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| With the outbreak of violence in northern Syria's Idlib governorate in the spring and summer of 2011, cross-border Syrian tourist trade in Antakya's "Syria Bazaar" has come to a complete halt. In early December, Damascus suspended its free trade zone agreement with Turkey in reaction to economic and political sanctions announced by Ankara |
ANTAKYA, Hatay province southern Turkey - Five
weeks before the beginning of Syria's unarmed uprising against the rule of
President Bashar al-Assad, Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan and his
Syrian counterpart Prime Minister Mohammad Naji Otri laid a symbolic
cornerstone for the so-called "Friendship Dam" that was to help
control the course of the Orontes River (known as the Asi River in Turkey) that
flows through what has traditionally been - and is once again - a bitterly
divided Levant region.
Otri declared to the state Syrian Arab News Agency that the dam would be "an important symbol on the edifice of the strategic relations" that would revive a long neglected border region that has been littered with land mines for a lengthy party of its post-colonial existence.
Erdogan stated that the dam would help to foster a feeling of lost fraternity between Turkey and the Syrian Arab Republic.
Turkish-Syrian relations have a complicated history, and conflict over the water rights to the Euphrates River led to direct Syrian support of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) under the regime of Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad. After a fiery speech by then-Turkish president Suleyman Demirel in Antakya near the end of the 1990s, Demirel gave a stern warning to Damascus to end Syrian irredentist claims on Turkey's Hatay province - once part of the French Mandate of Syria - and to end covert support for the PKK insurgency in Turkey's southeast, lest Syria face the wrath of the Turkish military.
From that point on, Turkish-Syrian relations began to slowly improve and continued apace until the outbreak of hostilities in Syria with the outset of the March 15 uprising last year.
After Ankara and Damascus had eliminated their reciprocal visa regimes for each other's nationals in order to strengthen cross-border trade, relations between the two countries were at a comparative all-time high.
Turkey's membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) throughout the Cold War and its partnership with Israel pitted it against a Soviet-aligned Syria. Damascus was also locked in an ideological and territorial dispute with the Israelis over the Golan Heights, meaning that Turkey's once Ottoman-era domain to its south became an enemy of sorts for much of the latter 20th century.
Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davotglu has been busy implementing his rather idealistic "zero problems" foreign policy agenda in the region aimed at improving Turkish ties with several neighboring states. The rapid deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations after the lethal 2010 raid by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Mamara flotilla that was en route to Gaza, led Turkey seemed to further intensify the concept of renewing stunted relationships in its immediate neighborhood.
Otri declared to the state Syrian Arab News Agency that the dam would be "an important symbol on the edifice of the strategic relations" that would revive a long neglected border region that has been littered with land mines for a lengthy party of its post-colonial existence.
Erdogan stated that the dam would help to foster a feeling of lost fraternity between Turkey and the Syrian Arab Republic.
Turkish-Syrian relations have a complicated history, and conflict over the water rights to the Euphrates River led to direct Syrian support of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) under the regime of Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad. After a fiery speech by then-Turkish president Suleyman Demirel in Antakya near the end of the 1990s, Demirel gave a stern warning to Damascus to end Syrian irredentist claims on Turkey's Hatay province - once part of the French Mandate of Syria - and to end covert support for the PKK insurgency in Turkey's southeast, lest Syria face the wrath of the Turkish military.
From that point on, Turkish-Syrian relations began to slowly improve and continued apace until the outbreak of hostilities in Syria with the outset of the March 15 uprising last year.
After Ankara and Damascus had eliminated their reciprocal visa regimes for each other's nationals in order to strengthen cross-border trade, relations between the two countries were at a comparative all-time high.
Turkey's membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) throughout the Cold War and its partnership with Israel pitted it against a Soviet-aligned Syria. Damascus was also locked in an ideological and territorial dispute with the Israelis over the Golan Heights, meaning that Turkey's once Ottoman-era domain to its south became an enemy of sorts for much of the latter 20th century.
Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davotglu has been busy implementing his rather idealistic "zero problems" foreign policy agenda in the region aimed at improving Turkish ties with several neighboring states. The rapid deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations after the lethal 2010 raid by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Mamara flotilla that was en route to Gaza, led Turkey seemed to further intensify the concept of renewing stunted relationships in its immediate neighborhood.
This resulted in the bilateral Strategic Cooperation Council that was to hail a new era in the region. But when Syria began convulsing in the death throes of Nasserism that rocked the Arab world throughout 2011, Erdogan quickly cooled on Assad by the end of April when it became evident reprisal acts by that regime would not simply let up on their own.
The ongoing crisis in Syria has reignited old feuds. The border has been heavily militarized on the Syrian side since the influx of refugees - including a number of army defectors - from Jisr al-Shigour and the surrounding rural areas of the troubled Idlib governorate since a siege in early June.
As talk of a buffer or security zone has been bandied about in the international community, Assad has been very careful not to let the emergence of a Benghazi-like area along Syria's borders become a political reality. The maintenance of Syria's territorial integrity appears to be of the utmost priority for the regime's survival.
Asia Times Online sat down with a pair of opposition activists near the Syrian border who provided insight into the current situation in the northwestern regions of their country. They described the area along the border with Hatay province as a dead zone with almost no freedom of movement.
Manned by a combination of regular Syrian troops, brutal shabiha militiamen, and Syrian intelligence officers bent on protecting the regime, the border has now reportedly become one of the world's most dangerous no-go zones.
Asia Times Online was informed that almost no refugees had crossed into Turkey since high summer due to the presence of snipers dotted along a series of border outposts. The men said they were not yet categorized as refugees under Turkish law so as to keep their presence, along with several high level Syrian army defectors, as depoliticized in the region as possible.
Ankara does not want to be seen as providing a safe haven for Syrian rebels in order to keep cross border tensions at a minimum. But those who spoke to Asia Times Online did not seem too bothered by the predicament they faced under international humanitarian law as they believed they would naturally return to Syria once Assad met his fate one way or another. In that regard, they were fairly optimistic. That optimism, however, does not sync with a dictatorship that currently shows no signs of abandoning power.
The oppositionists described how they are operating a delicate humanitarian corridor along well-worn smuggling tracts to circumvent the rings of heavy security to bring medical supplies, satellite phones and tiny hidden cameras for their countrymen to document atrocities which can then be smuggled back out of Syria and uploaded onto Youtube and other social networking sites.
Though there has been a recent lifting of the ban on international media after pressure from the Arab league, it has mostly resulted in government-minded dog-and-pony show trips with a few exceptions.
The men based in Antakya showed Asia Times Online an array of devices used to clandestinely gather imagery to show the outside world what is taking place in their beleaguered country. They described vehicle mounted mobile technology imported from both Iran and Iraq that is being used to block social media sites and global satellite news networks inside Syria.
They claimed the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, tilted heavily toward Tehran after the US withdrawal, is fully backing Assad even in the face of a wider Arab consensus that he must leave power.
Shi'ite-majority Iraq has become an outlier in the Arab world in favoring the Iranian position on Syria in opposition to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states led by Qatar which are openly calling for Assad's ouster.
They stated Maliki had even turned over American-designed communications technology that was meant for the Baghdad government to Damascus to aid in its quelling of the rebellion.
Iranian technology has also been offloaded from Iranian naval vessels at the port of Latakia, an Alawite stronghold nearly midway between the Lebanese and Turkish borders.
The Iranians have delivered huge shipments of non-lethal crowd suppressing equipment such as batons, tear gas and riot gear. In comparison, Muammar Gaddafi was rather isolated as Libya and was flanked by the weak, revolutionary states of Tunisia and Egypt.
Syria borders a newly friendly
Iraq devoid of US troops, has the rhetorical backing of Hassan Nasrallah's
Hezbollah in Lebanon and is receiving copious amounts of Iranian assistance by
many accounts.
There are also Shi'ite fears of what a Sunni-dominated Syria would look like. Following Hafez al-Assad's 1982 scorched earth operation smashing the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in Hama, many Syrians went into exile in Saudi Arabia and other GCC Wahabbi states working as teachers and engineers.
The removal of the Shi'ite-offshoot Alawite government in Damascus could be a blow to the resurgent Shi'ites who have consolidated power in Iraq and Lebanon in the last decade. Maliki has also expressed concern that a Sunni Syria may stoke Sunni nationalism in western Iraq's al-Anbar governorate along the border with Syria's Deir ez-Zor governorate, a hotbed of the rebellion against Assad.
Iraq's Maliki may be supporting Assad in part to prevent the further Balkanization of Iraq. Although allowed for in Iraq's constitution under Article 140, following the threat of creating a Sunni semi-autonomous region comprised of al-Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala governorates in the autumn of 2011, Maliki insists that Iraq will not be further split along sectarian lines.
In a period of renewed sectarian tensions within Iraq, Maliki likely views key to his own political survival that neighboring Syria not disintegrate along sectarian lines even more complex than Iraq's own when factoring in the Druze and Alawite minorities.
The rather swift, NATO-enabled fall of Gaddafi's Libya will not be repeated in Syria. The ethnic and religious mosaic of Syria coupled with an entirely different geopolitical reality means that without any kind of decisive intervention or overt "foreign conspiracy" as Assad terms it, Syria may be more of a long smolder than a powder keg.
The Arab League monitoring mission was a farce from the start, quickly falling into disarray. Unfortunately for those in the Free Syrian Army who are wishing for a no-fly zone forcing the implementation of a cordon sanitaire, there are both American and French presidential elections on the horizon.
When asked whether it was inevitable that Syria would descend into a sectarian war of which Iraq's Maliki along with a number of Western analysts have warned, the Syrian dissidents stated that this scenario was not a foregone conclusion.
They said that a civil war was sure to come after the eventual fall of the regime but that a conflict of a purely sectarian nature could be avoided while there was still time. The more civilians are killed each day, they said, the more feelings of vengeance are becoming entrenched in the national psyche.
The longer any kind of armed humanitarian intervention is put off while organizations from the GCC to the United Nations to NATO debate about just what to do, the bloodier a Syria after Assad's fall will be. They cited recent shelling in Homs' Bab Tadmour neighborhood in which an estimate 62 civilians were killed and an incident in Hama's Bab Kabli in which another 18 civilians were killed as to the constant veracity of the regime's assaults faced by ordinary Syrians each day.
The sand was running through the hourglass for any kind of peaceful transition of power in this light. The longer the fighting drags on where lightly armed rebels face the regime's heavy weaponry while civilians take the brunt of the casualties, the less likely any kind of negotiated settlement can be reached, according to Asia Times Online's interviewees.
The "Libyan model" is starting to look more like a one-off operation that was politically acceptable in the West and the GCC but is far too risky in a much more complex Syria, especially in an election year.
Asia Times Online asked about one of Western analysts' justifications for not rushing to the Free Syrian Army's aid in the way it had been done in Libya with the fighters of the National Transitional Council: Syria has no equivalent to Benghazi. The rebels in the Free Syrian Army hold pockets of particular second tier cities and now some smaller towns like Zabadani northwest of the Syrian capital, but skeptics of a nationwide rebellion have pointed to the lack of any kind of sustained uprising in either downtown Damascus or central Aleppo.
Asia Times Online was told that a major factor were the transnational logistics needed to undergird an armed rebellion. Cities and towns near the borders with Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey could be supplied with weapons and materiel. Fighters can also use these states as temporary sanctuaries to organize and regroup.
Aleppo and Damascus, the narrative goes, have been largely free of both mass people power movements or armed insurrection because locals know that would be quickly crushed. The only exception in their view was Hama which has maintained a sustained uprising against great odds and paid a correspondingly heavy price. An example of collective punishment is being set in Hama today as it was 30 years ago.
Though Iraq and Syria were furious rivals for decades in the Ba'ath party's schism regarding whether Baghdad or Damascus was the true leader of the Arab world. In the view of the Syrians, the democratization by force of Iraq was far different than the popular unrest in Syria.
The overthrow of Saddam Hussein brought a stifled Shi'ite majority to power. The overthrow of Assad's Alawite regime could remove not only an air and land logistical bridge to arming Hezbollah in Lebanon but would also bring a Sunni majority to power that could very well be hostile to Iran's interests in both Syria and Lebanon.
For Iran to be severed from Hezbollah would be a disaster for the ideologues in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps whose desire to project Iranian power across the region all the way to the Mediterranean is paramount. They see the Iranian agenda as countervailing to broader lurches toward greater freedom across the Arab world that began at the end of 2010 with the self-immolation of an emasculated street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia.
In a world where both Iran and Israel need each other as enemies to perpetuate their respective foreign policies, the Syrian uprising turned revolution throws each of these narratives off the rails. The men interviewed claimed that Arabic-speaking Iranian snipers have been helping to train and bolster the shabiha militiamen who are defending Assad's interests all along the lengthy Turkish frontier.
Iran portrays itself as first among equals in the global Palestinian cause and as the primary state actor that defines itself in opposition to Zionism.
The Syrian dissidents also told Asia Times Online that President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's Iran did not want to see a democratic Syria for entirely domestic reasons. Tehran does not want a repeat of the "Green" movement episode in 2009 should ordinary Iranians witness a full-scale revolution in Damascus.
Assad's handling of what began as largely non-violent protests mimicked Ahmadinejad's handling of the call for reform in Iran in June and July of 2009. The "Green" movement in Iran called for reform as the Syrians had initially with the key difference being that it occurred in isolation.
Protests in the Arab world are components in a larger chain reaction of popular resentment and economic despair. Assad has pledged significant reforms since coming to power after the death of his father in 2000 which have never materialized. His handling of the uprising has morphed it into what is currently a low intensity civil war.
For now it appears Assad will cling to power far longer than some of the other Arab strongmen, in part because of his own internal and familial sect driven allegiances. Assad, unlike Gaddafi's weaker African clients, has a host of nearby allies who can and are duly coming to his aide.
There are also Shi'ite fears of what a Sunni-dominated Syria would look like. Following Hafez al-Assad's 1982 scorched earth operation smashing the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in Hama, many Syrians went into exile in Saudi Arabia and other GCC Wahabbi states working as teachers and engineers.
The removal of the Shi'ite-offshoot Alawite government in Damascus could be a blow to the resurgent Shi'ites who have consolidated power in Iraq and Lebanon in the last decade. Maliki has also expressed concern that a Sunni Syria may stoke Sunni nationalism in western Iraq's al-Anbar governorate along the border with Syria's Deir ez-Zor governorate, a hotbed of the rebellion against Assad.
Iraq's Maliki may be supporting Assad in part to prevent the further Balkanization of Iraq. Although allowed for in Iraq's constitution under Article 140, following the threat of creating a Sunni semi-autonomous region comprised of al-Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala governorates in the autumn of 2011, Maliki insists that Iraq will not be further split along sectarian lines.
In a period of renewed sectarian tensions within Iraq, Maliki likely views key to his own political survival that neighboring Syria not disintegrate along sectarian lines even more complex than Iraq's own when factoring in the Druze and Alawite minorities.
The rather swift, NATO-enabled fall of Gaddafi's Libya will not be repeated in Syria. The ethnic and religious mosaic of Syria coupled with an entirely different geopolitical reality means that without any kind of decisive intervention or overt "foreign conspiracy" as Assad terms it, Syria may be more of a long smolder than a powder keg.
The Arab League monitoring mission was a farce from the start, quickly falling into disarray. Unfortunately for those in the Free Syrian Army who are wishing for a no-fly zone forcing the implementation of a cordon sanitaire, there are both American and French presidential elections on the horizon.
When asked whether it was inevitable that Syria would descend into a sectarian war of which Iraq's Maliki along with a number of Western analysts have warned, the Syrian dissidents stated that this scenario was not a foregone conclusion.
They said that a civil war was sure to come after the eventual fall of the regime but that a conflict of a purely sectarian nature could be avoided while there was still time. The more civilians are killed each day, they said, the more feelings of vengeance are becoming entrenched in the national psyche.
The longer any kind of armed humanitarian intervention is put off while organizations from the GCC to the United Nations to NATO debate about just what to do, the bloodier a Syria after Assad's fall will be. They cited recent shelling in Homs' Bab Tadmour neighborhood in which an estimate 62 civilians were killed and an incident in Hama's Bab Kabli in which another 18 civilians were killed as to the constant veracity of the regime's assaults faced by ordinary Syrians each day.
The sand was running through the hourglass for any kind of peaceful transition of power in this light. The longer the fighting drags on where lightly armed rebels face the regime's heavy weaponry while civilians take the brunt of the casualties, the less likely any kind of negotiated settlement can be reached, according to Asia Times Online's interviewees.
The "Libyan model" is starting to look more like a one-off operation that was politically acceptable in the West and the GCC but is far too risky in a much more complex Syria, especially in an election year.
Asia Times Online asked about one of Western analysts' justifications for not rushing to the Free Syrian Army's aid in the way it had been done in Libya with the fighters of the National Transitional Council: Syria has no equivalent to Benghazi. The rebels in the Free Syrian Army hold pockets of particular second tier cities and now some smaller towns like Zabadani northwest of the Syrian capital, but skeptics of a nationwide rebellion have pointed to the lack of any kind of sustained uprising in either downtown Damascus or central Aleppo.
Asia Times Online was told that a major factor were the transnational logistics needed to undergird an armed rebellion. Cities and towns near the borders with Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey could be supplied with weapons and materiel. Fighters can also use these states as temporary sanctuaries to organize and regroup.
Aleppo and Damascus, the narrative goes, have been largely free of both mass people power movements or armed insurrection because locals know that would be quickly crushed. The only exception in their view was Hama which has maintained a sustained uprising against great odds and paid a correspondingly heavy price. An example of collective punishment is being set in Hama today as it was 30 years ago.
Though Iraq and Syria were furious rivals for decades in the Ba'ath party's schism regarding whether Baghdad or Damascus was the true leader of the Arab world. In the view of the Syrians, the democratization by force of Iraq was far different than the popular unrest in Syria.
The overthrow of Saddam Hussein brought a stifled Shi'ite majority to power. The overthrow of Assad's Alawite regime could remove not only an air and land logistical bridge to arming Hezbollah in Lebanon but would also bring a Sunni majority to power that could very well be hostile to Iran's interests in both Syria and Lebanon.
For Iran to be severed from Hezbollah would be a disaster for the ideologues in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps whose desire to project Iranian power across the region all the way to the Mediterranean is paramount. They see the Iranian agenda as countervailing to broader lurches toward greater freedom across the Arab world that began at the end of 2010 with the self-immolation of an emasculated street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia.
In a world where both Iran and Israel need each other as enemies to perpetuate their respective foreign policies, the Syrian uprising turned revolution throws each of these narratives off the rails. The men interviewed claimed that Arabic-speaking Iranian snipers have been helping to train and bolster the shabiha militiamen who are defending Assad's interests all along the lengthy Turkish frontier.
Iran portrays itself as first among equals in the global Palestinian cause and as the primary state actor that defines itself in opposition to Zionism.
The Syrian dissidents also told Asia Times Online that President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's Iran did not want to see a democratic Syria for entirely domestic reasons. Tehran does not want a repeat of the "Green" movement episode in 2009 should ordinary Iranians witness a full-scale revolution in Damascus.
Assad's handling of what began as largely non-violent protests mimicked Ahmadinejad's handling of the call for reform in Iran in June and July of 2009. The "Green" movement in Iran called for reform as the Syrians had initially with the key difference being that it occurred in isolation.
Protests in the Arab world are components in a larger chain reaction of popular resentment and economic despair. Assad has pledged significant reforms since coming to power after the death of his father in 2000 which have never materialized. His handling of the uprising has morphed it into what is currently a low intensity civil war.
For now it appears Assad will cling to power far longer than some of the other Arab strongmen, in part because of his own internal and familial sect driven allegiances. Assad, unlike Gaddafi's weaker African clients, has a host of nearby allies who can and are duly coming to his aide.
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