“The Battle for Qusayr is Sidi Bouzid”

Le Monde on use of chemicals in Damascus (top) and Yara Abbas, who was killed near Qusayr

Top Syria news at this writing:

• President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have repeatedly used chemical weapons against rebel fighters in Damascus, according to first-hand accounts in France's Le Monde newspaper.
• EU foreign ministers are set to discuss British and French calls for them to ease sanctions against Syria so weapons can be supplied to the rebels.
• Yara Abbas, a prominent female war reporter for Syria’s state-run Al-Ikhbariyah TV, was killed near Dabaa airbase, a short distance from Qusayr. Rebels held the town of Qusayr in Homs province for a year but came under attack by Damascus government and Lebanese Hezbollah forces last week.

“The Battle for Qusayr is Sidi Bouzid,” according to Dr. Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian-born American scholar who is a senior fellow at the Baker Institute, the United States Institute of Peace and at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

He writes in his think piece today for Saudi Asharq Alawsat:

The battle for Qusayr raging between Hezbollah and Syrian opposition forces is identical to Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunis, which sparked the Arab Spring uprising in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria.

Qusayr is Bouzid in the sense of sparking off a new conflict in the Arab region the framework of which was set by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in his Saturday speech.

I must say his address was – in terms of its bona fide implications – the most important I heard in the two years since Egypt’s late Vice President Omar Suleiman announced President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation.

Nasrallah’s address effectively outlined the nature of the dawning Sunni-Shiite struggle, the opening round of which is the battle for Qusayr that he vowed to win – win against Sunnis, of course.

To think otherwise is to try hiding the sun with one finger.

Fact is we’re into a second wave of the Arab Spring in Qusayr, but in reverse.

Instead of being between oppositions and regimes, the face-off becomes one between Shiites and Sunnis in order to draw the strategic features of the Arab region for years to come.

The Arab region from hereon will be captive to an ideological clash between Iran-led Shiite supremacy and a Sunni axis comprising Turkey and key Gulf Arab states. Egypt, with a massive Sunni majority (of about 77 million), will remain a bystander.

The Syria war between the Assad army and the opposition showed the former to have serious shortcomings. Its combat capabilities are not what Iran and Hezbollah expected as a backup.

Part of the reasons for Hezbollah and Iran’s intervention is to plug loopholes in the Syrian army and restructure it. But more important is the end result of the three-way Iran-Syria-Hezbollah cooperation in terms of military interoperability (or compatibility in computer parlance).

How would this military coordination between Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces affect Geneva-2 and Assad’s exit?

Judging from Nasrallah’s speech, the Shiites have won -- through Iran – a seat at the Geneva-2 negotiating table.

As regards the agenda, the Shiites would be speaking as the regime’s regional sponsor, backed by an international patron represented by Russia’s Sergei Lavrov.

Sadly, after Nasrallah’s discourse, Syrian regime loyalists and opponents will have no say in Geneva-2. The negotiations will be between the two principals: Russia and America.

At the same time, there will be indirect talks between Iran, as the regime’s regional sponsor, and the opposition’s regional patron represented by Turkey and key Gulf Arab states. No wonder the opposition is headquartered in Istanbul, offsetting Iran’s overt political and military defense of the regime.

Post Nasrallah’s speech, the Geneva-2 scenarios are three:

1. A roadmap for a transitional government in Syria
2. A replay of the January 1991 talks between James Baker and Tariq Aziz preceding the war to liberate Kuwait. In that case, the U.S.-European-Arab side would announce the failure of diplomacy and recourse to regime change by force, except there is no appetite for this in the West
3. The West regurgitates what it used to say regarding the Palestine Question: “Look, we are trying. We don’t like what we’re seeing.” The means the West adopts a moral but apolitical position.

Geneva-2 will most probably get nowhere or maybe reach half-solutions, allowing the Shiite-Sunni war’s opening tactical and symbolic battle to continue in Qusayr.

The battle for Qusayr is Bouzid in reverse.

Post-Qusayr, the battle will not be over control of state authority, such as in the Arab Spring states, but over regional hegemony.

The Arab Spring is accordingly moving backwards to a primitive Sunni-Shiite millennium-old conflict.

Iran proxies growl: Hands off Assad!

Clockwise from top: Assad with Iran's Ali Khamenei, Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki and Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah

“The best defense is a good offense” is a popular saying in sports and military combat.

For Iran, the idiom might also prove useful in politics to prop up its embattled strategic ally in Damascus.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – both Shiites and unabashed surrogates of Shiite Iran – are openly warning of regional sectarian conflict if Syria’s quasi-Shiite President Bashar al-Assad is ousted.

In the words of Sarkis Naoum, the primary political analyst of Beirut’s independent daily an-Nahar: “Nasrallah and Maliki are bracing for civil wars.”

In an interview with The Associated Press (AP) released yesterday, Maliki warned a victory for rebels in Syria would create a new extremist haven and destabilize the wider Middle East, sparking Sunni-Shiite wars in Iraq and Lebanon.

The implication of his comments is that Assad’s ouster would empower Syria’s majority Sunni Muslims.

"If the world does not agree to support a peaceful solution through dialogue... then I see no light at the end of the tunnel," Maliki told AP in Baghdad.

"Neither the opposition nor the regime can finish each other off," he continued. "The most dangerous thing in this process is that if the opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan and a sectarian war in Iraq."

The Iraqi leader's comments come as his government confronts growing tensions of its own between the Shiite majority and an increasingly restive Sunni minority nearly a decade after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The war in Syria has sharp sectarian overtones too, with predominantly Sunni rebels fighting a regime dominated by an Alawite minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Nasrallah also warned yesterday against Shiite-Sunni infighting in Lebanon related to the Syria war.

"There are some who are working night and day and pushing the country toward civil and religious strife, and specifically Sunni-Shiite strife," Nasrallah said on the group's Al-Manar TV. If this were to happen, he said, it would "destroy everyone and burn down the entire country."

Nasrallah denied accusations by the Syrian opposition that his men were fighting alongside forces loyal to the Assad regime, and reiterated that some Shiites in villages along the Lebanese-Syrian border, including Hezbollah members, have taken up arms in self-defense against Sunni gunmen. (Nasrallah’s views have been publicly challenged by Hezbollah’s first Secretary-General Subhi al-Tufayli -- see my post yesterday, “The other face of Hezbollah”).

Officials and analysts say there is real anxiety within Hezbollah that if Assad falls, the militant group might lose not only a crucial supply of Iranian weapons via Syria but also political clout inside Lebanon, where it currently reigns supreme.

Editorially, an-Nahar’s Sarkis Naoum writes in his column today:

ON ONE HAND we have the Euro-American approach to the Syrian revolution, which is to starve it of serious military backing in order to keep the regime in place.

Most Western military experts concur the regime could have been brought down last year had the revolutionaries been supplied with antitank and antiaircraft weapons and logistics equipment.

From this perspective, decision-makers in the West do not mind the fighting continuing to (1) destroy united Syria and hearten Israel (2) drain Iran financially, militarily and morally and implicate its Lebanese offshoot Hezbollah in the killing of Syrians (3) ingather as many Arab and non-Arab Jihadists on Syrian soil, where they can be easily monitored, then killed there and elsewhere.

ON ANOTHER HAND is the Iran-led regional alliance fighting full-strength in Syria to avoid losing Iran’s “Jewel in the Crown.”

Maliki, offspring of Iran’s cherished Islamic Dawa Party, warns that a Syrian revolution victory will trigger wars in Iraq and Lebanon. Therein lies a cloaked warning to internal Lebanese and Iraqi sides that (1) they would be made to pay for Assad’s fall (2) the Shiite surge will fight tooth and nail in Lebanon and Iraq to preclude turning back the hands of time.

Maliki means to say (1) Iraq’s Shiites will fight to keep the upper hand in Iraqi politics and security (2) Hezbollah won’t hold back from waging an internal war to prevent putting back the Shiite jinni in the bottle from which it emerged a few years ago.

Maliki’s comments join Nasrallah’s discourse yesterday, when the Hezbollah leader dwelt on the matter of “sedition,” telling his adversaries in Lebanon, “Beware misestimating us.”

In other words, the post-Assad chapter is the subject of serious thinking between Iran’s satellites in Iraq and Lebanon.

They are warning of civil wars here and there if the Iraqis or Lebanese tried to exploit Assad’s fall and capitalize on the rise of a regime hostile to Iran’s regional politics...