Damascus and Syria’s fate

When everybody was talking about Turkish troops entering the northern Syrian border town of Jarablus, the dirty deal in Greater Damascus was nearing its completion. The long suffering suburb of Darayya was being handed over to Bashar Assad’s regime and its supportive militias.
This was taking place in what was once a “Syrian Arab Republic,” while somewhere else, in Geneva to be precise, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were following up their smoke-screen bluffing.
Actually, what has and will happen in Geneva should not surprise any serious follower of the Syrian crisis. Those who have observed its evolution — thanks to international collusion and bloody suppression that seeks a “military solution” — from a spontaneous moderate popular uprising to a civil, regional and open-ended sectarian war aiming at uprooting Sunni Arabs of Iraq and Syria.
Some groups within the Syrian opposition may be blamed for militarizing the uprising, by falling into the trap that Assad and his backers had laid for them. They may deserve the blame because they were supposedly aware of the nature of a police state built by ruthless and suppressive sectarians.
The huge popular demonstrations that filled the streets and squares of the city of Hama in the summer of 2011 were the turning point. Seeing hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating that day, there was panic in the regime, and that was bound to lead to an all-out war against any town, neighborhood or village that challenges its authority.
Indeed, this is exactly what the regime did, adopting a deviant strategy. It called on non-Syrian sectarian Shi’ite militias to fight for the regime under the religious order and military command of the Vali-e-Faqih in Iran and
exploited extremist Sunnis after releasing them from prisons. The regime is also trying to achieve its goals by diverting the opposition away from moderation and peaceful means to belligerent and flagrant sectarian confrontation.
Another strategy of the regime to exploit the notion of Alliance of Minorities paid off as some senior Christian clergymen, Syrian and non-Syrian, actively incited Western governments against the uprising; and one of them summed up his views during a visit to Europe in the early months of the uprising by saying: “Assad’s regime may be bad and corrupt, but what the uprising would bring is worse.”
The regime’s strategy has created the political, humanitarian and humanitarian catastrophe in Syria today. Sectarian Shi’ite militias have temporarily managed to save the regime from collapse, and given rise to a sectarian (Sunni) counter-reaction that, as time passed, marginalized nationalist, liberal, moderate currents within the uprising.
Planting the regime’s extremist “fifth column” to undermine the uprising has proved a success. Finally, religious and sectarian incitement in the West completed the mission as it provided an excuse, not only to ignore the uprising, but also to deprive it of the means to even defend itself, either by refusing to provide it with suitable weapons or adamantly rejecting its pleas for safe havens and no-fly zones.
The other day, many celebrated "a great victory" when Ankara sent its troops to a small Syrian border town, with the western ‘green light’. The fact of the matter, however, is that today’s Turkey is not the Turkey of 2011. Its freedom of movement has been drastically curtailed after being cowed by Russia, let down by NATO and shaken internally; which means she is not allowed to have any regional say, except in what may harm it on the Kurdish front.
In the meantime, Russia and Iran continue the implementation of their respective geo-political plans in other parts of Syria, especially Damascus and its environs, through religious, sectarian and ethnic cleansing — mainly targeting Sunni Arabs with US and international blessings.
John Kerry thinks he can still sell the Syrian people the illusion that Washington is sincere about ending their suffering and finding a political solution when they know full well the following:
First, in the last months of Barack Obama’s presidency, Washington failed to respect its ‘red lines’ on Assad’s use of chemical weapons and it never confronted Russia and Iran.
Second, Washington refused to depose Assad by force; and later when the Daesh excuse became available, its approach to the Syrian crisis became hardly distinguishable from that of Moscow and Tehran. Its focus has been on confronting terrorism (Sunni terrorism).
Third, American political and military support of the Syrian uprising has never been serious. A good proof is how the southern fronts (south of Damascus) have been strangely silent, while Washington was working overtime to concoct artificial ‘pan-Syrian’ militias, which are in fact Kurdish militias with dubious previous links to the regimes with Arab and Turkmen ‘facades’ in northern Syria.
Fourth, the only declared “change” in Washington’s position vis-à-vis Syria during the last five years has been its continuous convergence with Moscow; even when the Russians decided on direct military intervention to help keep Assad in power.
Finally, any talk about a political solution is meaningless as long as military operations — especially air raids — continue, and while the Assad regime, Russians, Iranians and their henchmen carry on with their crimes of demographic change, the latest example is Darayya.
What has befallen Darayya is extremely dangerous because the fate of Syria is decided in Greater Damascus, and the fate of Greater Damascus is decided by the silenced southern fronts and the cheap theatricals of the Geneva talks.