European Union and its challenges

 

Topic- Instability and external involvement in Syria

·         Hafez al-Assad, father of the current President of Syria Bashar al-Assad was from, the Alawi minority, a heterodox Shia sect, that had long been persecuted in Syria and came to power under the post–World War I French mandate. He took control over Syria from the Baathist military junta in 1970 and put majority of the powers in the presidency.

·         In February 1982, Hafez al-Assad ordered the military to put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama with brute force. Syrian forces killed more than twenty-five thousand there. Hama became a rallying point during the Protest since 2011.The Assad presided over a system that was not just autocratic but kleptocratic, doling out patronage to bind Syrians to the regime.

·         Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000 pledging reforms. He promised to let markets take the place of the ‘Arab socialism’ put by the previous regimes. The privatization benefitted the riches and well wishers of the regime. It heavily impacted the rural peasants and urban laborers as the price ceilings were lifted and subsidies were gone. A record-setting drought from 2006 to 2010 exacerbated socioeconomic problems. Mismanaged farmland was rendered fallow and farmers migrated to cities in ever-larger numbers, causing the unemployment rate to surge. 

·         After getting inspired by the events in Middle East related to Arab Spring fifteen boys in the southwestern city of Deraa, Syria, spray-painted on a school wall: “The people want the fall of the regime.” They were arrested and tortured. Demonstrators who rallied behind them clashed with police, and protests spread.

·         Though many protesters were demanding for something lesser such as the release of political prisoners, an end to the half-century-old state of emergency, greater freedoms, and an end to corruption. But the regime cracked down the protesters with equal vigor. Unlike Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Assad responded to protesters immediately, offering just token reforms while directing security services to put down the protests with force.

·         Anti-regime protests soon spread from Deraa to major cities such as Damascus, Hama, and Homs. The Syrian army fired on unarmed protesters and carried out mass arrests by targeting the agitators. Torture and extrajudicial executions were frequently reported at detention centers.

·         Then, in late April 2011, the Syrian army brought in tanks, laying siege to Deraa. The civilian death toll mounted and residents were cut off from food, water, medicine, telephones, and electricity for eleven days. Amid international condemnation, the regime offered some concessions, but it also repeated the Deraa response in other places where there were protests, at far greater length and cost, leading some regime opponents to take up arms.

·         In July 2011, defectors from Assad’s army announced the formation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and soon after they began to receive shelter in Turkey. Yet the FSA, outgunned by the regime, struggled to bring its loose coalition under centralized command and control. FSA militias reflected the interest of their regional supporters. With resources scarce, they depended at times on the very populations they were charged with protecting.

·         The FSA’s civilian counterpart was also established in summer 2011, in Istanbul. The Syrian National Coalition (SNC), which claimed to be the government-in-exile of Syria, and the United States, Turkey, and Gulf Cooperation Council countries, among others, recognized it as “the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.” But the SNC and its successor, the National Coalition, were unable to deliver significant diplomatic or material support to the opposition, and many of the regime’s opponents within Syria did not give it much legitimacy. Rival coalitions began to proliferate as a result the FSA fighters aligned with Islamist groups that, with funding and arms from Gulf donors, scored greater battlefield successes against the regime.

·         In January 2012, a group called Jabhat al-Nusra announced itself as al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, and the following month al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri called for Sunnis from around the region to join a jihad against the regime. Jabhat al-Nusra gained Syrian and foreign recruits as it scored greater battlefield successes than rival opposition groups.

·         In April 2013, a group formed from the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq that called itself the Islamic State of Iraq emerged and exceeded even Jabhat al-Nusra in its brutality. In several months, its forces established control over territory spanning western Syria and eastern Iraq. The emergence of Islamic State raised the prospects of sectarian politics even further and population in the occupied regions suffered more than any other opponent held regions.

·         The rise of extremist groups in Syria and in mid-2011, release of  hundreds of Islamist militants from prisons to discredit the rebellion was, in part, the regime’s own doing, as Assad wanted to present to the world a stark choice between his secular rule and a jihadi alternative and to put forward a sectarian agenda.

·         Both Assad’s forces and rebel groups have regularly targeted civilians in areas outside of their control. The deaths of some 1,400 civilians from chemical weapons deployed by the Assad regime in the summer of 2013 mobilized world powers to dismantle the regime’s chemical arsenal. However, in the years since, the Syrian government has employed devastating conventional arms that have also caused massive civilian casualties.

·         The regime has made regular use of sieges and aerial bombardment. According to analysts these collective-punishment tactics serve dual purposes, they raise the costs of resistance to civilians so that they will pressure rebels to acquiesce, and they prevent local committees from offering a viable alternative to the regime’s governance.

·         The people in Syria demonstrated against the four-decade rule of the Assad family regime since then hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and millions of the people have been displaced.

·         The Assad’s regime remained unabated and used extreme measures to curb the protestors and militias. The heavy hands of the government led to a constant flee of population towards Lebanon, Turkey and towards Europe through Mediterranean borders.

·         Despite a UN Security Council resolution in 2014 aimed at securing humanitarian aid routes, aid became politicized as Assad would grant UN convoys permission to distribute food and medicine in government-held areas while denying them access to rebel-held areas, and rights advocates charged the regime with targeting medical facilities and personnel. In 2018, the UN humanitarian agency said more than one million people lived in areas that were besieged or otherwise beyond the reach of aid.

External Involvement

·         The deepening of Syria’s civil war made both pro- and anti-regime forces dependent on external sponsors. The Syrian Civil War has become a battle ground for much of the regional and international powers to run the proxy wars and balancing of power against each other.

·         As mounting casualties and desertions weakened Assad’s army, the regime came to rely increasingly on Iran and Russia. Iran, a longtime ally interested in protecting a vital land route to its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah; Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps; The Iranian volunteer Basij paramilitary force and the foreign Shia militias it has rallied have propped up support to the regime and caused casualties and suffered even more.

·         Russia has provided Assad with critical diplomatic support and vetoed the measures in the UN Security Council that would have punished the Syrian regime. Russia then entered the conflict directly in September 2015 with the deployment of its air force, claiming that its air strikes would primarily target the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. But analysts said it more often targeted other rebel groups, some backed by the United States and many intermingled with al-Qaeda’s affiliate near the front lines with the regime. This helped Assad strengthen his control of population centers along the western parts.

·         Opposition forces, too, depend on foreign support. A rapprochement between Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey enabled the formation in March 2015 of the Army of Conquest, which comprises an array of opposition and extremist groups. The United States, too, has provided covert training and arms to opposition forces. But official foreign support for these groups has been unsteady and uncoordinated.

·         The United States had been at the forefront of a coalition conducting air strikes on the self-proclaimed Islamic State and defended the town by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) the militant group. U.S. forces aided in ousting Islamic State fighters from Kobani and continued to provide arms and air support to the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). U.S. abruptly pulled back its forces and support to YPG in October 2019 ahead of the second invasion of northern Syria by Turkey. The Turks seek to push Kurdish forces, the United States’ main local partner in the fight against the Islamic State, from border areas. Russia too has carried out air strikes in Syria, coming to the Assad regime’s defense, while Iranian forces and their Hezbollah allies have done the same on the ground.

·         Assad has never been willing to negotiate by going out of the power but his continued rule is unacceptable to millions of Syrians, particularly given the barbarity civilians have faced. Meanwhile, the foreign forces on which he relies will continue to wield power.

·         Fighting in the northern part of the country entered a new chaotic phase in late 2019, leading to the war’s highest civilian displacement.

Role of United Nations

·         UN-backed attempts to mediate a conflict-ending political transition in Syria have been affected by the individual interests of P5. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey aligned with the United States against the Assad regime, while Iran joined Russia in backing it. Russia and China have cast multiple vetoes on Syria-related Security Council resolutions, and the threat of veto has deterred or watered down humanitarian and human rights measures, reinforcing a view of the council as toothless.

·         A June 2012 multilateral document known as the Geneva Communiqué called for a Syrian-led political process, beginning with the establishment of a transitional governing body “formed on the basis of mutual consent.” But multiple rounds of peace talks to implement these principles have yielded little.

·         A core issue is Assad regime which does not want to negotiate his own political demise and retains Russia’s and Iran’s backing, while the possibility of Assad staying on in a transition is anathema to the opposition.

Conclusion

The use of brutal force and undemocratic means by Assad regime caused a sense of insecurity among the Syrians and led to sprung up the protests and militia groupings. The need is to establish a more trustworthy and democratic governance system to rule which can be achieved by the Assad’s regime by devolving some of the powers by decentralization process. The involvement of the external forces and heavy dependency of regime over other source has to be reduced to find a more peaceful and steady solution to the problem of Syria.