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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Today Syria is a country known for all the wrong reasons: civil war, vicious sectarianism, and major humanitarian crisis. But how did this once rich, multi-cultural society end up as the site of one of the twenty-first century's most devastating and brutal conflicts? In this incisive book, internationally renowned Syria expert David Lesch takes the reader on an illuminating journey through the last hundred years of Syrian history - from the end of the Ottoman empire through to the current civil war. The Syria he reveals is a fractured mosaic, whose identity (or lack thereof) has played a crucial part in its trajectory over the past century. Only once the complexities and challenges of Syria's history are understood can this pivotal country in the Middle East begin to rebuild and heal.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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CONTENTS
Cover
Front Matter
Map
Preface
1 What is Syria?
The Historical and Physical Setting
The Historical Syrian Mosaic
Notes
2 World War I
British and French Negotiations
Arab Involvement and the Sharifian Revolt
End of the War and Postwar Negotiations
Notes
3 The French Mandate
Divide and Rule
Rebellion against and Solidification of French Rule
Notes
4 Syria amid the Cold Wars
The 1954 Parliamentary Elections
The Cold Wars in the Middle East Heat Up
Notes
5 The 1967 Arab–Israeli War
The Coming of War
Syria and the War
The Aftermath
Notes
6 Syria under Hafiz al-Assad
Black September (or the Jordanian Civil War)
The 1973 Arab–Israeli War and Its Aftermath
The Effects of the 1979 Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty
Assad’s Pivot
The Nature of the State
Notes
7 Bashar al-Assad in Power
Syria and Lebanon
Solidifying Power
Navigating the International Arena
Note
8 The Syrian Uprising and Civil War
Bashar Faces the Protests
Civil War
Notes
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Syria
David W. Lesch
Polity
Copyright © David W. Lesch 2019
The right of David W. Lesch to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2755-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lesch, David W., author.Title: Syria / David W. Lesch.Description: Cambridge, UK : Polity Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018032455 (print) | LCCN 2018034955 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509527557 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509527519 | ISBN 9781509527519(hardback) | ISBN 9781509527526(pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Syria--History--20th century. | Syria--History--21st century. Classification: LCC DS95 (ebook) | LCC DS95 .L47 2019 (print) | DDC 956.9104--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032455
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
A Political Map of Syria
Preface
Syria has become something of a second home for me. Since my first visit to the country in 1989 to conduct research on my dissertation, I have visited it over thirty times, staying for months at a time on occasion. I have, therefore, come to know Syria quite well for a Westerner, often learning about the country from the inside out. Although nothing compared to the suffering of Syrians today, it has been one of the most difficult periods of my life to see a number of friends and acquaintances on both sides of the conflict having been killed or displaced as the result of the civil war that has raged since 2011. One of those people was Dr. Khalid al-Asaad, the Head of Antiquities of the magnificent Roman era ruins at Palmyra. Dr. Khalid had personally escorted me and my family around Palmyra on multiple occasions. When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) took over the city from Syrian government forces, he decided to stay rather than flee, as most of its inhabitants had done. It appears Dr. Khalid remained because he wanted to try to do what he could to preserve the ruins and museum against the inclination of ISIS to destroy anything that was pre- or non-Islamic. After about a month of ISIS occupation, Dr. Khalid was beheaded at age eighty-two. Thereafter ISIS went on to damage and destroy a number of priceless ruins.
Stories of suffering and senseless violence such as this unfortunately are too numerous to count. I have tried to do what I can since the beginning of the civil war to facilitate conflict resolution and/or create the parameters for political dialogue between opposing sides. I developed and organized (along with William Ury) the Harvard University–NUPI (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs)–Trinity University Syria Research Project, funded by the governments of Norway and Switzerland. I led a team of researchers in 2012–13 to meet with most of the stakeholders in the Syrian conflict in and outside of Syria, including many Syrian armed opposition leaders and Syrian government officials. The data provided necessary insights into the dynamics of the conflict in order to formulate possible pathways toward conflict resolution. In fall 2013 we completed a final report for the project and presented our findings at the highest levels in Europe, the United States, and at the United Nations (an abridged version is available at the link listed in Chapter 8, note 2). In 2014–16 I engaged in what essentially became phase two of the project, Trinity partnering in this instance with Conflict Dynamics International or CDI (based in Cambridge, MA) and funded by the Danish government. We continued our efforts at finding common ground among the combatants. In 2017 I began working with The Carter Center and CDI on an initiative along similar lines, and it is currently ongoing as of this writing. As such, I have had the opportunity to observe at close quarters many aspects of the Syrian civil war, which, I believe, has only enhanced my understanding and, hopefully, my portrayal of it, for instance in my book Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad (2013), and subsequent writings and commentaries.
Finally, as is well known, I met regularly with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and many other leading Syrian officials between 2004 and 2009, first conducting research for what would become the book The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria (2005), and thereafter in mostly futile attempts to improve US–Syria relations. However, again, it provided me with a uniquely close vantage point from which to view the inner workings of the Syrian government and its president. Hopefully, in this book, I have been able to translate all of these experiences into a better understanding of a country for which and a people for whom I have great affection.
I would like to thank Polity Press, and its editor, Dr. Louise Knight, for approaching me in 2017 with this opportunity. It is a book I have long thought about writing, that is, a general, accessible history of modern Syria, but for one reason or another, mostly because of my involvement in various diplomatic initiatives, I was not able to do so. Since this volume is by design a concise history of modern Syria, I had to perform triage at times on what or what not to include, so this is by no means an exhaustive treatment of the subject. It has been a pleasure to work with Louise as well as her assistant editor, Nekane Tanaka Galdos, production editor Rachel Moore, copy-editor Justin Dyer, and the whole Polity Press production team. Finally, I would not be able to do anything of any note without the love and support of my wife, Judy Dunlap, through whom everything I do flows.
For the people of Syria …
1What is Syria?
Syria is a country today known for all the wrong reasons: civil war, vicious sectarianism, rampant death and destruction, a massive refugee exodus, terrorism, and so on. It is a fractured mosaic. But how did it come to this? There were, of course, immediate causes of the current civil war that are related to the so-called “Arab Spring” that spread across much of the Middle East in 2010–11. In addition, there were conditions indigenous to Syria that generated the initial uprising. However, there are also long-term causes and historical forces that have been at work in the country for decades, reaching back to the days of the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century. But modern Syria owes most of its formative roots to the World War I, mandate, and post-independence periods in the twentieth century. This book will outline this historical trajectory of Syria, from a rich, multi-cultural historical blend to European-imposed artificiality, and from post-independence political and geo-strategic struggles to a one-party, military dictatorship, a socio-economic and political milieu from which emerged a tragic civil war.
The diversity in the country today is born out of centuries of influences near and far. The region traditionally known as Syria has been something of an amorphous entity generally located in the area we geographically know currently as the Syrian Arab Republic. Syria scholar Christopher Phillips conducted an informal poll in Syria on the question of identity given to a couple of hundred respondents a few years before the outbreak of the civil war in 2011.1 The question was the following: Do you think of yourself first as a Syrian, an Arab, or a Muslim? Interestingly, the responses were divided about evenly between all three. Notably, however, no one listed the Syrian identity lower than second. So while this informal poll suggests that there are still multiple primary identities in Syria, the concept of a Syrian state and a Syrian nationality has taken hold in the country since independence in 1946. As we shall see, some of this has been force-fed by authoritarian fiat (it is, after all, the Syrian Arab Republic), but it may be instructive to the future reconstitution of a broken state when the war ends and the rebuilding begins in earnest.
All of this is indicative of how identity (or the lack thereof) has played such an important role in Syrian history – and it is clearly an unfinished story. Thus, the modern history of Syria will be placed within the context of these (and some other) identities as they have developed in concert with and in opposition to each other over the years amid a complex multi-dimensional matrix of domestic, regional, and international politics.
The Historical and Physical Setting
Geographically, Syria measures 71,504 square miles (185,170 square kilometers), including the Israeli-occupied Golan (Jawlan) Heights, which lies about thirty-five kilometers from Damascus at its closest point – all in all Syria is about the size of North Dakota. This is, however, the modern nation-state of Syria, whose name is most likely derived from the great pre-Common Era Middle Eastern kingdom of Assyria. The Romans called this area of the Fertile Crescent, an agriculturally rich area north of the Arabian desert arcing from present-day Israel/ Palestine and Lebanon to the Tigris–Euphrates area, “Suri,” from old Babylonian.2 Many Syrians consider the modern boundaries of their country to be but a rump of the whole, an arbitrary European-designed portion of what generally is thought of as greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham), which also consists of present-day Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, including the occupied territories, and parts of southern Turkey. In the West, this area of the Middle East became known as the Levant, an Italian word used by traders to mean “the point where the sun rises.”3 These areas are thought to have been artificially separated from Syria as a result of the post-World War I mandate system manufactured by Europe.
Syria today is a primarily semi-arid and desert plateau, with a narrow coastal plain along the Mediterranean Sea. The Syrian desert, in essence the northern extension of the Arabian desert, abuts deeply into this portion of the country. As such, nearly eighty percent of all Syrians live in the western twenty percent of the country, what the French mandate authorities initially – and somewhat derisively – called “useful Syria.” The bulk of this concentration of people live in a north–south line of cities (Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Damascus) that generally separates the more fertile areas of the country from the semi-arid and desert plain. The borders that became modern Syria cut off many parts of the country from their traditional mercantile and cultural links. For example, Damascus traditionally looked toward the Mediterranean through Beirut and Haifa (Israel) as well as to the desert toward Baghdad; whereas Aleppo, heavily influenced by its proximity to Turkish, Armenian, and Kurdish areas, tended to look to the Mediterranean as well, but it also leaned eastward, as it was a critical way station along the silk route to Central Asia. It is little wonder then that there are a number of cross-cultural affinities and ties. These cross-cultural identities have had political implications – and produced irredentist claims – over the years that have at times complicated Syria’s relations with its neighbors.
The arable land amounts to about one-quarter of the total. The agricultural sector produces high quantities of cotton, wheat, barley, sugar beet, and olives. Although eighty percent of Syria’s agriculture is rainfed, the government in the decade prior to the 2011 uprising had invested heavily in developing irrigation systems in order to maintain crop production during drought years. Rainfall is seasonal in Syria, most of it coming in the winter months and falling in the northern- and western-most parts of the country. Syria – as well as other parts of the Middle East – had been suffering for about two decades from drought-like conditions, which particularly decimated the agrarian sector in the rural areas of the country and contributed in some important ways to the growing discontent that underpinned the nature of the uprising itself.
It is difficult to estimate the current population of Syria because of the population shifts caused by the war. The population before the war was a little over twenty-two million, about forty percent of whom were below the age of fourteen. About half of the country’s population as of this writing are displaced either externally or internally, with about five hundred thousand estimated to have been killed. Before the war, the capital and largest city in Syria, Damascus, had a population of approximately five million, Aleppo had 4.5 million, Homs (Hims) 1.8 million, Hama 1.6 million, and Latakia one million. However, because of the destruction levels and intensity of conflict in a number of Syrian cities, particularly in Aleppo and Homs, these numbers have dramatically changed. The populations of Damascus proper, as well as of cities such as Latakia and Tartus, which have for the most part remained securely under Syrian government control during the war, have risen quite substantially with the influx of displaced persons seeking refuge from the conflict. Such is the difficulty of applying numbers to today’s Syria that the United Nations essentially gave up the number estimate business a few years into the conflict because of the paucity of independent reporting and lack of access due to security concerns.
Approximately ninety percent of the population is Arab, including some four hundred thousand Palestinian refugees. Arabic is thus the official and most widely spoken language. The Kurds make up about five to ten percent of the population depending upon the source. Many of the Kurds still speak Kurdish and most live in the northeast portion of the country, although there are sizeable numbers who reside in the major cities. Armenians (clustered primarily in and around Aleppo) and a smattering of other groups, such as Turkomans, Circassians, and Jews, make up the remaining small percentage of the population.
Sunni Muslims account for about seventy-five percent of the population (with Sunni Arab Muslims constituting sixty-five percent), and they are the majority in every province of Syria save for Latakia and Suwayda. The Alawites (see below) number approximately twelve percent of the population, and they form the majority (about sixty-two percent) in the province of Latakia; indeed, seventy-five percent of them reside there.4 Christians of various sects, although the largest is Greek Orthodox, come in at about ten percent, and the Druze constitute about three percent, most of whom are located in southwestern Syria in the Suwayda province (about eighty-seven percent of the province, also referred to as the Jabal al-Druze or Jabal al-Arab). There is also, as noted above, a very small Jewish population, which, together with some other small Muslim sects, such as the Ismailis, represent one to three percent. The apportionment of minority populations shifted in and after the 1960s once the Baath Party, itself disproportionately comprised of minority groups in power positions, such as Alawites and Druze, came to power in 1963. With the coming of this more favorable political and economic environment, many began to migrate to the cities from the rural areas where they had been confined for centuries. Again, all these numbers have probably shifted to a degree due to the conflict, with so many Syrians, about 4.5 million, now residing as refugees outside of the country and many internally displaced persons moving to different cities inside the country to escape conflict. There will need to be a thorough and independent census taken in Syria after the war ends, including a determination of how many current refugees decided to repatriate.
The Alawites are an obscure offshoot of Twelver Shiite Islam, although a number of Alawi religious figures might argue this point, instead saying that Alawites constitute a distinct branch of Islam rather than a schism of mainstream Shiism. Alawites venerate Ali ibn Abi Talib as the “bearer of divine essence,” second in importance only to the Prophet Muhammad himself. Ali was the son-in-law and cousin of Muhammad, the fourth caliph or successor to the Prophet as the leader of the Islamic community, and one of the seminal figures in Islamic history. The name “Alawite” or “Alawi” translates into “those who follow Ali.” Also known as Nusayris, a name derived from a ninth-century Muslim prophet, Muhammad ibn Nusayr al-Namiri, the Alawites integrate some Christian and even Persian Zoroastrian rituals and holidays into their faith. For this reason, Sunni Muslims and even most Shiite Muslims have considered Alawite Islam to be heretical. The great thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Sunni Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyya issued a fatwa (religious ruling) calling the Alawites greater infidels than Christians, Jews, or idolaters, and he authorized a jihad (struggle or holy war) against them.
Until recent times, then, the Alawites in Syria, located primarily in the northwestern reaches of the country, had been a persecuted minority for centuries. It has been traditionally thought that the Alawites – as well as some other minority religious groups – took refuge in mountainous regions of the country to escape persecution by the Sunni Muslim majority. Indicative of their subject status, as noted by Nikolaos van Dam, is the fact that well into the twentieth century, the poorest Alawi families “indentured their daughters as house servants to the richer families, mostly urban Sunnis, who usually regarded the Alawi peasants with contempt.”5 In part this may be the case, but it just as well could be that, as Patrick Seale once stated, the Alawites, Druze, and Ismailis are “a remnant of the Shiʿi upsurge, which had swept Islam a thousand years before: they were islands left by a tide that receded.”6 Seale is referring to the so-called “Shiite century,” which roughly lasted from the mid-tenth to the mid-eleventh centuries, when the Ismaili Shiite (or Sevener) Fatimid empire ruled over Egypt and Syria, and the Iraq- and Iran-based Buyid (Buwayhid) confederacy, under whose patronage Twelver Shiite (Ithna ashari) Islam developed, held sway in the heart of the Islamic world. Geography, religion, and ethnicity tended to intermix and produce identifiable pockets of sectarian and ethnic distinction that produced strong communal bonds.
Alongside these ethnic, regional, and religious identities, there exist tribal and family allegiances and alliances that have also played an important role historically. Indeed, for much of Syrian history prior to its formation as a nation-state, most in Syria would identify primarily by their family or tribal affiliation, especially outside of the larger cities. In the cities themselves, tribal and family identification receded into the modern period as new socio-economic relationships, political identification and ideologies, and the enhanced mobility commensurate with modernity muddied the waters of traditional connections, but they were still important, and remain so even to this day; indeed, as political and economic power coalesced around a select group of clans in Syria in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, familial connections continued to be barometers of influence. For those from one of the main cities in Syria, you were just as likely to hear someone identify themselves as Halabi (Halab or Aleppo), Damascene, Homsi (from Homs), and so on. Indeed, there remains an urban–rural divide in Syria that has often taken on sectarian dimensions and has played a very important role in modern Syrian history.
In fact, identities in Syria were often layered and crisscrossing. The formation of the nation-state in the twentieth century as well as the rise of political Islam and Arab nationalist ideologies only added more layers to the nature of Syrian identity.
The Historical Syrian Mosaic
The area we know as Syria today is rich in cultural traditions. It is a true crossroads of history. Many different empires, peoples, and cultures have traversed this territory for millennia, usually on the road to conquest or fleeing would-be conquerors. As such, the country of Syria became a cultural mosaic, enriched by the intermingling of different belief systems, governance structures, and cultural practices. It was also eventually damned by this very diversity, today so apparent in what in some important ways became a sectarian-based civil war. Being a crossroads of history is usually great for tourism, and Syria is replete with some of the most magnificent historical and archeological landmarks in the world, but it is not necessarily good for a young country that has long been in search of a national identity.
Prior to the uprising in 2011, if you were to travel to Syria, it is likely you would have visited Palmyra (Tadmur) in the Syrian desert northeast of Damascus. It is an amazing place, one of the highlights of which, before it was destroyed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2015, was the Temple of Baal, dedicated to a powerful pagan god emerging from several different religious traditions in the centuries before the Common Era. It was a Roman trade way station on the East–West caravan trade route (along with Petra in Jordan). While there – and a few other places in the country – a visitor would notice a number of things named “Zenobia,” after the third-century CE queen who led the Palmyran kingdom in rebellion against its overlord, Rome, only to be quelled with great effort by the Roman Emperor Aurelian, personally leading his forces.
Travel almost directly west of Palmyra through Homs toward the Mediterranean coast and you will stop at the Crac de Chevaliers, the best-preserved Crusader castle in the Middle East, where the Knights Hospitallers military order attempted to protect the Christian Crusader presence in the Holy Land. So awesome is the nature of this fortress that even during the current Syrian civil war, military forces have successfully ensconced themselves inside its thick walls as protection against the destructive power of modern weaponry. Heading south to Damascus, you would likely visit the Street Called Straight, where St. Paul is said to have experienced his conversion to Christianity. A short trip northwest of Damascus and spectacularly nestled in a mountainous ravine is Maalula, a largely Christian town that is known as the last place on earth where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is spoken. In Aleppo to the north there are churches in Christian quarters belonging to Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics, and Armenian Orthodox. To the northwest of Aleppo is the revered pilgrimage site of St. Simeon the Stylite, a Christian ascetic in the fifth century who lived on top of a pillar for decades to show his devotion to Christ. Because of this central Christian heritage, the Christian West had always expressed a particular fascination toward the area, which heightened the interest level of Europe in the region regardless of any economic or geo-strategic factors.
The rest of the country is full of historical and religious sites belonging to the dominant religion in Syria, Islam, which arrived shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. Islam came upon a largely Judeo-Christian environment that had been under Roman/Byzantine rule. It was the minority religion in the area for some time after the Islamic conquests, especially as the Muslim conquerors showed great tolerance of existing Judeo-Christians traditions, whose practitioners were viewed as ecumenical cousins. But being a part of the religion of the political and social elite, as well as escaping a poll tax, was too seductive and led to a steady conversion that turned Syria into one of the primary bastions of Muslim power during the medieval Islamic period.
Damascus is known as one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. The modern identification of Syria as an Arab and Muslim territory began in the early years of Islam in the seventh century CE. Syria was an important trading destination for Arabs in western Arabia (the Hijaz), including those in Mecca, for several centuries before the rise of Islam. The Prophet Muhammad, before he began his religious calling, apparently participated in trade caravans to Syria as a member of the Hashemite clan. The leading clan within the Quraysh tribe that dominated Mecca was known as the Abd Shams, from which emerged the Umayyad family.
The great Islamic conquests began within two years after Muhammad’s passing. In keeping with his own preferences, the primary direction of conquest was toward Syria against the Byzantine empire. The Umayyad family, who apparently held extensive property in and around Damascus, played a central role in the conquest of Syria. By 638, Byzantine resistance in greater Syria had been smashed by the Muslim armies, and the second caliph or successor to the Prophet Muhammad, Umar, appointed an Umayyad as the first governor of Syria. His name was Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan, who eventually would be primarily responsible for establishing the Umayyad caliphate based in Damascus in 661 upon the assassination of Ali ibn Abi Talib. Over the course of its ninety years in power, there developed opposition from many different quarters in the fast-expanding Islamic world in the Middle East, North Africa, and central Asia that came under the dominion of Damascus. The expansion of Islam was a dynamic movement that, as often happens to fast-growing empires, experienced the growing pains of expansion.
The Umayyads, however, could not deliver the type of leadership that most Muslims wanted. It tended to be a regime by and for the Arabs. When the Islamic world was becoming more non-Arab and including a number of peoples who practiced religions other than Islam, this was increasingly seen as inappropriate. The ultimate result was the Abbasid revolution in 750 CE, which ended the Umayyad caliphate, shifting the center of Islam eastward to Baghdad. The Abbasids themselves, directly descended from the Prophet’s family, promised a much more religiously inspired and inclusive leadership. While falling short in many ways on both these counts as the years passed, Syria receded into the background as one of a number of provinces in a growing empire. Syrians today, however, are very proud of their Umayyad past. Many distinguishing architectural gems still remain from this medieval Islamic period, such as the grand Umayyad mosque in the old city in Damascus and, most spectacularly, the Dome of the Rock in the old city of Jerusalem. Though short-lived, the Umayyad caliphate was a critically important period during the formative and oftentimes chaotic period of early Islam.
