In early 2011, as repeated dictatorships fell across the Middle East and the entire region echoed with the cries of anti-regime protesters on the streets, it seemed that nothing could stop the wave of democratisation and changed heralded as the “Arab Spring”. Nearly four years on, the initial fevered optimism has given way to cynicism and fatigue, and reports of civil rights movements and freedom of speech have metamorphosed into the documentation of atrocities and brutal crackdowns on civilians.
Nowhere has this descent from peaceful uprising to bloody civil conflict been more pronounced than in Syria, where over 100,000 people have lost their lives and an estimated 9 million fled their homes since the Syrian people first took to the streets to oppose President Bashar Al-Assad in March 2011. But what is it about the Syrian case that has led to such widespread bloodshed and chaos? How did a series of nominal peaceful protests turn into a hotbed of extremism, with armed groups and militias fighting both each other and the army in an all-out civil conflict that one activist described as “world war three”?
Like Iraq before it, Syria has often been characterised in media and analyses as an ethnically and religiously diverse society in which years of oppressive dictatorships have created a psychologically scarred and internally divided population. According to this narrative, the regimes of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez and Bashar Al-Assad in Syria – both predominantly made up of a minority religious group (the Sunnis in Iraq and the Alawis in Syria) who monopolised power at the expense of the rest of the population – fuelled long-standing intra-societal divisions that split people down religious, ethnic and tribal lines. It is this deep-seated and ingrained sectarianism, the argument goes, that has achieved its ultimate expression in the terrifying juggernaut of the so-called Islamic State (also known as ISIS).
While not denying the discursive and ideological salience of sectarian rhetoric in the case of both Syria and Iraq – especially in the case of radical Sunni Islamist groups such as ISIS, Jabhat Al-Nusra and the Islamic Front – nor the continued targeting and killing of people on both sides of the conflict simply for being from the “wrong” social group, reducing the complex array of socio-political and geo-strategic interests at stake in Syria to the catch-all term of “sectarianism” ultimately obscures more than it reveals.
Indeed, numerous academics, journalists and analysts have countered the sectarian narrative, arguing that it is both “analytically unsound” and “morally problematic“, not merely because it often confuses cause and effect in determining social processes. In this sense, the current rise of sectarian rhetoric and religious hatred in Syria and elsewhere is not the result of a primordial disposition of “the Middle East’s tribal DNA” but the result of political and socio-economic processes in the region over many years.
With this more nuanced and cautious use of the term “sectarianism” in mind, it becomes clear that the escalation of violence in Syria was not precipitated by intra-communal hatred based on ethnic and religious ties, but by an economy of violence that fractured Syrian society down pre-existing lines of social class and status. The first two provinces to rise up against the regime, Deraa and Idlib, had populations who were heavily reliant on agriculture and who had suffered during the government’s liberalisation schemes. The urban middle-class, however, who benefited from the Ba’th party’s channelling of national income resources, did not join the protests until much later. Thus, the initial targeting of minority Alawis (a branch of Shi’a Islam) by Sunni Arabs (the vast majority of the population) had little to do with religious hatred and more to do with the social distribution of wealth and power that had disproportionately benefited Assad’s Allawi sect over many decades. It is worth remembering, too, that the initial slogans of the protesters focused on civil rights, liberty and democracy and the ultimate collapse of the regime (“the people want the downfall of the regime“).
Moreover, like in Egypt, the Syrian political spectrum was extremely limited and the only established (but mostly underground) opposition movement at the time of the uprising was the Muslim Brotherhood, based mainly around the cities of Homs, Hama and (to a lesser extent) Aleppo. Hardly surprising, then, that these regions were seen as key areas in the uprising, especially the strategic city of Aleppo, the country’s largest urban centre, and that Sunni Islamist discourse propagated by the Brotherhood and its allies quickly gained salience within the protest movements. Unlike Egypt, however, where a (predominately Sunni Arab) army strategically chose to align itself against the beleaguered figure of Mubarak and refused to fight the (predominately Sunni Arab) protesters, the state apparatus in Syria had a well-established base of loyal Alawis on which to draw and who dominated the security services and military. It was Assad’s brutal crackdown on the protesters that initially galvanised the Sunni majority against his minority-based regime and paved the way for sectarian violence in the country.
And yet, socio-economic factors alone cannot account for the wave of devastation that has overtaken Syria. There is also a geo-political dimension. Unlike Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain or the other countries experiencing so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings, Syria enjoys a strategic position in the region both in terms of its geographical location and its politics. As an ally of Iran and the Islamic Republic’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, Assad is a key figure in maintaining Iranian influence in the Levant; thus making him a thorn in the side of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, who seek to spread their own agenda in the region.
“At the moment in Syria there is two conflicts,” says Syrian activist and journalist Karim. “The first conflict is [that of] Syrians against the Assad regime and the second conflict is the international conflicts in Syria. They are using Syria as a game.”
Karim fled the country in late 2011 after being targeted by the regime for his role in the uprising, but was forced the leave his family behind in Raqqa, a city now under ISIS control. “I have relatives who unfortunately joined ISIS, not because they believe but because they need money,” he says, adding that: “people are sympathising with ISIS against the regime. And the [US-led] coalition’s bombing will only make Assad stronger.”
Indeed, the coordinated bombing campaign against ISIS targets in eastern Syria and western Iraq have, by all accounts, only served to further galvanise the embattled and desperate population, who often see extremist groups such as ISIS and their ilk as the only viable antidote to their continued suffering. And recent rumours of a rapprochement between the US and Iran is unlikely to improve the situation on the ground since many Syrians, especially the majority Sunni population, already feel that their country has been taken over by foreign influences.
“There are so many foreign fighters now in Syria,” says Karim, “the other day my family even called me and said that they saw Russians and Chechens on the streets with guns. It has become an international conflict and the media doesn’t care about Assad and the Syrian people anymore.”
It is this involvement of geo-politics by regional actors and allies that, ultimately, served to transform the Syrian revolution into a clash of ideologies. Factor in the significance of bordering Turkey and Iraq, and each of their embroilment in the issue of Kurdish independence, and it is easy to see how the war in Syria quickly escalated from being a peaceful uprising against an oppressive dictator to a polarised and bloody civil war in which warring factions serve as proxies to global powers and their strategic interests. In other words, “far from being a determinant factor, the sectarian divide in Syria is but one of many pawns in the great game of nations.”1
1Aslam Farouk-Ali (2014), “Sectarianism in Alawi Syria: Exploring the Paradoxes of Politics and Religion,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 34(3): 222.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.