The war in Syria is not over yet. Indeed, the Bashar Assad
Baathist-Alawite regime has been salvaged in Western Syria, the most populated
part of the country. However, this was not been achieved by the regime’s
itself, but rather by foreign protectors – Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the
Shiite state-within-the-state in Lebanon – that provided fighters or firepower
or both. And there are still large pockets of Sunni insurgency in the
northwest. While some of these areas are now de facto under Turkish
supervision, others are still operated by independent Syrian Sunni militias.
As for eastern Syria, it is still largely beyond the control
of the Assad regime. While ISIS does not seem to have retained compact
territorial strongholds there, some non-ISIS Sunni insurgents remain active in
the southeastern deserts along the Jordanian and Iraqi borders. More important,
Trans-Euphrates Syria in the northeast has consolidated into an autonomous
polity known as Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan), or alternatively, the Democratic
Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS), a coalition comprising of Sunni Kurds,
Sunni Arabs and Christian Assyrians. The DFNS spearhead is a well-organized and
highly motivated Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which
carried most of the war against ISIS on the ground from 2015-on, and
reconquered most populated areas in the former ISIS-dominated territory.
Until recently, the YPG relied ultimately on American
logistical and tactical support. American assistance was crucial in defeating
ISIS at Kobani in 2015, under the Obama administration, and in the reconquest of
the ISIS capital Raqqa in 2017, under the Trump administration. Russia also
extended some measure of support at times. On the other hand, Turkey, Iran and
Shiite-dominated Iraq have constantly opposed Rojava/DFNS and are clearly
tempted to wipe it out now that American personnel are about to leave the area.
Turkey has already taken advantage of the new situation by wresting from the
Kurds their westernmost outpost in Afrin. But it has been apparently advised by
the US and Russia alike not to interfere with Trans-Euphrates Syria proper.
What is striking about the present map of Syria is how
closely it resembles another one drawn by the French just 100 years ago.
In line with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, the French
and British divided the former Ottoman Middle East between themselves. While
the British took over the southern Levant (Palestine on both banks of the
Jordan River) and oil-rich Mesopotamia, the French occupied the northern
Levant, from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates River and beyond – a 200,000
square-kilometer area they renamed Syria.
This arrangement was seen by Arab nationalists – who had
been promised an independent and united State by the British, and had convened
a national congress in Damascus – as a cynical betrayal. This was all the more
so when their British-appointed king, Emir Faisal of Hejaz, was ousted from
Damascus by the French in 1920, and had to resign himself with a diminished
realm in Iraq only. The word Nakba (“catastrophe”), which now applies primarily
to the Arab Palestinian plight, then came into use in the Arab press for the
first time, to describe the dismemberment of a stillborn new Arab Empire.
In fact, the former Ottoman Middle East could hardly have
been described as a single nation even then. The population, spread out over a
total area of about 750,000 square kilometers, was sparse – five millions at
best. Most inhabitants spoke Arabic, but there were many places where Kurdish,
Turkish, Aramaic, Armenian or even Greek were the primary languages. Meanwhile,
a growing Jewish community in Palestine was reviving Hebrew as a modern,
day-to-day language.
Most inhabitants claimed to be Muslim, but broken down into
many Sunni and Shiite sectarian groups. The Christians, the second largest
religion, also split into sectarian groups, not to mention smaller religious
minorities like the Jews, Druze or Yazidis. Every geographical region and every
tribe or clan claimed a distinct identity. The economy was largely local. As
noted by the American historian Martha Neff Kessler, connections to larger
markets outside the area along the old caravan roads or the more recent Ottoman
railways networks were more relevant than interconnections within the area.
What was true of the region as a whole was equally true of
each Western zone of influence. The French quickly realized that their Syrian
dominion – two millions inhabitants in 1920 – was a patchwork of conflicting
communities. Charles de Gaulle, who was stationed as a young staff officer in
Beyrouth from 1929 to 1931, dryly observed, “The people who live here never
contented themselves with anything nor anybody.”
Still, some administrative framework had to be devised. The
secretary-general of the French High Commissioner’s Office, Viscount Robert de
Caix de Saint-Aymour, took up the challenge. A personal friend of Philippe
Berthelot, the secretary-general of the French Foreign Office and the supremo
of French post-WW I diplomacy, he would enjoy a near unlimited authority in
these matters.
According to de Caix, Syria did not exist and would never
exist. It had to be partitioned into smaller but more homogeneous entities. His
first draft, in 1919, provided for two main States, centered around Damascus in
the South and Aleppo in the North, and three smaller States: Lebanon, the
Alawite state and the Druze state.
The differences between the Damascus and Aleppo areas were
very real. As a matter of fact, each city had ruled its own vilayet
(administrative district) under the Ottomans. Damascus had been in Biblical
times the capital of the powerful kingdom of Aram, and then, in early Muslim
history, the seat of the first caliphate dynasty, the Ummayads. Until 1918, it
was the chief town of an Ottoman vilayet of Syria extending from Hama in
central Syria to Aqaba on the Red Sea. For all that, it was then a rather
diminished, conservative and inward-looking city of 180,000 that derived most
of its wealth from local agriculture.
Aleppo, until 1918 the chief town of an Aleppo vilayet that
included Marash and Urfa in southeastern Anatolia and Alexandrette on the
Mediterranean, was on the contrary a booming commercial and industrial city of
200,000, connected to all Ottoman lands and beyond. It had suffered a brief
eclipse in the late 19th century, when the Suez Canal rendered age-old caravans
obsolete, but had soon been reinstated its previous position as one of the most
important Imperial Ottoman Railways hubs. The French compensated for the loss
of the Anatolian districts by bringing Trans-Euphrates Syria, previously known
as the Ottoman Sanjak of Zor, under the jurisdiction of the Aleppo state.
Lebanon, the only place in the Levant where Christians
formed a majority, had been closely related to France for centuries. Its main
Christian community, the Catholic-oriented Maronites, had been educated wholly
in French since the 19th century. French cultural influence was almost as
strong over the other Christian and non-Christian elites. Quite naturally, de
Caix took steps from the very onset to sever this enlightened country from the
rest of Syria. The State of Lebanon was created in 1920, and turned six years
later into the semi-independent Republic of Lebanon under French tutelage.
Likewise, the Alawites were promised a fair amount of
autonomy in their own area around Latakia, between Lebanon and Turkey. A
nominally Shiite sect that most Muslims, including regular Shiites, regarded as
heretical, the Alawites were eager to associate with the new non-Muslim rulers.
They provided the French with excellent and disciplined native levies, which
later turned into elite forces.
The Druze issue was more awkward. Another offshoot of Shiite
Islam that had developed into a fully separate religion, the Druze community
was a major power both in the mountainous areas south of Damascus – the Jabal
Druze – and in several parts of Lebanon. While the French provided the Jabal
Druze with a state of its own, they subordinated the Lebanese Druze to the
Christians. That major departure from their global scheme and major mistake was
soon met by a bitter all-Druze insurgency and more unrest in other parts of the
country. It took two years, and a very discerning general, Edouard Andrea, to
quell it in 1927. Finally, de Caix’s map was cosmetically redrawn. The states
of Damascus, Aleppo and Jabal Druze were merged into a single Syrian Federal
State. However, Lebanon and the Alawite State were maintained as separate
entities.
Wrested from Vichy France by the British and the Free French
in 1941, Syria was granted independence as a single state in 1945, with the
exception of Lebanon, which was confirmed as a separate independent state. It
did not mean, however, that the ethnic, religious and geographic tensions or
rivalries that appalled de Caix vanished instantly. On the contrary, they were
exacerbated by an enormous demographic growth – from five million in the 1950s
to about 10 million in the 1970s to about 20 million today. Democracy quickly
gave way to military regimes, a succession of coups and even a brief
incorporation into Gamal Abdel Nasser’s United Arab Republic. Finally, the
Alawites took over.
Ironically, the pro-French Latakia sectarians had converted
to militant nationalism and then Baathism in the 1940s, and their military
power had allowed them to assert an ever-increasing role in the country’s
politics in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1970, Hafez Assad, an air force general and
a leader of the Baathist Syrian branch, emerged as the sole ruler. The Assad
regime, under Hafez Assad from 1970 to 2000, and then under his son Bashar, was
outwardly pan-Arabist, but relied in fact on carefully calculated sectarian
alliances.
In a nutshell, the Alawites co-opted all non-Sunni or
non-Arab minorities in order to check the Sunnis. The system was cemented by
socialism – in effect, family and sectarian patronage – and a close alliance
with the USSR. Once the Soviet Empire fell that started to unravel. The civil
war that started in 2011 brought back to the surface a geopolitical Atlantis:
de Caix’s map, with only one major difference, the assertiveness of
Trans-Euphrates Syria.
The post-Soviet Russians have been back in Syria since 2015.
While they see the preservation of their Alawite ally as a priority, they are
realistic enough to commend federalization as a long-term solution. This is all
the more so since they know they are bound to compete with their Iranian allies
and their Turkish allies-in-the-making. The Americans and the Europeans should
not, at that point, leave it to the Russians alone. Nor should the Israelis.