Syria’s Civil War Has Been Hard for Minorities

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Charlottetown Guardian

The Islamist Sunni group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), along with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), have now taken control of Syria.

Minority groups suffered disproportionately from the Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011. Most of the current Syrian population are Arabs, primarily Sunni Muslims; but there are also significant minority groups, including Alawites, Christians, Druze, and Kurds. These groups today represent approximately 25-30 per cent of the population, with Kurds comprising the largest group at around 10-15 per cent.

While still significant, these percentages nevertheless reflect the dramatic decline of some of the communities, the Christian community, in particular: their 10 per cent of the population in 2011 now stands at two per cent. The minorities are dispersed geographically.

Kurds live in the north and northeast, and Alawites in the coastal regions such as Latakia and Tartus; Christians, who are comprised of Greek Catholics, Maronites, Armenians, and Assyrians, live in cities like Aleppo, Damascus, and Homs, as well as in rural areas.

The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) has been the most minority-friendly region of Syria. It operated since 2012 with a decentralized governance model, implementing policies favoring pluralism and self-administration. It expanded its areas of control during the war against the Islamic State in particular. It is governed by local councils representing all of the ethnic groups in the region.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the military arm of the AANES, has likewise been a coalition composed of various ethnic and religious groups. Although the core of the SDF comes from the People’s Defense Units (YPG), a Kurdish unit, other groups are also represented.  

In the early 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood conducted the first great uprisings against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, especially in Homs and Hama. While the government brutally and successfully suppressed them, many Syrian Sunni Arabs looked at the uprisings favorably, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood clandestinely thereafter.

 During the same period, Sunni Arabs also consolidated their ties with their Iraqi brethren across the border. They established smuggling routes supporting their Iraqi neighbors. By the 1990s, it had led to good connections between Sunni Arabs in Syria and the Iraqi state apparatus.

In this context, it is unsurprising that the Kurdish movement in Syria quickly declared their own “third path” in the opposition to Assad, separate from the Arab supremacists and jihadis filling the ranks of the opposition in 2012. The efforts of the SDF, with Kurdish YPG fighters playing a central role alongside Assyrian militias like the Syriac Military Council and Sunni Arab units, defeated ISIS.

But now the new Syrian regime has reached an agreement with the SDF to integrate the latter with state institutions. Syria made the announcement on March 10 and released images of a signing ceremony featuring the Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa and the head of the SDF, Mazloum Abdi.

The deal will integrate SDF institutions into the new government, handing over control of border checkpoints as well as the region's oil and gas fields to the central government. As well, Damascus has granted the Druze militias autonomy and permission to keep their weapons.

For Christians and Alawites, the situation is more worrisome. Unlike the Kurds and Druze, many of them face Sunni Arab violence; they are seen as collaborators of the late regime. For years, most Syrians have suffered humiliation and degradation at the hands of an Alawite ruling minority, whose dominance under Assad has left an indelible mark of resentment. Gruesome videos of executions of Alawites have begun to emerge, alongside reports of attacks on Christian neighborhoods.

In addition, HTS is continuing Assad’s divide-and-rule strategy with the Christian minorities, who are more internally divided, both culturally and politically, than the Kurds. The Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, and Melkite Greek Catholic communities have expressed concern over the recent violence.

The heads of the Christian churches supported the Assad regime, which represented itself as the protector of the country’s minorities. “Many Syrian Christians in the country and in exile are deeply disappointed and angry at the attitude of their church leaders,” asserted Najib George Awad, a Syrian academic who researches theology at the University of Bonn. “Church leaders allowed themselves to be used as a PR tool by the Assad regime.”

Syria’s new interim constitution makes no mention of specific ethno-sectarian groups or divisions, because the new government claims they didn’t want a quota system. This leads to problems, with different groups competing for privileges. Religious or sectarian priorities then become part of politics, as in neighbouring Lebanon. Syria wishes to avoid that.

How Will Kurds Fare in a New Syria?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

Syria’s 13-year civil war ended abruptly in December, when rebels belonging to the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) swept south from their bastions in the northwest of the country, precipitating the fall of the government of President Bashar al-Assad. In a matter of weeks, a regime that had lasted decades came to an end.

One group of Syrians was particularly worried. Since 2014, Washington has backed a de facto autonomous government in northeastern Syria formed principally, but not exclusively, of ethnic Kurdish factions. This coalition, under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), took advantage of the chaos unleashed by Syria’s civil war to carve out an enclave along the border with Turkey.

Much of northeastern Syria has been controlled by Kurds, who call it Rojava, meaning western Kurdistan. The SDF fought off a host of enemies: Assad’s troops, Turkey and Turkish-backed militias, al-Qaeda-linked groups, and the Islamic State (ISIS). U.S. forces worked closely with the SDF in chasing ISIS from its last redoubts in Syria. The United States still maintains around 2,000 troops as well as contractors in roughly a dozen operating posts and small bases in eastern Syria.

But six years after the SDF captured the last ISIS stronghold in Syria, ISIS fighters still operate in central and eastern Syria. The SDF’s actions also bred resentment among local Arab communities. Tightly controlled by the People’s Defense Units, a Kurdish militia known as the YPG, the SDF committed extrajudicial killings and conducted extrajudicial arrests of Arab civilians; extorted Arabs who were trying to get information about or secure the release of detained relatives; press ganged young Arabs into its ranks; twisted the education system to accord with the political agenda of the YPG; and recruited many non-Syrian Kurdish fighters.

To be sure, these excesses pale in comparison with those of the Assad regime, but they caused substantial friction with Arab communities, especially in Arab-majority cities like Raqqa. Particularly in areas where the YPG led SDF forces, many in the region were therefore  calling for reintegration with the rest of Syria

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The SDF was also hampered by ongoing hostility between Turkey and the YPG. Turkey viewed the YPG is a terrorist group. But in late February, a key Kurdish leader in Turkey called for a cease-fire with Ankara. Abdallah Ocalan, the head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK -- a Kurdish militant group affiliated with the YPG that has long fought the Turkish state -- told fighters loyal to him to lay down their weapons and stop waging war against Turkey. This allowed for a rapprochement between the SDF and the new government in Damascus.

Syria made the announcement on March 10 and released images of a signing ceremony featuring the Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa and the head of the SDF, Mazloum Abdi. The deal will integrate SDF institutions into the new government, handing over control of border checkpoints as well as the region's oil and gas fields to the central government.

The safety and prosperity of Kurdish communities depends not on foreign powers but on the Syrian government respecting their rights and those of all Syrian citizens. For Christians and Alawites, the situation is more worrisome. Unlike the Kurds, many of them face Sunni Arab violence; they are seen as collaborators of the late regime. For years, the vast majority of Syrians have suffered humiliation and degradation at the hands of an Alawite ruling minority, whose dominance under Assad has left an indelible mark of resentment. Gruesome videos of executions of Alawites have begun to emerge, alongside reports of attacks on Christian neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, Syria’s new interim constitution makes no mention of specific ethnosectarian groups or divisions. The new government claims they didn’t want a quota system, because of how they’d seen these play out in Iraq and Lebanon. The idea behind consociationalist or confessionalist systems, as they are called, is to give each ethnic and religious group a voice in government to ensure their needs are covered. But this has led to problems in the longer term, with different groups competing for privileges. Religious or sectarian priorities are always part of politics.

“The best day after a bad Emperor is the first,” wrote the Roman historian Tacitus. The hard work will now have to follow. It remains unclear how genuinely willing the new Syrian government is to establish an inclusive democracy. But it appears that right now Syrians living under its control generally enjoy more political and personal rights than they have had since the Assads took power in 1970.

What's Next for Syria?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Last December, after more than 50 years of tyranny and repression, the government of Bashar al-Assad fell in Syria, due to a combination of three forces: First, Israel’s military utterly eviscerated Assad’s foreign military support base, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia; second, the Ukraine war has forced Russia to withdraw its support from the Syrian theatre; and third, the Turkish government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stepped into the breach. So Ankara’s favoured radical militia, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), captured the country with almost no opposition.

 HTS leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa is a former al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist. He formed the Nusra Front, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, but he eventually broke ties with them and the Nusra Front evolved into Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. He is currently attempting to position himself as a moderate figure, despite his history of terrorism and his group’s human rights abuses in the Idlib region of Syria.

 Replacing the country’s minority Alawite Shia regime by a Sunni dictatorship will not solve its problems either. The country is too disparate in terms of religion and ethnicity. The distinct national identities of its Alawite, Arab Christian-Orthodox, Druze, Kurdish, Armenian, Ismaili and Arab Shia populations were all recognised under Ottoman rule. And when France obtained the territory in 1919, it strove to accommodate plural identities by creating two separate states: an Alawite one in north-west Syria and a Druze one in the south-east, both apart from the Sunni majority.

 But when the French gave up their control of Syria in 1946, a Sunni Arab, Shukri al-Quwatli, became the country’s president. He was soon removed in the first of Syria’s many coups. During the next 21 years, 17 presidents followed one another. And three of those years were under Egyptian rule.

 But stability would come in November 1970 when Hafez al-Assad, via the supposed socialist Ba’ath Party, took control as military dictator before naming himself the president in February 1971. He was an Alawite, a suspect sect in a Sunni Arab majority country. The disproportionate number of Alawites in the officer corps, as a loyal minority that had been favoured under French rule, allowed his family to assume control. After his death in 2000, son Bashar continued Ba’athist rule.

 Iran’s support allowed the Assad regime to cling to power for years, even in the face of the mass “Arab Spring” protests led by the Sunni Arab majority that started in December 2010. So the regime survived for another 14 years. But it could not survive Israel’s demolition of Hezbollah. The ongoing war with Israel left Iran and especially its proxies --Hezbollah and Hamas --in an unprecedented position of weakness, significantly undermining their presence in Syria and enabling the rebels’ swift advance.

 Today, the tables have been turned, and members of the Alawite minority have reason to fear they will be punished or persecuted because of their community’s long-standing connections to the Assad family. There has already been fighting in an area that is their heartland, with thousands dead.

 Alawi Islam emerged in the ninth century in northeastern Syria. Alawites have a differing interpretation of several pillars of Islam, which are considered foundational by orthodox Muslims. Alawites prefer to worship in private, don’t think women need to wear headscarves, and use wine in their rituals.

 Among the many challenges the new regime faces are uniting a complex patchwork of rebel groups, gaining control over multiple regions under the sway of powerful factions and rebuilding relations with the international community to undo crippling sanctions.

 It is rapidly implementing stabilization measures, including the appointment of foreign, defence, and other government ministers, and expediting the restoration of Syria’s foreign relations.

 Turkey supported the rebels against the Assad regime throughout the civil war and is now reaping the benefits of its involvement. The current situation in Syria suits Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nationalist aspirations of positioning Turkey as a regional power. It is expected to have a central role in shaping Syria’s future. There is talk that Turkey might train the new Syrian army and open airbases in the country.

 Ankara’s policy in Syria has been motivated by two main interests: reducing the Kurdish autonomous region in the northeast and pushing its perceived threat away from Turkish territory, and facilitating the return of some of the 3.5 million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey, who pose an economic and political burden.

 The situation of the Kurdish minority in Syria, numbering about 2.5 million residents, has shifted since the country’s upheaval. Much of northeastern Syria has been controlled by Kurds, who call it Rojava, meaning western Kurdistan. Since 2012, they have run it as a self-declared autonomous region, protected by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

 But now Syria’s Kurds have agreed to integrate their autonomous institutions into the Syrian state. Damascus also granted the Druze militias autonomy and permission to keep their weapons. In return, the Kurds have been promised constitutional and language rights. President Ahmed al-Sharaa met with SDF leader Mazloum Abdi March 10 to sign the deal. Abdi called the accord a “real opportunity to build a new Syria” that “guarantees the rights of all Syrians and fulfills their aspirations for peace and dignity.”

 “The best day after a bad Emperor is the first,” wrote the Roman historian Tacitus. The hard work will now have to follow.