Paul Gillespie: Regional Sunni powers hold the key to Syria

The Paris atrocities pose stark political choices in Europe and the Middle East, both of which are struggling with the fallout from Syria's devastating civil war.

Europe’s reception of one million refugees from that war is under threat as migration and internal movement are securitised and external borders tightened.

Such panic measures, however justifiable in terms of public safety, will stoke up discontent and radicalisation among those who have made the awful journey if they are then disappointed with its outcome. Striking a balance between dealing generously with refugees and demonising them in a time of “war” is a political choice playing into popular fears, election cycles and long-term social stability.

Regional powers in the Middle East must choose whether to prioritise their fight against Islamic State over their hatred of the Assad regime in Syria. The deepening cleavage between Sunni and Shia Muslims is driven by inter-state rivalry between Saudi Arabia, other Gulf states and Turkey, which have aided Islamic State, versus Iran and Iraq or Egypt and Jordan which fear Islamic State will empower their Muslim Brotherhood opponents.

Now that the territorial expansion by Islamic State, also known as Isis, has probably reached its limits, the Sunni powers must decide how best to tackle this unanticipated threat to their interests.

The political and military balance between those regional interests was profoundly changed by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The subsequent ejection from power of the Sunni military top brass who supported Saddam Hussein leads directly to their present support for Islamic State's state-building exercise straddling Syria and Iraq.

External intervention

The territorial integrity of both states is challenged by that fact, causing the regional rivalry. Only Syrians and Iraqis, together with their neighbours, can settle this. Further external interventions would provoke deeper regional upheavals and send more refugees and instability towards Europe.

How then should European foreign policy handle this crisis? Even to talk of such a policy invites ridicule from those who say it cannot find coherence amid such diverse and conflicting interests among European states.

That is a mistaken analysis and conclusion. Although neither France nor Germany supported the Iraq invasion, the UK, Denmark and Poland were part of it, even though public opinion throughout the EU was against it.

Since then the EU’s foreign policy apparatus has become much stronger. Its ministers meet more often and their collective interest in managing this crisis has also grown.

That interest would be best pursued by a much more determined support for a peace process capable of bringing an end to the fighting in Syria and pursuing a stable settlement there. For France, that means aiming at peace, not war, shifting away from its recent arms sales-driven alliance with the Saudis, a willingness to work with Russia and allowing Assad a role in the transition.

Peace process

But Syria has been split into three main entities by 4½ years of deadly fighting: the coastal region controlled by the Assad regime based around the Alawite Shias, Christian and other minorities who fear Sunni rule; the Sunni areas now substantially controlled by Islamic State; and the Kurdish quasi-state on Turkey’s border.

These divisions reflect a society with six million externally and 7.6 million internally displaced people, representing a massive and arguably irreversible ethnic cleansing and a middle class mostly in exodus to Europe.

Some progress was made last weekend through the UN in Vienna and at the G20 on defining and sequencing a peace process. It would see a ceasefire by January 1st, a six-month negotiation on an inclusive transition government (with or without Assad), a year-long constitution-drafting period followed by UN supervised elections. Jordan is to nominate which opposition forces to include.

Huge questions loom about Assad’s role and whether the regional military and political balance is yet right (that is, sufficiently exhausted and at an impasse) to sustain such a process. And if it is right, what sort of Syria should emerge from it?

The most convincing case is made not for a unitary state, but for a federal one divided between the coastal area, a Sunni entity shorn of Islamic State (but how?) and a Kurdish region. That could allow the coastal region, rather than the whole, to decide on Assad.

Rule would be a power-sharing model like that in other divided societies such as Lebanon, Bosnia or Northern Ireland. Probably only such a scheme could cater for Syria's current divisions – and open up possible confederation later with a similarly reconfigured Iraq.

pegillespie@gmail.com