No one — not Washington, nor the establishment press —
seems ready to confront the Sunni-Shia conflagration that threatens to rock
whatever narrow foreign policy hold the U.S. has in the region, promising a
bleak landscape of war for years to come.
Foreign policy had been largely sidelined in American political
discourse over the last year, but now that President Obama has secured a second
term, and the roiling conditions in the Middle East before November 6 haven’t
subsided — they will become harder to ignore.
“No one is paying attention to this,” says Adil Shamoo, an Iraqi-American author
and professor at the University of Maryland. Shamoo was born and raised in
Iraq and is a Chaldean Christian who is horrified at the sectarian strife that has divided his native country
since the American invasion of Iraq nearly 10 years ago. He sees the American
presence there as unleashing the simmering tensions between the Sunni and
long-repressed Shia majority, leading to institutional discrimination and a
backlash against other religious minorities, particularly the now-dwindling Iraqi Christian
population. Worse, he sees the conflict playing out throughout
the region today.
“I think it’s the most dangerous development in the Middle East, in the
Muslim world,” he told TAC in a recent interview, “because you’re
talking about hundreds of millions of people potentially fighting each other
and it has become real now.”
The American presidential debates completely ignored the issue of
sectarian violence erupting in places like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, and
Pakistan — even though U.S. foreign policy directly concerns each country.
Washington placed the new Shia-dominated government in Iraq into power. Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki has since handed down four death sentences against Sunni
Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, who is in exile. The U.S. still supports
the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain, despite widespread reports of human rights
abuses and the torture of political prisoners. The government there has
actually started revoking the citizenship of
dissenters.
Violence in Syria is already spilling over into Lebanon, which has
implications for Israel, neighboring Jordan, and even Washington’s tenuous
negotiations with Iran, a stalwart ally of Syria.
American policies affect many of these powerful dramas unfolding today —
Washington being both an extra and a principal player. It is key that the
world’s “superpower” does not rush to its usual inclination, to steal the show,
warns Shamoo. “There is a reservoir of good will towards Americans, but there
is a bigger reservoir of anti-Americanism,” he said. The next several weeks and
months will tell how the president grapples with each explosive flash point.
Syria
The uprising in Syria, launched by the majority Sunni, some 74 percent
of the country, is struggling to topple the authoritarian rule of President
Bashar Al Assad, who represents the minority
Alawites, a sect of Shiism which broke off from the main
branch of Shia a thousand years ago.
“We want just what they got in Tunis and Egypt,” Mahmoud Razak, a
shop-keeper in the outer suburbs, told The Guardian recently. “Freedom and the chance to
progress in life. But we thought it would take 19 days like it took [in Egypt].
It’s now 19 months. We didn’t know it would be this difficult.”
In the meantime, Syria has become the epicenter in the long-anticipated
Sunni-Shia confrontation, with besieged President Assad reportedly drawing
support from Iran and Lebanon via Hezbollah, as well as Shia fighters
from Iraq, and the minority Kurds, who (with possibly their own long-term
sights on independence) fighting the rebels in the north, enjoined by Kurdish
compatriots from over the Turkish border. Noted the New York Times:
Some Iraqi Shiites are traveling to Tehran first,
where the Iranian government, Syria’s chief regional ally, is flying them to
Damascus, Syria’s capital. Others take tour buses from the Shiite holy city of
Najaf, Iraq, on the pretext of making a pilgrimage to an important Shiite
shrine in Damascus that for months has been protected by armed Iraqis. While
the buses do carry pilgrims, Iraqi Shiite leaders say, they are also ferrying
weapons, supplies and fighters to aid the Syrian government.
“Dozens of Iraqis are joining us, and our brigade is
growing day by day,” Ahmad al-Hassani, a 25-year-old Iraqi fighter, said by
telephone from Damascus. He said that he arrived there two months ago, taking a
flight from Tehran. The Iraqi Shiites are joining forces with Shiite
fighters from Lebanon and Iran, driving Syria ever closer to becoming a
regional sectarian battlefield.
Meanwhile, arms and financial assistance are flowing to the rebels from
the Gulf States and Turkey, all predominantly Sunni. Jihadi fighters have streamed
in seeking the same ideological struggle playing out in Muslim power vacuums
from Afghanistan to North Africa, according to recent reports. The
majority of these religious jihadis among the opposition in Syria are Syrians,
according to the Guardian,
however:
… it has become clear that extremist Salafi or jihadi
groups, some linked to al-Qaida, are now a significant element of the armed
opposition. Alongside fighters from al-Qaida in Iraq or Fatah al-Islam
from Lebanon is the mysterious Jabhat al-Nusra, which has claimed
responsibility for suicide bombings in Damascus and Aleppo. It is sympathetic
to al-Qaida. Others hail from Jordan, Libya and Algeria.
In October, the Washington Post reported that at least 150
Islamists from Jordan were fighting in Syria with Jabhat al-Nusra, and a number
of “ultraconservative Islamists” or salafists, who have been arrested in
Jordan, ostensibly preparing for jihad in Syria. Jordan,
ruled by the Sunni monarchy of King Abdullah II, has its own fervent democracy movement to contend with, as
well as refugees from Syria who continue to pour into the country. Abdullah has
maintained official ties with Assad, but like other states in the region,
Jordan has encouraged Assad to step down.
The Syrian opposition is feeling the burden of a religious war building
on their efforts at democracy, too, according to writer Martin Chulov:
For the most part, the opposition movement is staying
true to the ethos that led many of the country’s towns and citizens to mount a
challenge to President Bashar al-Assad’s absolute state control over their
lives. But around the fringes, there are signs that the revolution’s original
values are starting to fray. The narrative of a defiant street versus a
draconian state, so simple in March 2011, is now far more complicated.
Mary Wakefield, reporting for The Spectator, recently toured the shaky
corridor along the Bakaa Valley, between Lebanon and Syria.
It is a paranoid and scarred place. “Everyone in the region is either for or
against Bashir al-Assad’s regime, it’s a bipolar world: Christians and Shia
mostly for, Sunnis mostly against.”
For these and many other reasons, the Obama administration has refrained
from getting involved in the conflict with anything other than “non-lethal
support.” Becoming a lead player on this stage could have serious repercussions
beyond the soft lines of the Syrian territorial map.
Lebanon
In October, a 70-kilogram bomb targeted and killed the Sunni head of the
Lebanese Internal Security Forces-Informational Branch, Gen. Wissam al-Hassan,
in a predominantly Christian quarter of Beirut.
According to reports, Hassan was an ally of the U.S. and Israel in
monitoring the activities of Hezbollah and pro-Syrian forces within Lebanon.
Both Syria and Hezbollah have been accused of plotting Hassan’s murder,
instigating a massive wave of anti-Shia/Syrian violence in the city. Some have
even called for a toppling of the Lebanese government, of which Hezbollah is a
ruling faction. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Because of Gen. Hassan’s ties to the West, Arab and
Western officials said they believed last Friday’s car bombing in central
Beirut …was a warning from Syria and Iran. Its aim, these people say, was to
warn anti-Syrian politicians in Lebanon and the West not to work for the
overthrow of Mr. Assad’s regime in Damascus.
At the same time, Hezbollah’s political rivals in
Lebanon are out for blood, led by a Sunni-led bloc still inflamed by painful
memories of the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri in a car
bomb attack in 2005. The group has vowed to topple the government led by Prime
Minister Najib Mikati, which could significantly weaken Hezbollah’s political
power
“We are targeting Najib Mikati, but we mean Hezbollah,”
said Nouhad Mashnouk, a member of parliament with the bloc opposed to the
Syrian government. Both Hariri and Hassan were key leaders of the Sunni
Muslim community, and their violent deaths have deepened the sectarian divide
between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Lebanon.
Bahrain
Not all Shia-Sunni tensions are connected to Syria, at least not yet.
Just last month, the Bahraini ruling Sunni monarchy banned all street protests
nationwide. The decree came 21 months after the Shia, which
represent 70 percent of Bahrain’s population, took to the streets in their own
version of the Arab Spring, demanding democracy and an end to the institutional
discrimination keeping their people largely unemployed and living in
quasi-apartheid conditions.
The strife has caused some 50 deaths, mostly activists, in the last two
years, amid major police crackdowns that left Shia protesters filled with
birdshot or tortured in government prisons, according to human rights
observers. The interior minister nonetheless blamed the campaigners for abusing
the privilege and shut all the rallies down, promising legal repercussions if
they took to the streets from this point forward.
This has put the American government in a bind, since Bahrain and its
biggest ally, Saudi Arabia (which has been accused of covertly fueling
sectarian tensions throughout the Middle East), are its own best friends in the
region. The Bahraini monarchy also has a
cozy relationship with western media and especially, Washington lobbyists,
insulating it from the kind of scrutiny that say, Egypt faced during its
revolution. The White House has been criticized not being
more vocal about the violence against protesters and the obvious stifling of
dissent.
Pakistan
According to a recent report by Michael Georgy for
Reuters, more than 300 Shia have been killed by Sunni extremists in Pakistan in
the last year. The group Lashkar-e-Jhagvi or LeJ, has “grown more robust and
appears to be operating across a much wider area in Pakistan than just a few
years ago.” They’ve been linked to both the Taliban and al Qaeda and are
responsible for some of the most violent terror attacks in recent times,
targeting the Shia, which account for about 20 percent of Pakistan’s population.
Revenge comes in the form of Shia extremist attacks, sometimes backed by
Iran, Georgy writes: “Sunni and Shi’ites, who have lived together for decades,
now cope with sectarian no-go zones.”
Dealing with a Sunni-Shia showdown on a grand scale has been a “no-go
zone” for most Washington lawmakers and even the foreign policy establishment,
which seems to prefer addressing one conflict area at a time. The spillover
from the Syrian conflict could wreak havoc on places already made fragile by
years of war, poverty, and corruption.
No comments:
Post a Comment