Damascus 2013 is more sinister than Baghdad 2003

By Ghassan Charbel*

“What is taking place in Syria,” he said, “is much more alarming than what was taking place in Iraq 10 years ago. The nature of the struggle is different and more complex. The area is more vulnerable than it was prior to the removal of Saddam Hussein. In Baghdad, America was spontaneous and determined. In Damascus, America is listless, hesitant and soft. In Baghdad, Tehran wanted to see Saddam removed and was preparing to reap the benefits of his eclipse. In Damascus, Tehran is so involved in the confrontation, as though it is defending its project and the fringes of its role and its prestige. Region change is dawning from Damascus, not Baghdad.”

He went on, “Arab safety valves are nowhere to be found. Morsi’s Egypt is sinking in unrest. Maliki’s Iraq is drowning again in a crisis of its components. Assad’s Syria is the theater of a brutal battle mixing together revolution, internecine strife, regional faceoff and international emasculation. With such givens, you can’t but expect the worst.”

I was startled by the Arab official’s words and asked him to elaborate further.

He said the most dangerous thing regarding Syria is the foreclosing of retreat. The opposition cannot backtrack after the fall of nearly 100,000 dead and material damages estimated at $100 billion. The regime too cannot do an about face after what it did. The regime also hinges on Bashar al-Assad. That’s why Lakhdar Brahimi returned frustrated from Damascus because he broached the taboo subject.

My interlocutor felt Brahimi’s last trip convinced Assad’s enemies at home and abroad that change was needed in the balance of forces on the ground. This simply means a new round of funding and arming. Damascus is heading to a major showdown liable to produce additional victims, ruin and refugee waves.

He said Russia, which went too far in its support of the Syrian regime, finds it difficult to backpedal.  Besides, the door key is in Tehran, which acts as though the Syrian regime’s fall is a catastrophe, not a loss. That’s why it is putting its full weight in the ongoing conflict. It believes its exit from Syria will perturb its presence in Iraq and Lebanon and dent its image at home. Ties with Assad are the biggest, longest and most costly Iranian investment in the region. Cutting the Syrian stretch of the line running from Tehran to Beirut via Baghdad means Iran losing its mission. And the mission is more important than the bomb that could defend a bigger undertaking.

Hezbollah too cannot go into reverse. Fall of the regime would downgrade Hezbollah from regional to local player and rub out the word “steadfastness” from its vocabulary.

The official drew my attention to a very precarious development. The chief of staff of the Free Syrian Army said the FSA would henceforth deal with Hezbollah fighters in Homs as “mercenaries, not prisoners of war.” Whoever looks at the map would appreciate the implications of such words i.e. that Syrian-Lebanese and Sunni-Shiite relations are likely to be severely tested once the regime falls.

The official said the “more difficult episode” of the Syria crisis is approaching.

If the regime survives in part of Syria, it means moving from regime risks to map risks. Fall of the regime by knockout means an unstable Syria for years. Al-Qaeda sinking root in Syria is very dangerous. All scenarios confirm Damascus is more treacherous than Baghdad was.

The official did not miss asking me about events in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley town of Arsal.

*Ghassan Charbel is the Lebanese editor-in-chief of the Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. The original Arabic wording of his editorial appears in today’s edition of al-Hayat.

Iraq et al: Without electricity -- كهربا ماكو

Sulaymaniyah (top) & Erbil are well-lit but Baghdad is trapped in a maze of snatched cables 

The colloquial Iraqi expression “ماكو for maco,” means “without,” “deprived of” or “lacking.”

Sulaymaniyah and Erbil (also written Arbil or Irbil) are the major cities in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region in northern Iraq.

About 100 miles separate Sulaymaniyah from Erbil, which is the capital of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan.

A trip to the region by Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, must have elicited his think piece, published today in Arabic:

Three men from different backgrounds chose to renew their old friendship in Sulaymaniyah.

The three had paid dearly for dreaming early on of an Iraq free of Saddam Hussein.

One of the threesome had fought for years in the rugged mountains. The other had spent a good part of his life as a subversive. The third got to serve time in an assortment of Baathist jails.

I chanced to attend their cheerful get-together.

After an absence of about two years, I was overawed by Erbil’s evolution.

Erbil is in a race against time, hoping to become another Dubai: high-rise buildings, shopping malls, exceptional vivacity, a rush of entrepreneurs and investors, and homes and streets full of light.

Sulaymaniyah is following suit.

It seems the people of Iraqi Kurdistan are bent on making up for time lost.

There was little in the dinner conversation about the pains of bygone years, but much about progress, reconstruction, investment and stability.

The person sitting next to me at the dining table asked about my impressions.

I said I was pleasantly surprised but passed up critical queries about travelling through the outskirts of Kirkuk.

I was heartened to learn that to forestall fraud and corruption, the Kurdistan Region had a few years back devolved the issue of electric power to the private sector.

The result is the Kurdish Region enjoys 24-hour electricity and is currently selling excess power supply to governorates in the vicinity.

I was overjoyed because, being Lebanese, I suffer from the “electricity complex.”

The Lebanese civil war plunged my native country into decades-long power cuts that have yet to end despite the wastage of billions of dollars and the ceaseless shuffling of crooks and charlatans.

I did not tell my dining companion I was envious, especially that I believe darkness in Lebanon caused by outages is only part of the pitch-black darkness likely to envelop the country.

For some reason, however, envy electrified the conversation at the dinner table around midnight, when the man sitting next to me burst out: “Imagine, my friend! Historically, Iraq was home to the oldest civilizations in the world. It now rests on a sea of proven oil reserves. Its annual budget exceeds $120 billion. It spent tens of billions to restore power supplies. Still, electricity is wanting: كهربا ماكو.

“We brag about Iraq recouping its regional clout, about having balanced relations with the United States and equitable ties with Turkey and Iran, and about our new, strong and promising country. But electricity is wanting: كهربا ماكو.”

He said sharks were gulping down Iraq’s wealth and that corruption is boundless – “worse than in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Baghdad, Basra, Nasiriyah, Najaf and all other cities, he said, swim in a sea of darkness and are sinking under the weight of snatched electricity cables and power generators.

He said power cuts and shortages were part of a tragic overheating of coexistence power lines connecting Iraqis.

He feared a growing preparation for a divorce between Sunnites and Shiites, especially if the emotional separation gripping Syria’s components -- due to the wholesale mass massacre going on in Syria -- culminated in divorce.

The power lines of coexistence in the Middle East region are cut.

True, a popular revolution is sweeping Syria. But also true, scenes of the former Yugoslavia are being replayed there, foreshadowing a long agony.

In Egypt, one rumor about a kidnapping or a mixed marriage is enough to see Muslims and Copts confirm a break in the power lines of coexistence. The lines are also out of service in Bahrain.

In Lebanon, a heated debate over a new electoral law risks splintering its constituent communities.

The cut in the power lines of coexistence make all our cities with (ethnically and religiously) mixed populations resemble Kirkuk.

Depression, darkness and fear permeate our cities.

The power lines of citizenry, of the state electricity authorities and of public institutions are down.

We stand at the threshold of a prolonged blackout, In fact, كهربا ماكو 

Cuba, Baghdad and turning Aleppo to rubble & ash

Aleppo's souks on fire (Photo from BBC News)

Raging battles between Syrian government forces and rebels in the historic districts of central Aleppo have started a major fire that threatens to destroy the city's medieval markets.

Reports say hundreds of shops in the souk, one of the best preserved in the Middle East, have been destroyed.

The labyrinth of narrow alleys lined with shops was once a major tourist attraction, but has been the scene of near-daily firefights and shelling in recent weeks, after rebels who fought their way into the city two months ago pushed toward its center.

Some activists described the overnight blaze as the worst blow yet to a district that helped make the heart of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and commercial hub, a UNESCO world heritage site.

The fire started late Friday amid heavy government shelling and was still burning Saturday, activists told The Associated Press. Video posted online showed a pall of smoke hanging over the city.

One Aleppo-based activist, Ahmad al-Halabi, estimated the fire destroyed a majority of the shops in the district.

"It's a disaster. The fire is threatening to spread to remaining shops," said al-Halabi, speaking to AP from the stricken area by telephone. He claimed Syrian authorities cut the water supply off the city, making it more difficult to put out the fire. He said rebels and civilians were working together to control the fire with a limited number of fire extinguishers.

"It is a very difficult and tragic situation there," he said.

The souks -- a maze of vaulted passageways with shops that sell everything from foods, fabrics, perfumes, spices and artisan souvenirs -- lie beneath Aleppo's towering citadel where activists say regime troops and snipers have taken up positions.

Many of the shops have wooden doors, and clothes, fabrics and leather inside helped spread the fire, activists said.

"It's a big loss and a tragedy that the old city has now been affected," Kishore Rao, director of UNESCO's World Heritage Center, told AP.

In awarding heritage status, UNESCO said Aleppo's "13th-century citadel, 12th-century Great Mosque and various 17th-century madrasas, palaces, caravanserais and hammams all form part of the city's cohesive, unique urban fabric."

The Guardian says Aleppo's souks are not the only Syrian cultural treasures to have fallen victim to the violence following the country's uprising and the crackdown by the Assad regime.

Some of the country's most significant sites, including centuries-old fortresses, have been caught in the crossfire in battles between regime forces and rebels. Others have been turned into military bases. In Homs, where up to 7,000 are estimated to have died, historic mosques and souk areas have also been smashed and artifacts stolen.

In his Aleppo-related column this morning for the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, the peerless Samir Atallah writes of “Cuba, Baghdad and Aleppo.”

In his words, as rephrased from Arabic:

Politics has many rules that are mostly uncivil and unethical. Rules in politics often prioritize interests over humans. The latter are at times sacrificed on account of concern or cowardice.

Cuba was at one point the Soviet Union’s Number One ally -- a Communist island nation (just 90 miles) off U.S. shores. Moscow, for Cuba’s sake, risked a nuclear war that could have devastated the world.

A while later, America started instigating East Europe against the Soviets. As soon as it felt America’s grip tightening around its neck, Moscow counseled Fidel Castro to stop backing Communist movements in Latin America.

Though he fancied painting the whole southern hemisphere red, Castro desisted – not so much to avoid irritating Moscow but for fear of an American-Soviet deal at his expense. Who says Russia won’t close its eyes to an American invasion of Cuba such as America let pass the Soviets’ occupation of Prague?

“Today’s Iraq” resembles the “1960s Cuba.” Today’s Iraq has ideological ties with Iran. It also complies with demands from its American ally, who signed away at the White House the State of Law Coalition to the epitome of democracy, Nouri al-Maliki.

When Barack Obama’s busy schedule prevented him from flying to Baghdad, Maliki hopped over to Washington to receive the freedom keys. And as soon as he returned to Baghdad, Maliki refocused on reconciling his old crush on Iran with new American constraints. That’s why when America told him Iran should stop using Iraqi airspace to fly arms to Syria, he listened to his head, not his heart – or so it seems.

In the Syria war, each has a tie-in. We don’t need to know them all today. We could get to know them after a while or when it is too late. But there is certainly a link-in-the-chain that makes Hilary Clinton talk more like a political analyst from The Times than a secretary of state.

There is another tie-in that makes China stand by Russia against Arab states and their Arab League, Europe and the Muslim-world-minus-Iran.

In politics, no rule prevents the monitoring of developments on the ground to gauge the power balance instead of to take care of victims. That’s why no one sees the Bombing of Aleppo as akin to the Bombing of Dresden.

In 1975, Suleiman Franjieh sent two rusting Hawker Hunter warplanes to bomb Palestinian refugee camps. The outcry in the Arab world saw the fighter-bomber jets hangared again.

Each day, loathsome MIGs take to Syria’s skies to pound cities and turn Aleppo neighborhoods into piles of rubble and ash.

Meantime, the world at the United Nations still has to listen to the speeches of Sergei Lavrov.

Syria: It’s payback time for Iran

Ahmadinejad with Assad and Nasrallah in Damascus and Maliki in Baghdad

Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, penned this op-ed in Arabic

Iran bagged several gold medals without participating in any games throughout the past decade.

It won its first gold after the 9/11 attacks that triggered Great Satan’s war on al-Qaeda.

It clinched its second when U.S. forces rooted out the Taliban who made no secret of their hostility to the Iranian regime.

Iran won its third when U.S. forces brought down the regime of its nemesis, Saddam Hussein, in Iraq.

It secured its fourth gold medal by way of the 2006 Lebanon War.

The great Iranian program’s future looked rosy. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Baghdad (in 2008), he was fully confident that U.S. troops there were looking for an opportunity to leave. (Two years later) he went to Damascus, where posters of him with Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Nasrallah consolidated the rejectionist crescent. He seized the occasion of his (October 2010) visit to Beirut and South Lebanon to put the region and the world on notice that his country’s missiles were beached on Mediterranean shores.

Iran won the gold medals and stepped up its quest for the ultimate prize: the bomb, or the ability to produce it and thus threaten the security of oil routes and Israel at the same time.

On the outbreak of the Arab Spring, Iran tried claiming parenthood. It was elated by the downfall of the West’s friends. But when the Arab Spring enveloped Syria, it stumbled into a ruinous trap.

Iran cannot let go of its strong and close alliance with the Syrian regime. Remaining neutral is implausible and keeping out is impossible.

Syria is not only a corridor to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is much more than that. The relationship with Syria is the most important triumph of the 1979 Khomeini revolution. Iran’s presence in Damascus means its presence in Beirut and South Lebanon, in the Arab-Israeli dispute and in the Palestinian issue. Iran’s presence in Damascus also preempts any serious attempt to hem in the Iranian surge across the region.

Iran cannot accept losing Syria. But it can’t salvage the Syrian regime either. The regime is severely damaged at the core. The (Baath) party is on life support. The (Syrian) army’s image is badly blemished.

FSA guarding Iranians abducted Saturday in Damascus 

The Syria crisis lured Iran into a blatant and horrific clash with Syria and the region’s majority. The clash has some sectarian overtones as evidenced by the repeated abduction of Iranians in Syria. The isolation gripping the Syrian regime is afflicting Iran as well, notwithstanding Russia’s objections.

Iran is roasting on the Syrian fire. It can’t opt out or distance itself. Nor can it change the course of events. It is hurting because of developments in Syria and the sanctions. Not since the start of its (1980-1988) war with Iraq did it face such difficult circumstances.

Escaping forward from the Syria crisis by initiating armed hostilities in South Lebanon or instigating a major crisis in the Gulf seems fraught with dangers.

Sending volunteers to Syria would mean touching off a sectarian regional war.

Gambling on keeping hold of a slice of Syria would open the way to a reconfiguration of maps. That would open the doors of hell and require the consent of Vladimir Putin, who is exploiting the Syrians’ blood to reinforce his country’s status.

Iran is twisting and turning on the Syrian fire.

It is test firing new versions of missiles much as an anxious boxer tries reminding the world of his muscles.

The time of collecting gold medals has lapsed.

The time of losing out has dawned.

Is Iraq preparing to dump Assad?

Massoud Barzani (top) and Hoshyar Zebari

Has Iraq decided to turn its back on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad?

The $64,000 Question came hot on the heels of Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari’s address at the opening of the Syrian opposition groups’ conference in Cairo earlier this week.

Zebari, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the Arab League Summit, told the Cairo meeting the Syrian opposition “is trying to get rid of a totalitarian regime disregarding the (Syrian) people’s well-being.”

He also said, “We know from our experience in Iraq what it means to stand up to oppressive regimes.”

Zebari then called for a peaceful transition of power in Syria, pledging to help in that endeavor "so that representatives of the Syrian people take over their political process and build their modern Syrian state."

Zebari’s utterances suggest Iraq is perhaps pondering what lies ahead across its border, says senior diplomatic correspondent and political analyst Raghida Dergham today in her weekly think piece for the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat.

Writing about an alleged “international understanding on the exit of Assad and his kinsfolk in exchange for a regime reprieve,” she quotes an unnamed Iraqi official as saying off the record: “We concluded in light of our international contacts and first hand observations that developments on the ground are not going in the regime’s favor. Whole (Syrian) governorates are no more under central control. The government is one of shabiha and the military. Russia is having a dialogue with the opposition. Even Iran is opening channels for dialogue with the opposition. All this prompted us to take clearer and more assertive stands.”

A more comprehensive analysis of Iraq’s Syria reset comes from Syrian Kurdish analyst Farouk Hajji Mustafa.

“In truth,” he also writes for al-Hayat, “the reasons for the shift in Iraq’s diplomatic discourse can only be explained by two factors”:

1.    Multiple analyses have hinted at an understanding between Russia and the United States on the way to manage change in Syria. According to these analyses, “change would be conditional on a balance being struck between the influences of Saudi Arabia and Iran in the region.” The implication is that “Iran would lose its supremacy in Lebanon and Iraq in return for keeping the Syrian regime in place – manifestly at least – until year’s end 2014. This drove the Iraqis to change their tack and speak accordingly.”

2.  The Iraqi leaders’ internecine power struggle is the other explanation for Baghdad’s new discourse supportive of the Syrian opposition. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki could be telling Iran he would cross the aisle if it let him down. Alternatively, “the shift could be traced back to Massoud Barzani,” head of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq. In other words, “the new discourse could be expressing the view of the government in Erbil, not Baghdad.” Barzani has repeatedly warned Maliki he can change the power balance in Baghdad if it didn’t stop canoodling with Damascus. The KRG leader, in other words, has put Maliki on notice that he was putting his alliance with the Kurds at risk.

Hajji Mustafa says in either case the question remains: “Will Iraq keep up its new Syria pitch?”