Al-Itihad, United Arab Emirates, Originally posted in Arabic on February 20
While the Syrian ceasefire talks are still unfolding in Europe, the situation in Syria is taking a severe downturn, with an escalation in violence and bloodshed on the ground.
The Syrian regime already announced that the ceasefire would not apply to its fight against terror, which suggests that Assad will continue his bombing campaign against civilian populations. Similarly, Russia also expressed its own doubts on the ceasefire, and informed the international community that it will continue its raids against the Islamic State.
Meanwhile, Turkish officials asserted that they would not hesitate targeting Kurdish sites in Syria, if any suspicious activity were to take place in proximity to the Turkish border. Even Saudi Arabia and Qatar articulated their intent to intervene in the Syrian war if tensions continue.
What can we make out of all of this?
The answer is sad, but rather simple: each party will continue doing exactly what it has done so far; this time, however, under the guise of an internationally-backed ceasefire agreement. With more and more parties intervening in the Syrian civil war, prospects for an all-out Middle East war become more and more viable.
The Israelis, too, are not at ease with the situation. A former Israeli intelligence official recently claimed that “the division of Syria into smaller statelets seems more and more plausible”. This might not be a wrong estimate on what is likely to happen in our region. With so many parties intervening in the Syrian civil war and expanding their use of force to protect their own sectarian interests, it is becoming less likely that the Syria we used to know would ever return to its old state of being.
Such foreign interventions might seem like small-scale wars today. But in the long run, they can possibly push our region to extreme turmoil, creating divisions within the Arab world that push us to fight one another. – Ghazi al-Ariddi