similar pattern. the country has a Sunni majority. The regime is Alawite, a Shi’ite subsect that makes up 12% of the population, but it also draws some support from other minorities–Druze, Armenians and others–who worry about their fate in a majoritarian Syria. These fears might be justified. Consider what has happened to the Christians of Iraq. There were as many as 1.4 million of them before the Iraq war. There are now about 500,000, and many of their churches have been destroyed. Christian life in Iraq, which has survived since the days of the Bible, is in real danger of being extinguished by the current regime in Baghdad.

All the features of Syria’s civil war that are supposedly the result of U.S. nonintervention also appeared in Iraq despite America’s massive intervention there. In Iraq under U.S. occupation, many Sunni groups banded together with jihadi forces from the outside; some even broke bread with al-Qaeda. Shi’ite militias got support from Iran. Both sides employed tactics that were brutal beyond belief–putting electric drills through people’s heads, burning others alive and dumping still breathing victims into mass graves.

These struggles get vicious for a reason: the stakes are very high. The minority regime fights to the end because it fears for its life once out of power. The Sunnis of Iraq fought–even against the mighty American military–because they knew that life under the Shi’ites would be ugly, as it has proved to be. The Alawites in Syria will fight even harder because they are a smaller minority and have further to fall.

Would U.S. intervention–no-fly zones, arms, aid to the opposition forces–make things better? It depends on what one means by better. It would certainly intensify the civil war. It would also make the regime of Bashar Assad more desperate. Perhaps Assad has already used chemical weapons; with his back against the wall, he might use them on a larger scale. As for external instability, Landis points out that if U.S. intervention tipped the balance against the Alawites, they might flee Syria into Lebanon, destabilizing that country for decades. Again, this pattern is not unprecedented. Large numbers on the losing side have fled wars in the Middle East, from Palestinians in 1948 to Iraq’s Sunnis in the past decade.

If the objective is actually to reduce the atrocities and minimize potential instability, the key will be a political settlement that gives each side an assurance that it has a place in the new Syria. That was never achieved in Iraq, which is why, despite U.S. troops and arms and influence, the situation turned into a violent free-for-all. If some kind of political pact can be reached, there’s hope for Syria. If it cannot, U.S. assistance to the rebels or even direct military intervention won’t change much: Syria will follow the pattern of Lebanon and Iraq–a long, bloody civil war. And America will be in the middle of it.

President Obama: Keep Your Nerve on Syria

by Robert E. Hunter

“Then we’ll have done all we can.”“Very heartless.”“It’s safer to be heartless than mindless. History is the triumph of the heartless over the mindless.”Yes, Prime Minister.

President Barack Obama, it is said, has painted himself into a corner with his repeated statements that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government will be a “game changer” or cross a “red line.” The difficulty of definitions has produced what must have been one of the most ambiguous letters ever to be put on White House stationery. It came as a response to a demand from two US Senators about presidential policy in the event of such weapons use.

More accurately, however, the president can be said to have painted himself into a corner with Syria on two occasions, initially as early as August 2011, and repeated since, by declaring that “Assad must go.”

Of course, Assad has not gone, thus demonstrating once again the first rule of being US President: never call for something, especially in a simple declaratory sentence, if you are not prepared to follow through and make it happen.

This recitation is not meant to be an attack on the US president. It is an introduction to what has to be a genuine dilemma, indeed, a series of dilemmas, which come in several forms.

Syria’s Future

The first dilemma regards the potentiality of a positive outcome in Syria. Assad and company are engaged in the massive slaughter of their own people, which, along with those killed by the rebels, numbers more than 70,000 by a recent (likely conservative) count, plus the creation of more than a million refugees. There is meanwhile no resolution in sight of what has become a full-scale civil war.

Let us assume that Assad is killed (or decides to seek a safe haven) tomorrow. What then? It is a vast stretch of the imagination to believe that the killing would then stop.

What is happening in Syria is radically different from what happened in the so-called “Arab spring” in Tunisia, Egypt, or even Libya. This is not primarily a matter of whether a leader who stayed too long and was too repressive will go; but whether a particular minority will continue to be able to dominate the rest of the population, or, with “regime change,” whether there will be a bloody free-for-all competition for power. None of the other three regime changes were about that.

More relevant is what happened in Iraq, when the US and partners, by invading in 2003, overturned centuries of admittedly unjust domination of a majority (Shi’ite) by a minority (Sunni). Or what is happening, or rather not happening, in Bahrain, where the situation is just the reverse but has been kept in check by military power, much of which has been applied by neighboring Saudi Arabia, with the US, concerned about its base in Bahrain for the Fifth Fleet, at best “turning a blind eye.”

It’s therefore hard to see what the United States, or any combination of outsiders, could usefully do — not to help overthrow Assad and his Alawite-dominated military (that can be done) — but to help “shape” a future in Syria that won’t lead to even more bloody chaos before something approaching “stability” could ensue. Even if that were possible, it would likely take the form of a new suppression, but by the majority (Sunni) over various minorities.

Public Opinion 

The second dilemma — perhaps it should be first — is related to whether the American people are ready and willing to see the US engaged in yet another Middle East war. The answer (“No”) is clear, but so far policy is not — hence the dilemma.

There should be no indulgence in the nonsense that all could be accomplished by providing more lethal arms to the rebels, imposing a no-fly zone, or using air power directly. That would be relatively sterile in today’s military taxology, but even if/when successful, it leads back to the first dilemma. And if unsuccessful, the US would then be called upon to do what, in current jargon, is called “boots on the ground” — that is, invasion. There should be no nonsense, however, about the US being able, as in Libya, to “lead from behind.” Even though the British and the French (the latter was the former mandatory power in Syria after World War I) would like to see something done, they are this time ready to hold the US coat, but not lead themselves.

To his credit, the president so far has been wary of getting more deeply engaged, presumably due to a combination of his awareness of the two dilemmas above, the second of which (US public opinion), if ignored, would surely take attention away from what he clearly sees as his legacy: repairs to the heavily-damaged US economy (and the global financial system) and his historical goal, which can be summarized in a few simple words: the promotion of equality in American society.

Regional Context

The third dilemma derives from the manner in which the conflict in Syria began. It did have domestic roots (as in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya), but it also had external causes and active agents, notably a desire by leading Sunni states (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and to a lesser degree, Turkey) to right the informal and rough regional “balance of power” between them and Shi’a states that was so heavily upset by the US invasion of Iraq. This came after the spread of the “disease” from revolutionary Shi’a Iran had both been almost entirely contained in the region and had most of its fires banked at home. Some Sunni states still fear contagion, however, notably Saudi Arabia, where oil lands are heavily concentrated in Shi’a territories (hence Riyadh’s desire to get rid of the Alawite rule in Syria).

So here it is: an already slow-rolling civil war across the region, pitting Sunnis versus Shi’as, but only in part about religion, is also about competitions for power. In this case, it’s an essentially four-cornered competition among Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey, the first three of which have as much to do in fueling the current confrontation with Iran as does its nuclear program.

Would the overthrow of the Assad regime cause this regional civil war to intensify? Or would it lead to a new, informal balance among religious groupings that would be reasonably “stable,” whatever that means in today’s roiling Middle East? It would take a Dr. Pangloss to argue the case for stability over more competition and even less stability and predictability about the future of inter-state relations and internal developments.

Non-governmental Actors

Dilemma number four flows from the above. As the civil war has continued and intensified, Sunni Islamist militants, including elements of al-Qaeda, Wahhabis and Salafists, have increasingly become engaged. That should be no surprise. These groups batten on conflict, especially a conflict with intense emotion and deep-seated religious inspiration. Thus even with Assad gone — perhaps by magic wand tomorrow — would the outcome of the civil war be ruled by a Sunni strongman, pacifying the country by force? Or solidification of another base for continuing terrorist operations by some of our and our allies’ worst enemies?….

Ambassador’s Pickering and Crocker on Syria (America’s two most senior retired ambassadors) from FP

Pickering has been working on a plan to offer a way forward. This would include dropping the precondition that required Assad step down for talks to begin — an idea Kerry embraced this week — an immediate humanitarian ceasefire across Syria, and a U.N.-brokered election process that would lead toward a transitional government.

While all sides note that there are no good answers and no easy solutions, Pickering notes that slow diplomatic action has not increased America’s odds of finding the best outcome among a slew of difficult options.

“I think we have tended to put the diplomatic side aside as in the ‘too hard’ category,” Pickering says. “We need to move this fairly soon or we are going to lose the opposition — certainly the al Qaedization of the opposition has been fairly serious and the fractionation of the opposition is very large.”

On the other hand, those who’ve seen the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from a front-row diplomatic seat say caution is the better part of policy prudence when it comes to Syria.

“There are no good options here and the pressure is growing to do something because that is what we do, we do things,” says former Amb. Ryan Crocker, who served as ambassadors to both Iraq and Syria and now is a senior fellow at Yale University. ” But everything of significance I can think of doing is likely to make the situation worse, not better and put us in a worse position, not a better one.” In Crocker’s view, the stalemate with the Russians at the United Nations regarding more concerted action has actually benefited America.

“The Russians are actually doing us a favor and I don’t think they are actually going to come off it because they see a rebel victory as deeply destabilizing for the region and particularly for them,” Crocker says.  “I hope they go on blocking any Security Council action because if you get an ‘all necessary measures’ resolution, then you are in a very exposed position if you don’t use all necessary means.”  

What Crocker does favor, however, is more humanitarian aid and non-lethal support, and greater backing  for the Syrian opposition, which gathered this week in Istanbul, in the effort to come up with a vision for a post-Assad political transition.

Crocker, however, rejects the idea that Syria is simply Iraq in a different form. He cites the willingness of the Assad regime to wage war by any means necessary as among the key differences, meaning more weapons for the opposition will not necessarily lead to less fighting.

“They have been training, equipping, and organizing for this for a very long time,” he says of Assad’s forces.  “They have got the weaponry, they are ruthless and they know what the alternatives are.  Whatever you say about them, they will stand and fight and you did not have that situation with a government in either Bosnia or Iraq.” ….

“Broader regional fighting could bring the U.S. and Iran into direct conflict, a potentially major military undertaking for the U.S. A U.S.-Iran confrontation linked to the Syrian crisis could spread the area of conflict even to Afghanistan. Russia would benefit from America’s being bogged down again in the Middle East. China would resent U.S. destabilization of the region because Beijing needs stable access to energy from the Middle East.

To minimize these potential consequences, U.S. military intervention would have to achieve a decisive outcome relatively quickly through the application of overwhelming force. That would require direct Turkish involvement, which seems unlikely given Turkey’s internal difficulties, particularly its tenuous relations with its substantial Kurdish minority.

The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddlywinks intervention from around the edges of the conflict-no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth-would simply make the situation worse. None of the proposals would result in an outcome strategically beneficial for the U.S. On the contrary, they would produce a more complex, undefined slide into the worst-case scenario. The only solution is to seek Russia’s and China’s support for U.N.-sponsored elections in which, with luck, Assad might be “persuaded” not to participate.”

The struggle for Syria
Op-Ed – LATimes
Any military intervention by the U.S. would only exacerbate the conflict.
By Majid Rafizadeh, May 7, 2013

My cousin, Ramez, was dead before the echoes of the gunshot that killed him stopped ringing. His 4-year-old daughter, Zeynab, watched him fall on a narrow street in Damascus, but she never heard the shot because she is deaf. She held onto his lifeless hand until a second bullet tore into her chest. She survived.

I tell this story to make it clear that my family and I have experienced the civil war firsthand. Ramez was just one of several family members who lost their lives in the battle against Bashar Assad’s police state. My mother, sister and brother, alongside millions of other war-torn Syrian refugees, were forced to flee to Lebanon and then on to Baghdad.

But despite the seriousness and severity of the situation, I don’t believe that the United States should intervene militarily in Syria. Any direct or indirect intervention by the U.S. would exacerbate Syria’s internal conflict and increase the number of people being displaced and killed.

The US can’t remake Syria
By Andrew J. Bacevich, May 08, 2013

As you contemplate the ongoing violence in Syria, here are the three things to keep in mind.

First, the United States undoubtedly possesses the wherewithal to topple the regime of Bashar Assad. On this score, the hawks are surely right. Whether acting alone, with allies, or through proxies, Washington over the past decade or so has demonstrated an impressive capacity to overthrow governments. Skeptical? Consider the fate of various evil-doers on whom we trained our gun-sights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

Second, once Washington has removed Assad as it did Saddam Hussein, the likelihood of the United States being able to put things right — creating a “new” Syria that is stable, humane, and grateful for American assistance — is approximately nil. Here the evidence supports the doves. Skeptical? Again, consider the course of events in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya once the evil-doers departed the scene.

These two points define the poles around which the policy debate in Washington incessantly revolves. In one camp are those who are fired by humanitarian concerns or persuaded that Assad threatens US (or Israeli) security. They are keen to put American muscle once more to work, and chastise President Obama for his reluctance to act. In the second camp are those wary of the United States once again stumbling into a quagmire. They commend Obama for (thus far) exercising restraint, fearing that American meddling will create more problems than it will solve.

This debate overlooks the third point, which obviates the first two: Whatever Obama does or doesn’t do about Syria won’t affect the larger trajectory of events. Except to Syrians, the fate of Syria per se doesn’t matter any more than the fate of Latvia or Laos. The context within which the upheaval there is occurring — what preceded it and what it portends — matters a great deal. Yet on this score, Washington is manifestly clueless and powerles

History possesses a remarkable capacity to confound. Right when the path ahead appears clear — remember when the end of the Cold War seemed to herald a new age of harmony? — it makes a U-turn. The Syrian civil war provides only the latest indication that one such radical reversal is occurring before our very eyes. For Syria bears further witness to the ongoing disintegration of the modern Middle East and the reemergence of an assertive Islamic world, a development likely to define the 21st century.

Recall that the modern Middle East is a relatively recent creation. It emerged from the wreckage of World War I, the handiwork of cynical and devious European imperialists. As European (and especially British) power declined after World War II, the United States, playing the role of willing patsy, assumed responsibility for propping up this misbegotten product of European venality — a dubious inheritance, if there ever was one.

Now it’s all coming undone. Today, from the Maghreb to Pakistan, the order created by the West to serve Western interests is succumbing to an assault mounted from within. Who are the assailants? People intent on exercising that right to self-determination that President Woodrow Wilson bequeathed to the world nearly 100 years ago. What these multitudes are seeking remains to be seen. But they don’t want and won’t countenance outside interference.

Anyone fancying that the United States can forestall this quest for self-determination should think again. Anyone who thinks Washington can bend the process to suit our own purposes needs to undertake a remedial study of the Iraq War.

Americans have long entertained the conceit that we are bigger than history. We provide the drumbeat to which others march. Sorry: Not so.

By way of comparison, think of those stories about the sea encroaching on some Nantucket or Plum Island home. Those immediately affected might delude themselves into thinking that a bit of sand replenishment will save the day. Grown-ups know better. Ultimately, the winds and tides, reinforced of late by climate change, will have their way.

So too with the Greater Middle East. Pressure on Obama to “do something” about Syria continues to mount. Perhaps he’ll refuse. I hope so. Or perhaps he’ll cave, with Syria becoming yet another active theater in what has become America’s endless War To Be Named Later. One thing is certain: US intervention in Syria won’t affect the tsunami of change that is engulfing the Islamic world.

Former Defense Chief Gates says ‘no’ to direct military involvement in Syria
New York Daily News

says he oversaw wars that began with quick regime change “and we all know what happened after that.”

For Intervention

Fouad Ajami: “In Syria’s war, the lines that matter aren’t red”

….The remarkable thing about this drawn-out fight, now entering its third year, is the passivity of the United States. A region of traditional American influence has been left to fend for itself.

Of course, these sectarian enmities do not lend themselves to an outsider’s touch. Nor did Obama call up these furies; they cannot be laid at his doorstep. But the unwillingness of his administration to make a clean break with Assad helped radicalize the Syrian rebellion. The landscape would have been altered by American help. A no-fly zone near the border with Turkey could have sheltered and aided the rebels. An early decision to arm the rebellion would have leveled the killing field. Four of the president’s principal foreign policy advisers from his first term advocated giving weapons to the rebels — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeusand the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey. But the president overrode them, his caution of no help in a conflict of such virulence.

Under the gaze of the world, Obama instead drew a red line on the use of chemical weapons and warned that his calculus would change if these weapons were used or moved around. He thus placed his credibility in the hands of the Syrian dictator and, in the midst of a storm of his own making, fell back on lawyerly distinctions.

A Greater Middle East, an Islamic world, used to American campaigns of rescue — Kuwait in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 — is now witnessing the ebb of American power and responsibility. Obama has held his fire in the face of great slaughter, and truth be known, congressional and popular opinion have given him a pass. America has wearied of Middle Eastern wars.

Syrian rebels sure that the American cavalry would turn up after this or that massacre have been bitterly disappointed. It’s the tragic luck of the Syrians that their rebellion has happened on the watch of an American president who has made a fetish of caution, who has seen the risks of action and overlooked the consequences of abdication…..

Misc.

Inside Syria’s siege economy
By Keith Proctor, May 8, 2013:

As the fighting in Syria drags on, resource flows have adapted to accommodate life inside — and to support the opposition forces vying for control…..

“I know the Blond Duck is a dictator,” said one young Syrian who requested anonymity, using a common nickname for President Assad. “But the opposition, they’re not about freedom, either. Do you really think that Jihadists will bring freedom?”

Like many young Syrians caught between the regime and rebels, he said, he simply wanted stability.

Whatever the outcome, he may be sadly disappointed. For most analysts, it’s not a question of whether the regime will fall, but when. Following that, the persistent fear is that the revolution, to use Jacques Mallet du Pan’s phrase, will devour its children. “If the Blond Duck falls,” the young Syrian said, “there will be complete anarchy.”

And if that happens, a war that has for months swirled around the still-peaceful center of Aleppo will finally rush in.

In Syria and Beyond, the Tyrant as Target
By FEISAL G. MOHAMED, May 11, 2013, New York Times

Eliminating a tyrant is not virtuous if one is knowingly creating even greater conditions of disorder and destruction. Legitimate tyrannicide must flow from a good-faith effort to institute justice. To return to the example of Syria, when we hear news of extreme violence committed (or, in recent reports, claims of the use of chemical weapons) not just by government forces but by opposition forces, too, we must be led to wonder if the latter aim to replace Assad’s tyranny with one of their own making

The effort to institute justice is one of several restrictions that we might impose on tyrannicide. At worst it is an alibi for the execution of political enemies. The most familiar examples of this tendency arose during the cold war, when a tyrant meriting assassination was one with Soviet sympathies and autocrats pliable to Western directives were deemed benign. To avoid this pitfall, we might first define a tyrant in terms familiar throughout history: a leader who rules by force, who has an incontrovertible record of directly ordering large-scale murder, and who is actively using a position of authority to engage in the slaughter of innocents. We might further define that person as a “rogue” in his refusal to participate in the community of nations, so that diplomatic and nonviolent restraint of his actions seems unachievable.

Cases in which tyrannicide seems an especially appropriate remedy will be those where the tyrant is a chief source of destructive commands in the polity, rather than presiding incompetently over a reckless and loosely organized military or security apparatus. In such an eventuality, the removal of the tyrant holds the strong possibility of ending the horrors taking place under his rule. But that removal, as we have said, must arise from the aspiration to implement a new and more peaceable civil order…..

Syrian rebel leader Salim Idriss admits difficulty of unifying fighters
By David Enders | McClatchy Foreign Staff

Savage Online Videos Fuel Syria’s Descent Into Madness
By Aryn BakerMay 12, 2013

Too Close for Comfort: Syrians in Lebanon, Beirut/Washington | 13 May 2013
Sahar Atrache, Crisis Group’s Middle East & North Africa Analyst

As the Syrian conflict increasingly implicates and spills over into Lebanon, a priority for its government and international partners must be to tackle the refugee crisis, lest it ignite domestic conflict that a weak state and volatile region can ill afford.

“Lebanon’s fate historically has been deeply intertwined with Syria’s. As Syria heads even more steadily toward catastrophe, there is every reason for Lebanese of all persuasions to worry about their own country — and to do something about it.”

Israeli Bombs and American Qualms: Assessing Syria, by Andrew Exum, May 6, 2013

U.S. and Russia agree to Syria talks, But Anti-Assad Opposition May Refuse to Participate By Jonathan S. Landay and Hannah Allam | McClatchy Newspapers

Congress Speaks With a Loud, Muddled Voice on Syria By Paul Richter | Los Angeles Times

Pentagon Plans for the Worst in Syria By Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes | The Wall Street Journal (Subscription Required)

Sen. Menendez: Senator Menendez Introduces Syria Stabilization Act of 2013, 2013-05-06, Legislation Provides for Lethal Weapons to Vetted Syrian

Turkey Fears Russia Too Much to Intervene in Syria, Soner Cagaptay May 6 2013, – Opposition, Sanctions Weapon Sales and Petroleum to the Assad Regime, While Delivering Humanitarian Assistance and Planning …

by Aron Lund for Syria Comment

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which has a great Syria resource site, just released my new paper on the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. They’re also about to release a second report by Raphaël Lefèvre, a French scholar who recently published a well-received book on the Syrian Ikhwan, called Ashes of Hama. Keep your eyes open for that – I’ve had a look at an earlier draft, and it was great stuff.

My own paper can be downloaded in English or Arabic, or (if you’re the lazy kind of Syria watcher) you can just skim through the summary right here: