The Role of the Military in Syrian Politics and the 2011 Uprising (original) (raw)
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In this research I examine the effect of the military on Syrian politics and the uprising of 2011. I consider the military's will to protect the Assad regime in the context of the " army-party symbiosis " that has been composed in the historical process. I rename this symbiosis as a power bloc because of Assad's designation of the military to be used not only against external threats but also to protect his regime against the Syrian opposition. The political and economic reforms implemented by Bashar al-Assad did not affect this power structure, which is the source of the military's will to suppress the uprisings of 2011. The armed organizations which emerged during the civil war, whether they are named as terror organizations or not, will be a challenging factor not only in the resolution of the Syrian crisis but also for the reorganization of the Syrian army.
THE SYRIAN CRISIS: MILITARY AND POLITICAL DIMENSIONS
The armed forces and security apparatus belong to the most important institutions in Syria; the army has always played significant role in the most critical developments in that country. This fact was determined not only by the frequency of wars and military crises, but first because of the military's role in domestic politics. Since the last decades, the military have been a focal point of Syrian politics, encamping in the center of power and decision-making mechanism of the country. In 1980s Syrian regime was challenged by an attempt to seize power by the military group loyal to Hafez Assad's brother Rifa'at. This coup failed thanks to the then minister of defense (Mustafa Tlass, a Sunny) and chief of staff (Hikmat al-Shihaby, a Sunny), who sided with Hafez Assad. After this episode the regime knew how to curb the appetite of their military in seizing power and making military coups. Nevertheless, as further developments showed, the tendency proved to be not irreversible. In view of this, the author's goal is to look at the Syrian armed forces as both military establishment and the key sociopolitical institution in the time when Syrian military crisis broke out. In addition, we would like to examine the interaction between politics and military, military and society during the crisis. We would try to show main behavioral patterns of the military in the crisis and examine the reasons why and how the army conducts the crisis in Syria and plays a crucial role in it. We will study the army's status after the crisis and the reasons why Bashar Assad was forced to use foreign militias to fight the rebels. The article will show the evolution of the Syrian army that turned out to become a pure sectarian force. We will observe the attitude of Russia and Iran towards the Syrian military and their contradictions in the military field in Syria. The author formulates some proposals for Moscow's politics in Syria aimed at the stable peace and furthering the process of political transit in this Arab country.
2020
Against the backdrop of Iraq's fragmentation and Egypt's derailed revolution, bold steps are clearly needed to prevent Syria from a likewise destiny, far worsened by the level of violence in the country and its role in the region's geopolitics. The degeneration of the crisis into sectarianism and social conflict is an increasingly tangible threat. Arguably, this degeneration is fuelled by the lack of a common vision for the future of Syria among those international players capable of influencing the conflict and within the internal opposition front. This paper analyses the anti-Assad front and outlines a post-war plan for national reconciliation framed in the context of the country's own past and experiences from other countries in the region.
The Syrian File. The Role of the Opposition in a Multi-Layered Conflict
IAI Working Papers, 2013
Against the backdrop of Iraq's fragmentation and Egypt's derailed revolution, bold steps are clearly needed to prevent Syria from a likewise destiny, far worsened by the level of violence in the country and its role in the region's geopolitics. The degeneration of the crisis into sectarianism and social conflict is an increasingly tangible threat. Arguably, this degeneration is fuelled by the lack of a common vision for the future of Syria among those international players capable of influencing the conflict and within the internal opposition front. This paper analyses the anti-Assad front and outlines a post-war plan for national reconciliation framed in the context of the country’s own past and experiences from other countries in the region.
Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War, 2018
The alliance between Syria and Iran and the formation of the so called ‘axis of resistance’ is one of the most fascinating and enduring example of a regional alliance, a pillar of Syria foreign policy and a determining factor in the trajectory of the Syrian conflict. To understand why secular Syria, the ‘beating heart of Arabism’, choose to align its foreign policy with the revolutionary Islamic Republic we have to look back at the transformation in Syrian politics under Hafez al-Asad, when Syria was in the process of establishing its prowess in the turbulent region (as part of its strategy to confront the Israeli ‘permanent aggression’) while it confronted a domestic rebellion. Formed as a response to the direct challenges posed to Syria and Iran by Iraq, Israel and the U.S. since 1980, the alliance with the Islamic Republic and its protégée Hezbollah boosted Syria’s regional position and contributed to its successful ‘balancing’ with international and regional powers. Concurrently, Syria continued to act as a swing state between Arab regional powers (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iraq) in order to consolidate an Arab front against the Zionist enemy. The alliance with Iran also served to legitimise the Asad regime, both domestically and regionally, and to contain Islamist opposition. Under Bashar al-Asad, Syria embraced the resistance front as a continuation of Hafez’ nationalist policy of sumud (steadfastness), with a renewed antiimperialist stance against regional (Israel) and international (U.S.) interference. This posture has been a key element of Syria’s regional strategy and authoritarian upgrading. Since Syria is situated at the heart of a region traditionally penetrated by international powers and ravaged by armed conflicts, it comes as no surprise that Syrian foreign policy often took priority over domestic concerns, as many analysts maintain. Besides, the Bonapartist nature of the Syrian regime allegedly made domestic opinion largely irrelevant to policy making. This paper does not rule out the explanatory power of systemic explanations: Syrian and Iranian behaviour is in great part derived from the exceptionally unstable systemic arena within which these states operate, magnified by the context of the bipolar world and its demise. Syrian leaders crafted foreign policy on a balancing strategy between rivals and enemies centred on the regional role of Syria as champion of the Arab cause . Regional power balancing and regime survival required powerful regional friends like Iran and Hezbollah acting as deterrents, superpowers as international supporters, and Gulf monarchies as rich donors. Yet any comprehensive analysis of Syrian foreign policy and alliance making requires a more nuanced view of the links between policy making and foreign and domestic threats. The Syria-Iran alliance was part of an ‘omnibalancing’ strategy designed to confront external threats and domestic challenges to state leadership while aiming at attaining ‘strategic parity’ with Israel. Both the nationalist struggle and regime consolidation required mass mobilisation to channel national energies and ensure unconditional support to leaders, whose main claim to legitimacy was a commitment to Arab nationalism. At a time when nationalist struggle, state building and regime consolidation coincided, Hafez al-Asad’s balancing policies successfully addressed the contradiction between the revisionism rooted in the Pan-Arab identity of Syria - the liberation of Palestine and the unification of the Arab umma - and geopolitical realities - the division of the Arab front and the shift from a bipolar to a unipolar world - while consolidating the regime. In the new regional and local context in which Bashar al-Asad operated in his first ten years - one in which state-led Pan-Arabism was already dead, non-state actors have emerged as powerful political agents and a growing radicalisation of the disillusioned, embittered masses was directly challenging Arab autocrats - the Syrian regime confronted an ever-increasing need for sustained mobilisation to support the ‘resistance front’ regime while facing its inability to either live up to its own legitimation claims or reform. The onset of the Arab Spring has revealed a variety of complexities in the front, yet its ‘resistance’ discourse – though in a twisted form - has shaped the trajectory of the Syrian uprising in a decisive way. The Syrian regime and its allies have linked the repression of the uprising to their counter-hegemonic discourse while Syria used a range of repressive measures against rebels and opposition groups; Hezbollah gained greater strategic depth; and Iran reinstated its ‘regional alignment’ strategy and influence. With the adoption of the western ‘war on terror’, we are seeing a re-articulation of the Syrian nationalist discourse and foreign policy as well as the transformation of the front into a transnational counterinsurgency coalition. These developments demand that we reconsider the ideological assumptions, capabilities, and persistence of the resistance front while reassessing the connection between Syrian domestic and foreign policy.
The Class Oriented Rationale: Uncovering the Sources of the Syrian Civil War
The Syrian revolt of 2011 against the Assad regime has evolved into a fiery-armed civil war. Syria has also become a hub for external involvement and political meddling. The ensuing crisis has been largely understood as being motivated by staunch sectarianism. However, the insistence that the bases of the armed Syrian conflict are grounded in sectarian origins reduces this ongoing phenomenon to visible derivations of the deeper structural causes of the conflict. Moving away from the common and simplistic focus on sectarianism, this work sets to demonstrate that the root of the ongoing Syrian Civil War is a class conflict disguised under a complex layer of pseudo-sectarianism. Understanding the 'true' nature of the Syrian Civil War requires an approach which escapes false assumptions that are associated with the present-day Syrian crisis. The perspective put forth critiques the analyses which assume that sectarianism is the primary causing factor of the ongoing Syrian civil war. Instead, this work argues that the conflict is an economic one, but is rationalized through a sectarian prism by both observers and participants in the ongoing civil war. The discussion here looks at the domestic side of the Syrian conflict. In order to bring to the fore the root of the ensuing conflict, this paper will not address clich ed focuses which are often advertised as being the primary igniters and sustaining agents of the ongoing civil war, these being; external involvement, proxy wars and international political interests, and investment or involvement in Syria. This work is also not concerned with the influx of non-Syrian fighters who decided to join the war, as they were a by-product of the war, and not a primary, instigating cause. Instead, the focus of this article will be to unravel how Syrian society transformed from being 'non-violent' and 'tolerant of difference' in the domestic sphere, to the state of armed-infighting chaos. While relying on historical references, this article is neither concerned with restating the chronology of events before and after 2011, nor with relating events with an assumed causality between them. Rather, the purpose is to analyse the conflict in a constructive way which allows a new analytical paradigm to crystalize. Unfortunately, recent
the syrian civil war (book project)
Is the current violence in Syria a revolt of “society” against an oppressive state, or should it be read more meaningfully as a full fledged civil war? If we assume the perspective of civil war, then the “state” and its various apparatuses would stand as just one “civil party” among others, protective of its own social and political interests, while revealing the multi-layered relations of power in Syrian society which cannot be solely attributed to a dysfunctional state–society relation. That is to say, even though the violence was originally meant to displace the apparatuses of the state, it has since then sprawled in different directions, not to be restricted to the problems of legitimacy that an authoritarian state has engulfed itself into since the Baathist revolution in the 1960s. It is such hypothesis that we want to explore, first, by contextualizing the antinomies of the Syrian nation-state in historical perspective, since its inception from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire and the French colonial state. Second, through a combination of sociological and anthropological approaches, we want to analyze the contradictions that the Baathist state has set itself into once it has opted for a hegemonic takeover of civil society, in particular in the 1970s, with Asad’s “corrective movement” and its aftermath, which led to a massive expansion of the state apparatuses.