Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene militarily in Syria last autumn seems to have paid rich dividends — at least from a Russian point of views. Last week’s United Nations Security Council resolution 2254 on the Syrian crisis seems to have taken most of Kremlin’s views into account. The future of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has not been mentioned in the text and the make-up of the Syrian opposition’s delegation to the negotiation with the regime will not be merely decided by the Riyadh group. It will most likely include other opposition figures; some of them very close to Moscow’s views. Priority in Syria will also be given to fighting radical armed groups and not to change the regime of Al Assad.
United States Secretary of State John Kerry, on the other hand, can also claim victory. He got the Russians and their Iranian allies to agree to start a transition process in Syria that would eventually lead to the departure of Al Assad. Right after the adoption of the resolution, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon tried to keep the momentum and called the warring parties to resume peace talks on January 23, 2016.
Yet, despite the very hectic diplomatic parleys to resolve the Syrian crisis, and despite the strong international pressure to end the conflict and place the focus on fighting terrorism — as both Washington and Moscow desire — very few credible analysts expect a near end to the nearly five-year old Syrian conflict.
In fact, all parties to the conflict appear to be stuck in a vicious cycle as they continue to make wrong calculations and wrong judgements since Day One of the crisis. The positions of the regime, the opposition and the regional and international actors with interest in Syria have not in fact changed much since the early days of the Syrian conflict.
The reason for that simply lies in the fact that nobody was really prepared to deal with a problem of such magnitude and fraught with such complications because nobody had expected the Syrian people to ever revolt in the first place. The failure to spot signs of a brewing storm led to disastrous miscalculations with dire consequences.
The regime in Damascus thought that it was immune to revolution. Six weeks before the uprising, Al Assad was lecturing journalists from the Wall Street Journal, on why his country was very unlikely to go through the turmoil that hit Tunisia and Egypt. “Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, the foreign policy of my government enjoys tremendous support amongst Syrians”, he told the two US anchors. That proved to be a fatal mistake, though. And by using deadly force to suppress the uprising, Al Assad was making another mistake — turning peaceful demonstrators into armed militias, fighting not only to bring his regime down, but also to protect their lives, honour and properties. Furthermore, by getting his own sect — the Alawites — to commit heinous crimes against their Sunni fellow countrymen, he prepared the ground for a full-fledged civil war and drew in terrorists from all over the world to take part in a conflict that turned into a region-wide sectarian showdown.
This was Al Assad’s calculations as he faced the highly unexpected revolution.
As for the opposition, their response to the revolution was pathetic, to say the least. Having been absolutely unaware of regional and international politics, it called for foreign military intervention that would never come. The regime’s determination to fight was also underestimated and the US and Russian positions were misjudged. The inability of the opposition to provide a reliable leadership for the revolution, five years after it started, was also intolerable.
Having said all that and at this stage of the conflict, one can hardly be optimistic about the very late efforts by the international community to bring peace back to Syria.
No matter what happens now, the division between Syrians will take a decade or more to heal. Foreign interference has already turned the crisis into a war by proxy wherein, the regime and the opposition find themselves stuck in a very delicate equilibrium, with neither side having the power to remove the other or make peace with him. In addition, the five-year-old conflict has already led to the emergence of warlords and de facto mini-states defined mainly on sectarian lines. As far as the human cost is concerned, there is no practical way to estimate it in terms of immediate human sufferings or the future impact on the next generation. In short, peace or no peace, it is very unlikely that the Syria we once knew will ever exist again.
Dr Marwan Kabalan is a Syrian academic and writer.
