Saturday’s truce might be best option for Western governments
At midnight on Friday, Damascus time, a cessation of hostilities will come into effect across parts of Syria after nearly five years of constant warfare. The regime of Bashar Al-Assad and the Higher Negotiation Committee, the main Syrian opposition group, have agreed in principle to terms negotiated by Russia and the United States (US).
Yet there are already voices suggesting that the lull in violence will be short-lived.
The deal does not include the Islamic State (ISIS) or Al-Nusra, Al-Qa’ida’s affiliate in Syria and an ally to many other opposition groups. The government has stated it will continue to attack both of these factions, and other ‘terrorist’ groups, leading to fears that this will be used as an excuse to continue fighting. To add to this uncertainty, Kurdish groups in the north of the country have been lukewarm at best towards the proposed truce.
For Western governments there is no other viable option of bringing the bloodshed to an end, so they might as well place their faith in the shaky peace deal.
The United States (US) and its European allies searched for a solution to the crisis. One notion floated was to increase support for Kurdish militias, forces proven in combat against the Islamic State (ISIS). In the north of Syria a stretch of territory along the Turkish border is controlled by the People’s Protection Units (YPG), while in neighboring northern Iraq a semi-autonomous Kurdish region is already functioning. Increased support for these groups and their proto-state could go some way towards stabilizing the conflict and defeating ISIS, they argued.
Not so, Angelique Lecorps, a senior consultant with Strategic Risk Advisory G4S Risk Consulting, told The Media Line. “If Kurdistan gets its independence, you can be sure that Kurdish minorities in (neighboring) countries will want the same… this would mean increased problems in the region,” Lecorps said. Turkey has made its opposition to such a scenario abundantly clear and has used the excuse of striking at ISIS to hit Kurdish military units.
Any attempt to create a Kurdish state would be further complicated by trade and economic difficulties given that the new nation would be landlocked. With few trade partners and at a time when oil exports would bring in limited income, Erbil [the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan] would struggle to support itself, Lecorps argued.
“Their desire is to get autonomy and the mess in Syria creates good military and political circumstances (to do so)… but there are fundamental weaknesses in their position,” Dr Reuven Erlich, head of the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, Israel, told The Media Line. Straddling a border between four regional powers – Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria – may simply prove too difficult a hurdle to overcome, he suggested.
Knock-on effects that a breakaway state would inevitably cause are also likely to sustain the conflict in Syria. Balkanization – the fragmentation of one state into several – might not present a desirable endgame, despite red herrings from history. “In Yugoslavia the situation was simpler because the neighboring states were stable. But what’s happening in Syria, the background is the Middle East in turmoil,” Erlich suggested.
Rather than serving to restructure borders along ethnic lines – as occurred when Yugoslavia tore apart to form several modern Balkans nations – a break up of Syria could simply create a series of overlapping failed states.
Such a scenario, an every-nation-for-itself brawl, is “an alarming possibility,” and also the default situation if nothing else comes to the fore, Martin Griffiths, a negotiator with experience of Syria’s conflict and the director of the European Institute of Peace, told The Media Line.
Two additional factors sour comparison of Syria to Yugoslavia, he continued. The first is that good behavior and stability in the Balkan states in the post-conflict years was achieved through the incentive of future admission to the European Union. The second factor is the Islamic State itself, which would further destabilize any attempt at Balkanization, Griffiths said.
Removal of Assad was also previously seen as one option to bring the conflict to a close, but any such notion was rendered null and void after Russia’s intervention in September. Now the President’s position appears stronger but his continued presence is likely to rankle opposition groups. “(I) haven’t heard anybody put forward a solution to the original deal breaker which is the future of President Assad. That’s been there haunting this process since the beginning,” Griffiths suggested.
With other options apparently not viable, Kerry’s push for a truce might be all that’s left. The alternative is not palatable for anybody.
“(There is) another scenario, that the war will not come to an end… for years,” Dr Erlich said, confiding that he was hugely pessimistic about peace negotiations in Syria.
“Because of the complexity of the scenario in Syria, because of the weakness of all the forces involved and the participation of all the super powers, it’s a mess that will continue for years,” he concluded.