Divide Syria

The butterfly effect is often surprising in its developments. Indeed, that is where the name comes from: a butterfly flaps its wings in New York and a typhoon hits Tokyo. All it takes is a little change in wind flow or air pressure moving its way across the globe. This week, we saw an example of this.

Hamas, a proxy of Iran attacked Israel on October 7^th, 2023. The attack surprised Israel and allowed Hamas its greatest military and terror success in its decades of history. Hamas took over parts of Israel for hours, and wreaked havoc with torture, murder, hostage taking, and general destruction. Predictably, this led to a war with Israel in Gaza that is still broiling a year later. The success of Hamas’s attack buoyed yet another Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, to launch its own attack from Lebanon.

Israel and Hezbollah have been at war on and off for decades, with Israel doing targeted strikes at weapons depots in Lebanon and Syria, given Israel’s policy not to allow an armed Iranian proxy on its boarders. Seeing the success of Hamas’s attack, and world opinion against Israel, Hezbollah joined the effort and bombarded Israel’s north for months, causing massive evacuations of Israelis from their homes. Another win for an Iranian proxy. Pushed to the limit, Israel responded by bombing Lebanon. This too was inevitable. Even so, something shifted.

Israel was angry at the brutality of Hamas and its inability to retrieve its hostages, not to mention the months of evacuation from the north. The political climate made anything but a forceful response impossible, and Israel decided that, this time, they were not going to just bomb troops; they were going to destroy these armies almost entirely and they would take out the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah, up to the very top. This was unexpected, and this flap of Israel’s butterfly wings had a tremendous, unforeseen effect.

A decade earlier, Syrian rebels attempted to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the Alawite dictator of the country. They failed not because of Assad’s army, but because Iran lent him Hezbollah as military support in exchange for Syria entering Iran’s orbit as a sort of vassal. Assad and Hezbollah were brutal in suppressing the rebellion, and those who survived have been in hiding. Suddenly, Syria’s southwestern neighbor obliterated Hezbollah, and Assad was again exposed. The rebels kicked off the war again and took Damascus in two weeks. A typhoon indeed.

What should happen now? I believe the best answer lies in understanding why Assad and his predecessors were so brutal in the first place. Assad is an Alawite, an Islamic sect that lives mostly on the Mediterranean coast, north of Lebanon. In the early decades of the previous century, this sect was marked by its modernity and moderation. What changed?

Following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the French and British divided their “spheres of influence” to control the Levant, which they had taken from the Ottomans. This is called the Sykes-Picot agreement according to which the French got the northern half, including what is now Syria and Lebanon, while England got the south, including what is now Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq (I am simplifying a lot, of course, and Russia also got a piece).

Originally, the coastal area containing the Alawites was to be ruled directly by France, and the rest of Syria as an autonomous Arab country. Then, in 1922, the Alawite coastal area was formed as its own autonomous entity, “The State of Latakia,” separate from Syria. The Druze in the Hawran region (comprising the Israeli Golan Heights, the south of Syria and the north of Jordan) were also independent at this time.

Latakia’s independent status was dissolved in 1936, when the French unified Syria. The Alawites at the time begged them not to, since they believed it was unsafe to be a minority in a Sunni country. Bashar al-Assad’s great-grandfather, Sulayman Ali al-Assad, wrote a letter saying that the Alawites would rather stay autonomous under French protection then join a full-blown Sunni state of Syria. But he was ignored. The British also favored a unified Syria and this is what formed when Syria became a country in 1946.

There’s an old saying: “The best defense is a good offense,” and the Alawites, who were wealthier and more educated than the average Syrian, moved themselves into seats of power and made sure they would remain safe by clamping down hard on all opposition. Thus, we get the strange mix of a man like Bashar al-Assad, an ophthalmologist with post-graduate training in London, who is also a cold-blooded slaughterer of his own citizens. It is built into the Alawite-Sunni system.

What needs to happen, I believe, is intuitive: the Alawites need to reform as the State of Latakia, with international protection against Sunni Syria, so that they can establish themselves. My guess is that, in 20 years, Latakia can be another Singapore. The Druze also need to be freed from what may be a dangerous, reactionary regime, with the Jebel Druze/ Hawran as its own polity. Their borders would be protected by Israel, who would strongly prefer a border with a Druze country than with a Sunni Syria, which could go in an extremist direction; remember, ISIS was part of trying to take over Syria too.

The rest of Syria will establish itself as a Sunni country. My hope is that it will be peaceful and progressive, but it is not something the rest of the world can control. What we can control, however, is ensuring the independence of the two minority groups — the coastal Alawites and the southern Druze — from the new polity, allowing all three groups, Alawite, Druze, and Sunni, to develop themselves independently, hopefully in safety, peace, and prosperity.