Syrian Kurds declare transitional administration

The PYD's Saleh Muslim and a map showing "Rojava" along Syria's border with Turkay

Syrian Kurds yesterday declared an interim administration in northeastern parts of the country (Rojava), further solidifying their geographic and political presence after driving out radical Islamist rebels. 

Long oppressed under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, Kurds view the Syria war as an opportunity to gain more autonomy -- like their ethnic kin in neighboring Iraq. 

Control over Syria's northeast, where Kurds predominate, had in recent months swung back and forth between them and mainly Arab Islamist rebels, who strongly oppose what they suspect are Kurdish plans to secede.

But a Kurdish militia prevailed earlier this month, and at a meeting held in the Syrian city of Qamishli yesterday, a committee of Kurdish and other groups said it was now time to set up an administrative body to run the region. 

"In light of the current circumstances which Syria is going through, and in order to fill an administrative vacuum... we see it as an utmost necessity to reach a transitional, pluralistic, democratic administration," said a statement sent to Reuters.

The statement said they were committed to the unity of Syria and asked world powers and neighboring countries to back the new administration, which they said had won the support of different political groups and minorities in the area.

The dominant force on the ground in Syria's Kurdish areas is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has a well-trained militia and is affiliated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The PYD's growing clout has also dismayed some fellow Kurds, who accuse it of being in league with Assad and seeking to replace his authoritarian one-party rule with its own.

PYD representative Mohammed Reso said some Syrian Kurdish parties had refused to sign up to the plan.

Davutoglu

In his first remarks after the declaration of the interim administration, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu accused the PYD of "not keeping its promise."

"We told them to avoid a de facto administration declaration that could divide Syria. We told them to put a distance between themselves and the [al-Assad] regime," Davutoglu said during a live interview on private broadcaster NTV on Tuesday. 

He criticized the Kurdish group for adopting an "ambivalent" posture. "The most serious mistake that the PYD is making is to put under pressure on the other Kurdish opposition groups in [their] controlled areas. We receive a lot of complaints from Kurds [in northern Syria], and we hope they will change this attitude," Davutoglu added.

PYD leader Saleh Muslim had visited Turkey twice in a brief period in July and August as the open conflict between Kurdish militia groups and jihadist rebels mounted, causing a refugee outflow from Rojava. He reportedly discussed with Turkish officials PYD's plans of forming an autonomous administration that triggered concerns in Ankara.

Barzani

The Turkish government and Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have adopted a similar attitude on the situation in northern Syria. Both oppose the PYD's creation of a politically autonomous entity in the region.

KRG leader Massoud Barzani is troubled by the disputes among Kurds, particularly between the PYD and other Kurdish parties, over the areas in Syria's north.

The Turkish government and Barzani also backed the Syrian Kurdish National Council (KNC), a group that agreed to join the main Syrian opposition body, the Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.

“The KNC is close to Barzani. Barzani wanted to impose his policies in Rojava and Turkey wanted to use Barzani to establish an alternative group to the PYD, which was the KNC. They tried hard, but failed. The KNC is not stronger than the PYD,” Iso said.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to meet Barzani in Diyarbakir at the weekend.

According to Turkish media sources, Erdogan will visit Diyarbakir, a predominantly Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey on Saturday, when he will be meeting the Iraqi Kurdistan president.

A source from Turkish Channel Show TV said renowned Kurdish singer Shivan Perwer will be back to Diyarbakir from self-exile in Germany to meet Barzani and Erdogan.

Relations between Iraq’s Kurdistan Region and Turkey have been improving steadily of late.

The volume of trade between Iraq and Turkey is about $12 billion, with three quarters of it being between Ankara and the Kurdistan Region.

Iran

Writing for the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat today, former editor-in-chief Tariq Alhomayed quotes a Reuters dispatch yesterday as saying the Kurds’ military gains in Syria is posing a dilemma for regional powers.

Syrian Kurds view Syria’s civil war as an opportunity to gain the kind of autonomy enjoyed by their ethnic kin in neighboring Iraq.

The seriousness of the report, says Alhomayed, is that their offensive has stirred mixed feelings, globally, regionally and locally, even among some fellow Kurds, who say the Kurdish fighters have drifted into an Iran-led regional axis supportive of Assad, something they deny.

To Assad and his Shiite allies, their gains mean more territory out of Sunni rebel hands two and a half years into a revolt against his rule.

Islamist rebels -- particularly the Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that have been imposing their will across rebel-held territory -- argue that their defeat says more about who was helping their foes than the strength of the Kurdish forces themselves. They said help from Assad's forces and Shiite-led Iraq was the reason for Kurdish gains.

The Iraqi government strongly denies supporting any faction in Syria, including Kurds.

A closer reading of this and other reports shows the Kurds’ military gains in Syria are posing a bigger dilemma for Syrian Kurds than for regional powers.

A senior Iraqi politician told Reuters Shiite powerhouse Iran, Assad's main regional ally, was also actively backing the PYD and emboldening the PKK, with which it is closely aligned.

"Iran supports these groups to guarantee having a powerful group in Syria in case things go out of control," he said, adding that Tehran was creating a network of allies from minority groups across the country to bolster their interests and to create alternative partners should Assad fall.

The Iraqi politician said Baghdad's Shiite government was supporting the Kurds to weaken cross-border ties among Sunnis.

"(They) may help them in cooperation with Iran to create an autonomous Kurdish region ... to establish a buffer zone between Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis."

This of course means the Kurds will have hostile and unbalanced relations with a predominantly Sunni region.

Also, can Syria’s Kurds genuinely withstand Turkey’s ire and eventually that of Tehran, which is home to eight million Iranian Kurds?

Syrian Kurds are set to realize that you don’t build nation-states by simply having minorities go their separate ways.

Turkey takes the side of Syria's Kurds

Yesterday's Erdogan-Barzani meeting and the title of Michael Weiss' piece

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has now played his “Kurdish card” -- not to win Syria back, but mire Turkey and hopefully walk away with an Alawite state.

This explains why he mobilized his Qaeda-linked surrogates to take control of Kurdish areas in the north of Syria on the border with Turkey.

In the face of the Syrian uprising, Assad forces originally pulled out of those areas in July and August 2012, hoping the vacuum would be filled by Turkey’s nemesis at the time, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The March 2013 peace deal between Turkey and the PKK spoiled Assad’s plan.

His fallback in recent weeks on his Qaeda-linked proxies – Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – is to keep the plan alive.

In context, I can’t think of a better eye-opener than yesterday’s commentary by Michael Weiss fittingly titled “Assad’s no enemy of al-Qaeda.” You can read it here.

Overnight, news broke of jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda -- read Assad -- having taken hostage around 200 Kurdish civilians after violent clashes with Kurdish fighters in two villages of northeastern Syria.

“Fighters of Jabhat al-Nusra and the ISIL have seized control of Tall Aren village in Aleppo province and are laying siege to another village nearby, Tall Hassel,” said the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Clashes between jihadists and Kurdish fighters have raged for some two weeks, after jihadists were expelled from the key town of Ras al-Ayn on the Turkish border.

The fighting claimed a prominent casualty on Tuesday, as a car bomb planted by Jihadists killed Kurdish leader Isa Huso, a leading member of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), a pro-PKK organization of Syrian Kurds and the most powerful faction of the ethnic group in the region (see yesterday’s post).

Politically, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met yesterday with Nachervan Barzani, prime minister of Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government and nephew of KRG President Massoud Barzani.

The two-hour meeting at the Prime Ministry in Ankara was closed to the press.

The talks are believed to have focused on bilateral relations, the PYD’s agenda in Syria and the upcoming three-day Kurdish National Conference.

The latter opens in Erbil on August 19 with 500 Kurdish delegates attending, mostly from Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran.

Before Barzani's visit, PYD co-chair Salih Muslim, a graduate of Istanbul Technical University in the late 1970s, was able -- on Turkey’s invitation -- to fly from Erbil to Istanbul after 35 years.

Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu told reporters after meeting with Muslim he acknowledged Syrian Kurds’ need to establish a “civilian administration” in their areas, just as other opposition groups have. He warned such provisional measures were possible provided the administration does not gain “permanent status.”

The understanding is that such a provisional local administration would include other ethnic groups such as Christians, Turkmen and non-Kurds who live in the Kurdish-majority areas of northeastern Syria.

Turkish columnist Sedat Ergin, writing for Hurriyet daily, says Turkey’s dilemma of late was to choose one of two options that would serves it interests best: Control of Syria’s Kurdish areas by the PYD or by the Qaeda-linked groups?

“We understand from Muslim’s interview with Ali Çelebi for Özgür Gündem daily,” writes Ergin, “that the Justice and Development (AKP) government has gone for the first option.

“…This being the case, instead of approaching the Syrian Kurds with animosity, building a permanent friendship with them starting today appears to be a wiser, more realistic policy. The path to this passes along a road that approaches them with respect, knows them and talks to them as counterparts.

“From this aspect, Muslim’s visit has been a positive step in the sense that a dialogue has been launched between Turkey and Syrian Kurds; also, it complements the peace process launched with the aim of solving the Kurdish issue domestically.”

Separately, Turkey has also stepped up economic relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq.

The KRG is now pushing ahead with plans to build an oil pipeline between Turkey and northern Iraq despite objections from Baghdad and the United States.

The Middle East is falling apart at the seams

Painting by Syrian artist Wissam Al Jazairy

Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of al-Hayat newspaper, penned this think piece in Arabic for today’s edition

Times are hard for the Middle East. It has to find a recipe for coexistence, drawing in the Muslims, Jews and Christians, which is not easy.

It has to search for a coexistence formula binding the Turks, Persians, Kurds, Arabs and others and a coexistence blueprint joining ethnicities, nationalities, religions and sects. This is not simple either.

Long lulls are deceptive. They feign that old conflicts have been assigned to the history books. This is not true -- any sudden twist is liable to rekindle old feuds streaming with blood.

Nation-states that were configured in the aftermath of World War One either curbed these conflicts or gave them other names. Once these nation-states’ repressive machines crack, the old demons resurface.

We’re clearly on the way to a ghastly, rather than a new, Middle East – one where the coexistence chapter drawing together its various components ends, heralding the reconfiguration of nation-states and maps.

We are unmistakably facing something more cataclysmic than the fall of the Berlin Wall or the breakup of Yugoslavia.

We are facing a Nakba worse than the 1948 Nakba of the Palestinian people, one marking the demise of coexistence.

We are into violent cross-border designs and aspirations tackling maps like an inmate treats his prison walls.

Don’t accuse me of being a prophet of doom. The pointers are everywhere in the print and audiovisual media, supported by rivers of corpses and declarations promising endless wars.

A suicide attacked a Husseiniya (Shiite house of worship) in Kirkuk, and the response was a spectacular offensive against Sunni mosques in or near Baghdad.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki blamed remnants of the “Baath” and “sectarian hatred.” His adversaries accused him of being a “sectarian bigot.”

Protesters in al-Anbar province treat the Iraqi army as a “Shiite militia” or the cover for one.

The Sunnite Iraqi says he won’t accept to be a second-class citizen, which is what the Shiite Iraqi was saying in decades past.

We’ve moved from the Arab-Kurd crisis to a Sunni-Shiite-Arab-Kurd predicament. It’s as if the whole Middle East has turned into the knotty problem of the disputed Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

Both sides in the Syria war are keen to deny its sectarian character. One side paints it as a war on inflowing terrorists and the opposite side depicts it as a revolt against a dictatorship.

So how do we explain the presence of Chechen fighters in Idlib, the arrival of Libyans to support their Sunni brethren or a funeral for a young Iraqi in Basra killed defending the Shiite shrine of Sayyeda Zeinab in Damascus?

Also, how do we explain the funeral for a young Sunni in the North Lebanese port city of Tripoli killed trying to infiltrate into Syria and the funeral for a Hezbollah member felled while on “jihadist duties” there?

Why does the Sunni Lebanese support the Syrian revolution and the Shiite Lebanese hinder it?

Why didn’t Alawites flee before rebels entered their villages or Sunnis take to their heels before government and allied forces stormed their townships?

Do the slogans of “objection” and “resistance” justify the military involvement of Iran and its allies in the Syria war? The counter-meddlers could be asked the same question.

What you hear in Lebanon, which used to be a model of and a proving ground for coexistence, is worrisome and unnerving.

Yesterday, I heard a prominent member of Gen. Michel Aoun’s “Free Patriotic Movement” accuse other Christians of treason. His charge sheet says the other Christians agreed to an electoral law allowing Muslims to have a weighty say in the election of 10 Christian legislators out of the 64 allotted to Christians in parliament.

A retreat to self-made islands won’t solve either Lebanon’s problems or the problem of its minorities. The biggest danger for Lebanon now is the growing number of risk-takers walking on thin ice.

Clearly, we are toughing out the eclipse of coexistence.

Our nation-states, our societies and our armies are breaking up.

The inviolability of international borders has evaporated. We’re in the midst of a regional civil war caused by a stream of cross-border projects. I am afraid we’re on the way to a period awash with statelets, militias, cemeteries and “cleansed regions.”

Barzani and the Middle East’s new Kurdish player

Inset is Massoud Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan

My paraphrasing of today's leader comment penned in Arabic by Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of al-Hayat:

A new player has entered the terrible Middle East field, where regimes, governments, maps and minorities are either crumbling or shaking like a leaf.

That’s the Kurdish player.

In the last century, Kurds were roughed up in the game of nations, which dispersed them, independently of their will, as minorities in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Geography sentenced this people without the right to appeal, and history endorsed the ruling.

Today, we’re talking of nearly 25 million Kurds.

A decade ago many believed Kurds were destined to simply pass on story lines about their sufferings in rugged mountains and about scenes of Halabja and the Anfal Campaign.

Many also believed Kurds would forcibly swallow unjust Turkization and Arabization drives.

Denial of Kurdish rights was a fixed but tacit government policy clause in all four countries despite their claims to the contrary.

Suddenly, the crazy American adventure of invading Iraq brought this dirty game to a close.

The invasion would not have taken place had the Kurdish-Shiite alliance not made a pitch for toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime by any means and in whatever way possible.

That’s how the Shiites pocketed Baghdad and the Kurds bagged Iraqi Kurdistan under the federal constitutional republic of Iraq.

The Kurds have now had a decade of stability for the first time in their blood-soaked history.

They’re living under their own flag, though they’ve not ditched Iraq’s.

They teach their children in their native tongue and sing their ballads in their squares. They are building roads and setting up universities. They are also attracting investors and tourists.

The past decade was full of scenes as well.

Massoud Mustafa Barzani is the elected president of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, managing it with the competence of a statesman after having led the Peshmerga with the astuteness of a freedom fighter-cum-politician.

Jalal Talabani sits in Saddam Hussein’s office as the president of Iraq.

Hoshyar Zebari shepherds Iraqi diplomacy, trying to uphold the interests of Iraq while walking a tightrope between America’s shadow and Iran’s clout.

Another scene is no less important.

The plane of someone named Recep Tayyip Erdogan landed in Erbil to open its international airport.

In a historic message, the visitor said the day when Kurdish rights were ignored is gone forever. Barzani struggled to conceal his delight, choosing instead to build on the phrase.

I asked Massoud Barzani about Erdogan’s Turkey and the Kurds of Abdullah Ocalan being on the same page now.

He acknowledged in his answer that he encouraged the two sides to bury the hatchet and seek a political solution.

He said success of the Turkey-PKK deal would be “a historic event inducing a sea change in the region.”

He said the two sides showed a sense of realism by kicking off implementation of the agreement to end a conflict that drained Kurds and Turks correspondingly.

I also asked Barzani if stability and prosperity in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region could incite Kurds in neighboring countries to use it as a template.

He replied: There is absolutely no need to clone the Kurdistan Region’s experience. There are circumstances, particularities, power balances and equilibriums. Chronic injustice should not stir up rashness.

“We’re not seeking to tear up maps and redraw borders. We don’t want clashes. We want to live in peace with the Turks, Arabs and Persians. We want to be a stability-and-prosperity factor.

“Surely, however, the times of usurped rights, exclusion and marginalization are defunct. Non-recognition of the ‘Other’ is a destructive culture.”

Barzani felt aggrieved by the mass killings and horrendous destruction in Syria, “which is on our doorstep.” He feared a prolonged split that would create an environment for extremists.

He precluded any role by Iraqi Kurdistan in arming Syria’s Kurds. He also hoped democracy and respect of all constituents would prevail in neighborly Syria.

Barzani refused to “personalize” his current dispute with Nouri al-Maliki, recognizing at the same time that links with Baghdad’s prevailing course of action were “nearing the point of no return.”

He stressed (Iraq’s) Kurds are not asking for more than a respect of the constitution and agreements signed, indicating at the same time that Baghdad’s course of action provoked a deep crisis with Iraq’s Arab Sunni component as well.

Turkey chose a new approach to deal with its Kurds.  Once the guns fall silent in Syria, its Kurdish component will be seated at the reconciliation table. Watching and waiting for their appointment will be Iran’s Kurds.

The triumph of Iraqi Kurdistan has helped change the way the ball bounces.

I asked Barzani, “What do the children of Peshmerga fighters yearn for?”

He grinned and replied, “They want computers, technologies, universities, job opportunities and hospitals. But, in this intricate Middle East, you have to remain on your guard. You must be prepared for war to ward it off.”

I asked, “Why do Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Nouri al-Maliki, Bashar al-Assad and Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemingly lack an esprit de corps?”

Barzani smiled again, saying only, “We want to turn borders into prospects to cooperate, not clash. We have to bank on human dignity, the economy and education. There’s no turning back.”

Pro-Iran Maliki and Syria war risk fracturing Iraq

Iraqi political analyst Ahmad al-Sharifi and a map showing Iraq's provinces  

Iraqi Premier Nouri al-Maliki’s drive to sideline the country’s Arab Sunnites, his harassment of ethnic Kurds in autonomous Kurdistan, his subservience to Iran and his support of the Syrian regime risk fragmenting Iraq and embroiling Jordan.

The arrest of bodyguards assigned to Finance Minister Rafei al-Essawi, one of Iraq’s most prominent Sunnite politicians, while searching his home and offices on December 20, sparked week-long mass protests in western Iraq's Sunnite province.

The protests in the predominantly Sunnite provinces of Anbar and Salahuddin have blocked the country’s highway to neighboring Syria and Jordan.

Demonstrators torched pictures of Maliki and the Iranian flag and flown the banner of the Free Syrian Army.

“Why doesn't Maliki go after criminals and outlaws among the Shiites who sit in parliament and government, and are well-known for their atrocities over the years?

“The answer is clear. He wants to shut the mouths that criticize him to turn this country into a pure Shiite one affiliated to Iran,” a protester charged.

Essawi said Maliki was deliberately seeking to stoke sectarian strife between Sunnites and Shiites by targeting Sunnite national figures.

The incident was essentially a replay of a similar crackdown in December 2011 targeting Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, also a leading Sunnite politician.

Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government charged Hashemi with running death squads. He has been sentenced to death multiple times in absentia.

Iraq has an estimated population of 31 million, roughly including 15 million Shiites, nine million Sunnites and five million ethnic Kurds.

The move against Essawi also came amid growing tensions between the Maliki government and Kurdistan, which have seen Iraqi troops and the Kurdish Peshmerga militia facing off against each other in disputed territory in the autonomous Kurdistan region north of the country.

Ahmad al-Moussawi Makki reporting today for the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar under the title, “The Anbar war: Gateway to partition,” suggests the most alarming aspect of the ongoing Sunnite protests are the calls for regional autonomy in Anbar and other provinces in the northwest where the Sunnites are in majority – a status similar to that of the Kurds in autonomous Kurdistan.

Makki says some of the protesters are even clamoring for setting up the “State of Western Iraq.”

He quotes Iraq’s respected political strategy analyst Ahmad al-Sharifi as telling him: “These sit-ins and demonstrations are meant to pave the way for Iraq’s partition. It’s an objective shared by many Iraqi political leaders. You can tell by the flags raised by demonstrators – the flags of the Iraqi Free Army and the Kurdistan region. All this heralds the so-called New Middle East.”

Sharifi says Maliki’s whistle-stop visit earlier this to Amman, where he offered to prop up the cash-strapped Jordanian economy, was aimed at preempting the empowerment of Islamist forces in the Hashemite Kingdom “because the Islamists’ advent to power in Jordan would lay the cornerstone for declaring the State of Western Iraq.”

Sharifi adds, “In addition to a vast oil field discovery, an enormous field containing as much as 53 trillion cubic feet of natural gas was found in western Iraq lately.”

The finds, together with the intractable problems between Baghdad and Kurdistan, are the harbingers of Iraq’s dismemberment – “perhaps six months from now,” according to Sharifi.

Syria

Iraq’s fragile power-sharing government has been lurching from crisis to crisis. Should today's protests in Anbar provide a mass show of force, it may add to concerns that Syria’s increasingly sectarian war, where majority Sunnites are battling a quasi-Shiite ruler backed by Iran, will push Iraq back to the Sunnite-Shiite butchery of 2005-07.

When fugitive Vice President Hashemi was asked in an interview with Thursday’s pan-Arab daily al-Hayat if he had evidence Maliki supports President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime, he said:

“There is conclusive evidence. Maliki acknowledged in a statement weeks ago that the Iraqi government is no longer able to inspect Iranian planes [overflying Iraq] after the pledges he made to the Arab League and the United Nations.

“Since he first made the pledge to the U.S. administration, I said this man is lying and would only inspect aircraft carrying medicine and medical equipment. This happened on two occasions. He inspected a plane coming from Iran and a second one coming from Syria, after it unloaded its full cargo of militias, explosives and other weapons. He called it a search.

“The media is focusing on aviation, but the main problem is land corridors. According to my information, there are endless means of overland transportation, from Zurbatiyah on the Iraq-Iran border to the al-Waleed port of entry [between Syria and Iraq]. There is a stream of civilian convoys with tinted windows heading from Iran towards Syria... These convoys don’t stop at checkpoints, and no one knows what they are carrying. I think this is part of the scenario to support the Syrian regime and increase the suffering of the Syrian people, regretfully.”

Hashemi added, “When the reference of the officials in Maliki’s sectarian regime is Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, what do you expect…?

“I suspect the war machine killing the Syrian people is run by Iran.”

“Damascus July 18 bomber holed up in embassy”

The man who planted the bomb at the headquarters of the National Security Bureau (NSB) in Damascus on July 18 remains holed up in an embassy in the Syrian capital. His accomplice, who is privy to all details of the bombing, is in custody.

Isaiah, from the Ultimate Bible Picture Collection

The news is revealed today by Syria’s leading Lebanese media frontman Jean Aziz, writing for Syria’s Beirut mouthpiece daily al-Akhbar.

Aziz says the bomber was identified “within two hours of the blast.” CCTV cameras at and around NSB headquarters showed clearly how he carried out the operation. “Information gathered also showed a getaway car drive him immediately to one of two adjacent embassies in Damascus, one foreign and the other regional.”

Aziz suggests the July 18 bomb attack, which killed President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law and Deputy Defense Minister Asef Shawkat, Defense Minister Gen. Daoud Rajha, former Defense Minister Hassan Turkomani and NSB chief Hisham Ikhtiar, was meant to trigger a drawn-out “coup operation that was planned meticulously and professionally.”

The first precursor of the plot, according to Aziz, was Gen. Manaf Tlass’ defection “on Monday, July 2, in the hope he would be given a role after the coup.”

Having failed to cripple the regime’s “chain of command and control,” says Aziz, the putschists fell back on their “Plan B” – namely, to blitz Aleppo “in the hope of forcing a Libyan scenario” in Syria.

Aziz, a Lebanese socio-political activist, journalist, university professor and talk show host, concludes:

“One thing is certain about the battle for Aleppo -- its outcome will only come to light after a relatively long while.

“Oppositionists are optimistic. They draw strength from the Turkish buildup and their supply routes from there. They are also cheered by the inflow of Jihadists.

“Loyalists are bullish about Iran’s stern warning to Ankara to keep out (of the fray) and a Kurdish role marginalizing Massoud Barzani.

“Whose optimism is well-founded?

“It’s impossible to tell.

“What’s obvious is that the battle for Aleppo would belie Isaiah’s prophecy, ‘Behold, Damascus will cease to be a city and will become a heap of ruins...’”

House of Many Mansions in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq

Add caption

The May 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France, with the ascent of Russia divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian Peninsula – essentially Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan – into future British and French control or influence.

Kamal Salibi, an eminent Lebanese scholar, professor and prolific writer who passed away last September, was regarded as one of the foremost historians of the Middle East. He was a lifetime bachelor who devoted his life to books. His many works include A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (1988).

Wind forward to today’s edition of the Beirut daily as-Safir and the editorial of its publisher and founder Talal Salman titled: “A House of Many Mansions in All the Sykes-Picot (presumed) States.”

The late Kamal Salibi (Photo from The Independent)

Salman writes:

Historian Kamal Salibi was not expressing a personal opinion on Lebanon’s political entity, its confessional makeup or the international backdrops of power struggles over the region when he wrote his book “A House of Many Mansions.”

In effect, he was forewarning of a risk we come up against today. The novelty is that Salibi’s metaphor is now apt to envelop the whole Arab Mashreq and may yet engulf other parts of the Arab Maghreb.

Where Lebanon is concerned, its current grim political, economic and security realities surpass anything the brilliant Salibi could have imagined.

Lebanon now is an archipelago of pseudo-islands akin to confessional and sectarian mini-states portioning out the small country’s territory and institutions. Each has carved up a de facto entity.

The political, judicial and security decisions of the central “state” are subject to these entities’ whims. The “state” would withdraw or deploy the army at the request of this or that entity after tough negotiations with its opposite.

Court rulings would be frozen, doctored or amended and the while judiciary paralyzed pending a “consensual” agreement within one sect or among several.

The “state” does not have a single all-inclusive national institution anymore. Each executive political, economic or security apparatus of government has its counterpart. When an opposite number is not found, it is created.

International highways in Lebanon are not always passable. They have fixed, at time movable, “border” crossings. The airport is always open for traffic but not so the airport road, which has its guards and controls.

The highway to North Lebanon has its crossings. Pre-Tripoli is one thing, inside Tripoli is another and past Tripoli is a totally different ballgame.

The highway to South Lebanon has a single crossing – in Sidon. A second is looming.

The highway to the Bekaa has a multitude of crossings that open or close on demand. The army is not sent to secure them before acceding to demands that cancel its duty and role.

Happenings outside the Lebanese “entity” – chiefly in Syria now, in Iraq before and maybe in Jordan later – evoke some memories of Sykes-Picot.

Does the earthquake that ravaged Syria’s regime and opposition fall in Lebanon’s fault zone or herald a post-Saddam Iraq?

Much as Iraq, which is no more “whole” after the evacuation of U.S. troops, it is unlikely Syria would emerge from its bloody predicament as a unified state entity after the breaking into pieces of the Syrian people’s unity.

Iraq now is a hodgepodge of regions and entities. Its Kurds chose self-rule and distanced themselves from the intra-Arab Sunnite-Shiite faceoff.

In Syria, the bloody and open-ended clash between the regime and its opponents has provoked calls – previously suppressed – for a sectarian redress. At the same time, Kurds and Turkmen are reminding of their ethnic rights.

In Iraq, there are borders and armed protection of boundaries between ethnic minorities.

The struggle in Syria could follow the same pattern. There are already signs showing in the north and perhaps the east.

There’s “A House of Many Mansions” in each of the Sykes-Picot states!