Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East

by Raja Shehadeh

  I managed a day’s return visit to the Atmeh camp, where conditions had turned from dust to mud, from wind to snow. A child had frozen to death the night before; another had been horribly burned in a tent fire. I couldn’t go any deeper into Syria because the international jihad tourists of Daesh had erected a checkpoint in Atmeh village, just beyond the camp. Six months previously camp residents had remarked on the presence of foreigners in the village. They complained that they never fought the regime, and derisively called them ‘the spicy crew’ in reference to their unfamiliar food. They saw them more as an amusement than a threat. But in the meantime Daesh had established mini-emirates in the north and east, and was killing Free Army commanders and revolutionary activists as well as journalists and non-Muslims. The fruits of the world’s abandonment of the Syrian people were beginning to blossom.

  In January 2014, a month after my visit, the entire armed opposition (the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic Front and Jabhat al-Nusra) declared war on Daesh, expelling it from Atmeh and from most of western and northern Syria. Throughout 2014 thousands of these fighters sacrificed their lives fighting Daesh, even while fending off Assad’s forces. Very few people in the West are aware of this, because it was hardly reported (similarly, very few have heard of the heroic anti-Daesh resistance of the also anti-Assad Shaitat tribe, over 900 of whom have been murdered in reprisals). Nevertheless, Daesh was being steadily pushed out of Syria by revolutionary forces until its sudden success in Iraq in June, its capture of American-made Iraqi army weaponry and the money from the banks of Mosul, and then its return in force to the Syrian east.

  In Atmeh camp in December 2013, the mood had definitely soured. The refugees were beginning to despair of ever going home, and a wounded sectarian identity was increasingly apparent. More people than before believed they were being attacked and driven from their homes because they were Sunnis. Why, they asked, had the Alawis remained loyal even as the regime committed genocide? Why was Shia Iran organising Assad’s military effort?

  It’s important to recognise the sectarianism flaring in Syrian society, but it’s also necessary to understand how it has been engineered. I live in Scotland, where tensions continue to simmer between the Catholic and Protestant communities, although hardly anybody goes to church, hardly anybody actively believes in God and almost nobody understands the theological distinctions between the churches. You feel the tension most on match days, when Rangers and Celtic are playing (these are Protestant and Catholic football clubs respectively), and beyond that it wasn’t much of an issue. But if one day a Scottish government were to decide to deal with popular protest by sending Catholic militias into Protestant areas (or vice versa) to kill, rape and burn, very quickly churches, community centres and pubs would become targets of mutual violence. One would hope that those reporting this hypothetical conflict would recognise the immediate context, that is the divide-and-rule provocations made by those in power, and not slip into lazy stereotypes of Scots fated by history and blood to eternal religious war.

  Likewise in the Middle East. In Iraq before 2003, a third of the marriages were between Sunni and Shia partners. Tribes contained both Sunni and Shia families. The Sunni–Shia cleavage was not insurmountable, sometimes not even present; then suddenly – as a result of political decisions – it was. And when Hezbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia, was fighting Israel in 2006, it was wildly popular among Syrian Sunnis. At that point most Syrians admired Iran as a strong, rapidly developing regional power that stood up to the West. If some Syrians now hate Iran and its client militias, this is not the result of an eternal, unchanging enmity. Yet far too often the media frames the Syrian revolution and counter-revolutions as an ancient conflict between Sunni and Shia. This orientalist approach makes present facts irrelevant and absolves the Assad regime and its backers from guilt.

  A more attentive reading demonstrates that the regime very deliberately, very cleverly, engineered sectarian conflict. In the spring of 2011, at the same time that it was targeting thousands of non-violent, non-sectarian revolutionaries for death by torture, the regime released the most violent and extreme of Salafist activists from its prisons. Many of these had fought the Americans and the Shia government in Iraq; Assad had facilitated their passage to Iraq and then arrested them on their return. Now they became useful again. Many of the current leaders of Islamist militias – Zahran Alloush of the Army of Islam, for instance – were beneficiaries of Assad’s ‘amnesty’. Meanwhile the regime relied on its own shabiha militias to terrorise protesting areas. In Damascus and Aleppo, these consisted of thugs from all sectarian backgrounds, but in the governorates of Hama, Homs and Latakia, they were selected exclusively from local Alawi and Shia communities. Very often they served as death squads. In a string of massacres in 2012, in Houla, Tremseh, Banyas and elsewhere, Alawi and Shia forces cut the throats of Sunni men, women and children.

  The regime calculated rightly that a genuine reform process would end in regime dissolution; it calculated wrongly that it would win any war it provoked. The fact that it provoked this war is difficult for some Western commentators to understand, but was no secret in Syria. ‘Either Assad or We Burn the Country,’ the shabiha wrote on the walls. While the regime attacked opposition-held areas with barrel bombs, heavy artillery, scud missiles and poison gas, it pursued an undeclared non-aggression pact with Daesh until June 2014. This meant that it bombed the markets and schools of Raqqa, but not once the city’s obvious Daesh HQ. The regime bought oil from Daesh, and even after it entered into battle with the jihadists, it still intervened in battles between Daesh and the Free Army – to bomb the Free Army.

  Why did the regime provoke first armed resistance and then a fierce sectarian backlash? For the same reason that it once sent Salafist fanatics to Iraq: Assadist policy is to present itself as the essential solution to problems it has itself manufactured – a case of the arsonist presenting himself as fireman. The double aim of the regime’s counter-revolutionary strategy was to frighten the minorities into loyalty (in particular, the drowning tyranny threw its arms around the neck of the Alawi community, making it complicit in its crimes and therefore a potential target for revenge, pulling it down with it into the depths) and the West into tolerance of the dictatorship in the face of the Islamist danger. The first has been partially successful, the second more so. Newspaper columnists and American ex-diplomats call for the West to cooperate with Assad against the jihadists, ignoring the context – Assad’s far worse atrocities – which created the chaos in which jihadism thrives.

  Media pundits have asserted, and perhaps much of the public in the West believes, that the United States and its allies have supported the Syrian opposition and its revolution. This is simply not true. Weeks into the mass killing of unarmed protesters, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was describing Assad as a reformer. Later on, the US and Europe sent selected Free Army brigades ready-meals, a few uniforms, some satellite phones and so on. Later still, some light weapons were delivered, even some anti-tank arms, but only sporadically. Syrian fighters describe it as the tap being turned on and then off again as soon as any progress is made. For a long time the only American move that actually made a difference was to veto other powers from supplying the anti-aircraft weapons essential to defend liberated areas from Assad’s planes. American policy has been fairly consistent: to encourage Assad to stand down while keeping the regime – expanded to include a few safe oppositional faces – in place. It’s a policy that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of both regime and revolution, that is morally bankrupt, and that allows jihadism to bloom. In the name of ‘realism’, Assad was permitted to raze the areas beyond his control and displace 10 million from their homes. In the name of disengagement, American planes are now bombing both Syria and Iraq, and Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, both Islamist opposition groups, as well as Daesh. They aren’t bombing Assad; indeed Assad’s and Obama’s planes share the sky. The immediate result of this on the ground has been a surge of support
for Daesh and, much more, for Jabhat al-Nusra.

  Who has sent weaponry to the Syrian opposition? Saudi Arabia has armed militias with tribal connections to the Kingdom, some secular and some moderate Islamist. Saudi individuals have also donated to Daesh – but not the state itself, which is terrified of the jihadist threat, and which recently gave $1 billion to the Lebanese army to defend Lebanon against Daesh incursions. The Qataris have funded Islamist but not transnational jihadist groups. Neither the Saudi nor the Qatari rulers are interested in democracy (both monarchies sent troops to crush the democratic uprising in Bahrain), though they may be genuinely outraged by the damage done to Syria. Turkey has passed a small amount of weaponry to the Free Army, but its political role in housing the now largely irrelevant Syrian National Coalition has been more important. Turkey has been the most generous of neighbours in permitting Syrian charities and political activity to operate on its territory, and allowing free passage of refugees and fighters. Very damagingly, however, it has until recently also allowed the free passage of foreign jihadists. I crossed the border illegally on my June visit. The Kurdish boys who led me across – right next to the official border post – told me they’d brought Chechens on the same route. Perhaps Turkey was motivated by the desire to pressure Syria’s Kurds, or perhaps its crimes of omission arise from mere incompetence. In any case, they are now likely to rebound on the Turkish state and people.

  Put together, the external arming and funding of the Syrian revolution has been done far too little, in an uncoordinated way, and is subject to American veto. This has guaranteed the failure of the Free Army to develop into a coherent, well-disciplined structure. Instead the free militias squabble over a tiny pool of aid while the jihadists grow.

  These facts do not seem to perturb many of the ‘liberal-left’ (I use inverted commas because their inane positions are neither liberal nor leftist), despite the clear principle that people who suffer genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing have the right to defend themselves, and the right to take weapons from anywhere they can.

  Much of the ‘left’ (Britain’s Stop the War Coalition comes to mind) have read the Syrian revolution from the start as an imperialist plot to unseat a socialist resistance regime, part of the ‘war on terror’ process, a rerun of Iraq. But Syria, and indeed our world, is much more complicated when seen from the ground. The line of thought that offers a ‘left’ justification for Assad is undisturbed by the contradictions of a ‘socialism’ in which one man – the president’s cousin Rami Makhlouf – controls 60 per cent of the economy, in which neo-liberalism has pauperised vast segments of the population; or of an ‘anti-Zionist resistance’ which slaughtered Palestinians in Lebanon in the 1980s and in Yarmouk camp today, which hasn’t fired a single bullet across the occupied Golan Heights since 1973. Most important, its ill-fitting Iraq analogy ignores the fact that there is no American occupation in Syria, and there was no popular revolution in Iraq.

  Iranian and Russian support for the Assad regime is too often not interrogated by anti-war activists in the West. In the face of our century’s greatest crimes, the media has too often retreated into absurd conspiracy theories. The most distasteful examples were Seymour Hersh’s articles in the London Review of Books blaming Assad’s August 2013 sarin gas attacks on resistance-held Damascus suburbs (which killed up to 2,000 people) on the resistance itself, in cooperation with the Turkish government. This improbable theory was based on one unnamed source and was comprehensively debunked (Eliot Higgins and Muhammad Idrees Ahmad did the best jobs); for many on the left it has nevertheless attained the status of gospel truth.

  Others wonder from a distance if the revolution was wise – as if it happened by collective decision rather than as the result of a failing system’s inevitable collapse – and condemn the decision to militarise, which in actuality was not one but a million individual decisions taken under fire. Perhaps worst of all, the idea is promoted, explicitly or not, that the Arabs are such a benighted people, so naturally prone to violent dissension, that they are better off under the rule of a strong man. The chaos expanding in Syria is therefore the fault of the treasonous or naive youngsters who stood up to state terror. This notion inverts logical, chronological and moral order. It is akin to the arguments that blame Jewish behaviour for German anti-Semitism, Palestinian behaviour for Zionist oppression or women’s behaviour when men beat or rape them.

  It’s a tragedy that Syrians have been so misrepresented in their hour of heroism and need. It’s another, directly related, tragedy that the world’s states, by omission and commission, have abandoned not only Syrians but their own peoples as well to a future of destabilisation and terror. The hope lies in Syrians themselves, and those who learn from them, those who will continue to forge a new type of history.

  DEFYING THE KILLERS: THE EMERGENCE OF STREET CULTURE IN SYRIA

  Malu Halasa

  1

  Taken on their own, graffiti, low-resolution pixelated camerawork and Arabic slang may not appear to be socially transformative. However, together their impact has had profound implications in Syria, where the cultural revolution that accompanied a broader political uprising is perhaps the only positive development in over four years of brutal conflict.

  Syrian activists were not operating in a vacuum. For many young Syrians, developments in Egypt and Tunisia were a call to artistic action. In the early months of 2011, a calligrapher in the countryside outside Hama and a fine arts student in Damascus were designing posters and uploading them on the internet for Egyptian and Tunisian activists to carry in their demonstrations. Soon bloody events closer to home prompted Syrians to initiate similar activities for their country. Through the internet, with Syrians inside and outside the country, an anonymous poster collective, known as Alshaab alsori aref tarekh (‘The Syrian People Know Their Way’) created posters that demonstrators downloaded from Flickr and other social media sites and carried during the first year of the Syrian marches.1

  Graffiti was another form of street art that crossed borders quickly.2 To a large extent, Syrians were influenced by the plethora of overtly political images and statements that appeared in the squares of Tunis and Cairo after January 2011. Egypt’s street artist El Teneen would repay the compliment several months later with a stencil showing Bashar al-Assad’s head sporting Hitler’s distinct hairline and moustache that spread across social networks.

  In Syria, graffiti launched the uprising. It was not the face of a political figure but a slogan popularised in the heat of nearby revolutions. ‘Al-shaab yurid isqat al-nizam’ (‘The People Want to Bring Down the Regime’) was spray-painted by fifteen schoolboys on a wall in the town of Deraa on 6 March 2011. Until this point, Syrians had not yet demanded the overthrow of the Assad family’s forty-year-long dictatorship, only the easing of the Emergency Law and the granting of greater political freedoms. However, the arrest and subsequent torture of the schoolboys, followed by the shooting of unarmed demonstrators on the streets of Deraa, acted as a catalyst for further mass demonstrations. These quickly spread to Homs, Hama, Baniyas and Damascus, and paved the way for a social and artistic activism never before seen in the country. As the artist, cinematographer and writer Khalil Younes described it, it was ‘the revolution within the revolution’.

  By that summer, as attacks and massacres by the shabiha regime-controlled thugs continued unabated, Damascus became a canvas for engaged art interventions. In particular people discovered that the most powerful weapon against a totalitarian dictatorship is ridicule. Activists turned the water in public fountains red. Hundreds of ping-pong balls carrying messages of freedom and dignity were released on Mount Qasiun, some of which rolled on to the grounds of Bashar al-Assad’s palace.

  Near official buildings or heavily patrolled public squares, loudspeakers hidden on rooftops, in trashcans or treetops blared out the sounds of protest marches, which sent the Syrian mukhabarat, or secret police, scurrying. As one unnamed artist-activist explained, ‘Because we don’t have
weapons, this kind of uprising is more intensive than an armed struggle. We want to affect the security forces, make them nervous, but we also want to suggest something smart, interactive and jokey.’

  The spontaneous mass demonstrations that took place in the cities in the country’s north were ‘carnivalesque’ in the Bakhtinian sense of challenging authority and allowing transgressive ideas to flourish. In the city of Hama, the site of a brutal massacre by Hafez al-Assad (Bashar’s father) in 1982, the crowd of thousands singing along to fireman and local singer Qashoush’s wittily chanted verses from ‘Yalla irhal ya Bashar!’ (‘Come on, Bashar, get out!’) was cathartic. In Homs, when the regime checkpoints prevented people from entering the main clock tower square to demonstrate, they constructed their own miniature clock towers and processed around those.

  Kafranbel, a previously unheard-of hamlet, emerged as a new centre for Syrian sardonic humour. Anonymous local illustrators and town wits garnered international acclaim for hand-drawn editorial cartoons and immaculately lettered protest banners authored as ‘Occupied Kafranbel’ or, by 2013, ‘Syrian Revolution – Kafranbel’. To this day, photos of these images held up by the town’s young men signal collective responsibility for the sentiments expressed.

  In another setting, activists from the Kartoneh collective who remained in war-destroyed Deir ez-Zor used the familiar and neutral iconography of traffic symbols, tinged with mordant humour. For example, two cars side by side in a red circle told residents ‘No overtaking’ the goal of ‘Citizenship, Justice and Equality’ for all; or a road narrowing ahead sign, which warned that there are only two choices – either opposition or pro-regime. The activists’ aim was to create a non-sectarian signage that would galvanise people of varying religious and ethnic backgrounds remaining in the city. According to a collective member, they may have had 7,000 followers on Facebook, yet more than 390,000 people have shared or seen their posters.