There are quite a few book-length studies of the Syrian Civil War. The distinctive thing about this one is that academic and author Christopher Phillips insists that other regional countries weren’t ‘drawn into’ the conflict once it had got going but, on the contrary, were involved right from the start, helped to exacerbate the initial protests into a civil war, and then were vital elements which ensured that the war continued and has proven impossible to end. The six countries he considers the key players and interveners are the US, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, each of whose motivations and actions are considered at great and fascinating length.

Disaster

He opens with the claim that the Syrian civil war is the greatest human disaster of the 21st century. Over 500,000 have been killed, as many as 1.9 million wounded. Over 5 million have fled the country and 6 million been internally displaced i.e. more than half the pre-war population of 21 million. By 2013 Syria had regressed 40 years in social development. By 2015 half Syria’s schools had closed, half its children didn’t attend school, over 80% of Syrians were living in poverty, 30% in abject poverty. The average life expectancy of a Syrian dropped from 70 to 55 in four years.

The Arab Spring

The Syrian civil war began as part of the Arab Spring at the start of 2011. The whole thing kicked off when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, as a protest against yet another act of petty harassment and humiliation inflicted on him by municipal officials, the kind of low-level harassment most people in most Arab countries have had to put up with all their lives. When news got around, Bouazizi’s act inspired street demonstrations in Tunisia which then spread west to Morocco and East to Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and Syria, and on into Bahrain and Oman in the Gulf. What all these places had in common was they were ruled by small elites run by old men who had gathered power and money to themselves, their families and followers, resulting in grossly unequal societies which, above all, had large youth unemployment.

• Timeline of the Arab Spring

The unrest was to lead to the overthrow of corrupt old rulers – Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. And yet the newish, youngish leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, managed to not only contain the protests, even as they escalated in scale and violence, but, 12 years later, is still very much in place, discredited ruler of a permanently devastated Syria. Why? This is the basic question Phillips sets out to address in this long, thorough and engrossing study. First some background.

Modern Syria

Modern Syria’s boundaries were drawn up by French politicians after the Great War when, in the light of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the area known as the Middle East was carved up by the victors, France and Britain. Britain got Arabia, Palestine and Iraq; the French got Lebanon and Syria.

Syria, like Lebanon, was a complex web of religious, ethnic and cultural groups, including Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Christians (10%), Kurds in the north and east (10%), Alawites (a spin-off of Shia Islam; under 10%), Druze, with pockets of Turkmen and Aramaic speakers, Circassians and Armenians.

Between the wars

Syria and France negotiated a treaty of independence in September 1936 but France fell to the Nazis before it could be implemented. Syria came under the control of Vichy France until the British and Free French occupied the country in the Syria-Lebanon campaign in July 1941. The British forced the French to evacuate their troops in April 1946 and give Syria independence – events covered in James Barr’s excellent book, A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East.

As in so many post-colonial countries, the parliamentary institutions left by the colonial masters were weak while the army emerged as the strongest national institution. There followed a bewildering series of coups, eight in total between 1946 and 1968. In 1958 Syria joined the United Arab Republic with Egypt but left this union in 1961 after another coup. In 1963 came the decisive coup, carried out by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party.

The Ba’ath party has ruled Syria as a totalitarian one-party state ever since, taking control of all aspects of education, culture and religion. It maintains its grip through the powerful Mukhabarat (secret police). In 1966 there was an intra-party rebellion against the Ba’athist Old Guard. In 1970 the last of these disruptions took place, when the formal head of state was overthrown in November 1970 by Defence Minister Hafiz al-Assad. Assad instituted a cult of personality, his face plastered on public hoardings, his voice dominating radio and TV, state propaganda declaring he and his family would rule in perpetuity. Hence political slogans such as ‘Assad or We Burn the Country’.

Brief mention of the various wars with Israel during this period, the 1973 war as a result of which Israel occupied the Golan Heights in the far south of Syria; the long series of troubles in Lebanon, namely its civil war 1975 to 1990, the Israeli invasion of 1982 and so on. Most relevant event of Hafiz’s rule was his assault on the city of Hama which was taken over in a rising led by the Muslim Brotherhood, and which he proceeded to raze to the ground, killing up to 40,000 civilians with another 100,000 deported.

Hafiz al-Assad ruled as a brutal dictator till his death from a heart attack in 2000. He groomed his oldest son, Bassel, to succeed him but Bassel died in a car crash in 1994, whereupon Assad recalled his second son, Bashir, who was studying to be an opthalmologist in London, and quickly promoted him through the ranks of the army.

There’s no time to go into detail about the troubled history of the region during Assad’s 30 years in power: enough to mention the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Syria and Egypt united to attack Israel and lost. In 1975 the civil war began in the Lebanon which Assad was closely involved in, and which was to drag on for 15 blood years. Assad deployed the Syrian army to the country, maintaining an armed presence until 2005.

The Cold War

Phillips is an academic. This means he likes to identify issues and then cite conflicting interpretations or opinions about them. Thus, he tells us, it was received wisdom that, during the long Cold War, Middle Eastern states sided with one or other of the two superpowers. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel leaned towards America; the more Arab nationalist regimes, such as Egypt, Syria and Iraq, had stronger ties with the Soviet Union.

It’s about here in the narrative that Phillips starts to weigh rival interpretations of established narratives, citing modern scholars who claim that, contrary to Cold War conventions, the countries of the region always had their own agendas and only called on support from each super power as it suited them. Apparently it is a ‘globalist’ view to think of the Middle East as one more region in which the Superpower rivalry played out; it is the ‘regionalist’ view to say that local countries had more agency than the simple Cold War model allows. So, for example, Syria and Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 against the wishes of their Soviet sponsor; in 1982 Israel invaded south Lebanon against the wishes of its American patron (p.16).

America the only superpower in the 1990s

America has had a long ill-fated involvement in the Middle East, above all, of course, supporting Israel, making periodic attempts to find some solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Phillips suggests that between the fall of the Soviet Union and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, America was credited with having emerged as the world’s only superpower, creating a ‘unipolar’ world, and emboldening the country to intervene in conflicts such as the First Gulf War, Somalia, former Yugoslavia and so on.

Effects of the Iraq War

However, this received opinion was seriously damaged by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 in which it slowly became clear to all the region’s countries that America was not the superpower everyone had thought it to be, far from it. America had lots of money and men but turned out to be staggeringly incompetent, and easily pinned down by local insurgencies. America’s bluff was called. The superpower was cut down to size. Phillips itemises the seriously destabilising impacts of the Iraq War:

1. Rise of Iran

Iran was the great winner of the invasion of Iraq. Saddam, a Sunni, had imposed his rule on Iraq which is a majority Shia nation. Once he was overthrown and something like democratic elections were held, then Shia parties and Shia religious leaders quickly came to the fore. Many of these had spent decades in exile in Shia Iran, owed their lives, livelihoods, rise to power to Iranian sponsors, militias, to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The most notable example was Nouri al-Maliki, who had been an exile in Iran and went on to become Prime Minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014, implementing aggressively pro-Iranian, pro-Shia policies (which helped to stoke the Sunni resistance). At every level Iraqi political life came to be dominated by Shia Iran.

2. The Kurds become players

Except for the Kurds, who lived in and, as a result of the overthrow of Saddam, got to run the northern third of Iraq. The Kurdish guerrilla movements had fought Saddam Hussein throughout his brutal rule (1968 to 2003). As Iraq sank into sectarian civil war (Shia against Sunni) the Kurds effectively sealed off their northern part of the country from the madness of the Arab south. The success of the Kurds in Iraq emboldened their brother groups and militias in Syria and Turkey.

3. Saudi Arabia stirs

Back to Iran: the rise of Iranian power and influence in Iraq sparked paranoia among Sunni states, none more so than Saudi Arabia. About 15% of Saudi’s population is Shia, mostly living in its eastern provinces which, coincidentally, is also where the oil is. Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s the Saudi regime was happy to fund Saddam Hussein who acted as a Sunni barrier against Iranian ambitions. They funded his long ruinous war against the new Iranian Islamic revolutionary regime, the Iran-Iraq war 1980 to 1988. Phillips calls it a policy of ‘dual containment’. However, Saddam burned his boats when, having brought his country to the brink of bankruptcy, he invaded Kuwait in 1990, thus forfeiting the aid he’d been receiving from Saudi and the Gulf states.

Since Saddam was removed in 2003, Saudi has found itself combating the ever-growing influence of the regional superpower, Iran. Phillips points out that it’s not just power, or the Shia religion, that threaten the Saudis, but the fact that revolutionary Iran embodies a radically different political model. The Saudis are run by an old-style hereditary monarchy, conservative and repressive. Iran presents a completely different religio-political model, with far larger elements of democracy and popular say. This model represents a threat to the Saudi model (p.19).

The rise of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry was perhaps the most dramatic regional shift caused by the Iraq war… (p.20)

4. Rising sectarianism

Talk of Saudi and Iran raises the issue of Muslim sectarianism i.e. the radicalisation of religion. The Americans converted Iraq from being a secular dictatorship which kept a tight check on religious extremism into a hotbed for all kinds of Islamic fanaticism (p.22). Al Qaeda moved into Iraq and grew hugely, countless other sectarian militias were set up and carried out brutal ethnic cleansings. Then, in the early chaos of the Syrian civil war, ISIS arose, mostly led by former Al Qaeda in Iraq soldiers, themselves former officers in Saddam’s army, made homeless when Paul Bremer sacked the entire Iraqi Army.

Why the Arab Spring failed in Syria

Phillips doesn’t make the comparison with Libya but I find if pretty obvious. The Libyans managed to get rid of their dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, but failed to replace him with one unitary government; instead Libya has collapsed into two rival governments because the opposition wasn’t strong or united enough to enforce unity. Same with Syria. There was much opposition to Assad’s regime but a) it was very split along regional, ethnic and sectarian lines and b) the regime managed to keep support from a wide enough range of groups, probably, in the end, the majority of the population which, although not keen on Assad’s repressive regime, feared the alternative i.e. chaos.

For this fear of chaos was another legacy of the Iraq War. Assad simply had to remind his people what had happened next door, in neighbouring Iraq, when an established dictator was overthrown i.e. chaos, sectarian massacre, ethnic cleansing and civil war. Probably the entire Alawi population rallied behind him (10 to 13%), as did the Orthodox Christian minority (8%). The Kurds took the opportunity to rebel but that just reinforced conservative fears that the rebellion would lead to the country’s collapse.

As I understand it, the one key decider for the fate of Arab Spring protests was whether the army and security services went over to the protesters or not. In Tunisia and Egypt they did and the old rulers were overthrown. In Libya it was a split, some did, some didn’t and the country collapsed. In Syria, the army and the network of security services referred to as the Mukhabarat was closely allied with Assad and remained loyal.

As to the splits in the Syrian opposition, this reached almost ludicrous levels, with virtually every town and village in rebel areas setting up their own councils, while a congeries of umbrella groups made up of exiled politicians, based in Turkey, Saudi or Qatar, fought to claim leadership of the movement. Phillips has one hugely telling statistic. At the peak of confusion in the Lebanon Civil War there were some 30 identifiable named militias; whereas, by 2013, a US centre identified 1,050 anti-Assad brigades and 3,250 smaller companies (p.127). It was, and is, like herding sheep.

The Kurds

For a century the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey have been seeking, in one form or another, some kind of autonomy if not a self-ruling state. The Kurds make up to 10% of the population of Syria, about 10% of the population of Iran, 18% of Turkey and 20% of Iraq. But as well as engaging in permanent conflict with the Turkish army, enduring periodic genocidal assaults by Assad in Syria and especially Saddam in Iraq, the Kurds have often been divided among themselves.

Phillips gives a clear account of the confusing manoeuvring of Kurdish groups on page 111. In May a Kurdish National Movement was formed which brought together 17 different political parties including the Democratic Union Party or PYD, Syria’s branch of the long-established Kurdish separatist party, the PKK. This broke down because of PYD demands and was replaced in October by the Kurdish National Council, which was more enduring but only contained 10 of the original 17 groups and not the PYD.

The PYD’s militia was named the People’s Defense Units or the YPG. When Assad forces withdrew from some areas held by the YPG, other Kurdish groups and Gulf backers accused it of being in league with Assad, something it strongly denied.

When the Syrian National Council was formed in August 2011 as an umbrella for opposition groups it refused to remove the word ‘Arab’ from its motto of calling for a ‘Syrian Arab Republic’, thus prompting a walkout by the Kurdish delegates. Despite repeated attempts at mediation both sides have refused to compromise. So you get the picture. It is with the Kurds, as with the Arabs in general, a picture of endless bickering disagreement.

Not only this but there is interference from Kurds outside Syria. The collapse of the state in Iraq led to the creation of a Kurdish autonomous area in northern Iraq, but rule of this was contested between the Iraqi branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a hard-core Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), a much more conservative nationalist movement, led by Masoud Barzani. So, very broadly speaking, the Kurds were at odds with their Arab partners in the opposition to Assad, and were also divided among themselves.

ISIS

However, the Kurds received a boost in 2014 after the catastrophic fall of Mosul, the main city in northern Iraq, to Islamic State, because this triggered the Americans to become involved. Barack Obama’s administration refused to intervene in the war against Assad but was prepared to give direct support to the YPG in its battles against ISIS. The Americans supplied and organised the fierce campaign, fought 2016 to 2017, to seize back the city of Raqqa in north-eastern Syria, which had become the Islamic State’s de facto capital.

Turkey

The situation of the Kurds is, of course, complicated by numerous external factors, the most obvious of which is that Turkish governments of all flavours remain vehemently opposed to the slightest flicker of Kurdish independence and so have declared the YPG a terrorist organisation, in this respect aligning it with the much more long-established Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which actually has carried out terrorist attacks, for example, on police stations, in Turkey.

It was concern about the ‘infection’ of Kurdish independence spreading from Kurdish autonomous regions which led Turkey to invade and occupy key areas in the north of Syria, where Turkish forces remain to this day.

Outside forces

1. US

Barack Obama was US President 2009 to 2017. The criticism made of his foreign policy was that he was too optimistic (thought other leaders were as rational and consensual as him) and believed America had more power than the Iraq invasion showed that it actually does.

Regarding Syria, Phillips records how the Obama administration, after initial caution, moved by August 2011 to call for Assad to go. This was what Phillips calls a ‘conflict escalator’: it misled everyone. It misled the Russians and everyone in the region into thinking America might be about to intervene (as in Libya) to arm the opposition and force Assad’s overthrow; thus stiffening Russia’s support for Assad. It stiffened the resolve of opposition groups who thought America would soon come riding to their rescue. It stiffened the resolve of the Assad regime hard-liners who thought they had nothing to lose by behaving more brutally.

Then there’s the issue of intelligence and leverage. America had been bankrolling the Egyptian state for 50 years or so, paying for its food and bankrolling its army. Therefore America had many levers to pull when they decided it was time for long-serving Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak (president from 1981 to 2011) to go.

But the Americans then mistakenly thought they would have the same kind of influence in Syria which, on the contrary, was a) a much more closed repressive regime than Egypt b) had been a Soviet client state since the Ba’ath took power. I.e. the Americans found it easy to topple Mubarak, impossible to topple Assad.

In 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and head of the CIA David Petraeus presented a plan to vet, train and equip opposition groups (p.143). Obama rejected it and some critics said ever afterwards that this was a lost opportunity to give the rebels the boost they needed to overthrow the dictator and a decade of misery would have been prevented. Phillips, here as everywhere, is enjoyably measured and balanced. He presents the counter-arguments that a) however much the US had given rebel groups events went on to show that Russia and Iran would have matched and superseded it; b) though Clinton et al reassured the Prez that the arms would only go to the good guys and not fall into the hands of ‘extremists’, they would have c) America spent a fortune vetting, training and equipping the police force and armies in both Iraq and Afghanistan who turned out to be either criminally corrupt or simply fled at the first sign of trouble. Seems to me Obama was right to be sceptical about everything to do with discredited foreign adventures.

2. Russia

Dmitry Medvedev, president of Russia 2008 to 2012, prime minister of Russia 2012 to 2020. Vladimir Putin president 2012 to the present. Russia had multiple motives. The Soviet Union had strongly supported Assad’s father, providing weapons and training, though this legacy wasn’t decisive. Similarly, Russia had trade ties with Syria but not as extensive as with Turkey or Iraq.

In 2011 there were protests in Moscow against Putin being elected Russian president yet again so Putin had a vested interest against the Arab Spring popular revolts. A bigger motive was blocking further US influence in the region. In a rare moment the UN Security Council approved armed intervention i.e. air attacks, to support the rebels in Libya; Russia blocked any similar gestures in Syria. If the principle of replacing unpopular/unjust leaders is allowed, it might at some point be used to justify overthrowing Putin himself.

Lastly, anti-jihadism. Fourteen per cent of the population of Russia is Muslim. Putin presented his murderous wars in Chechnya as campaigns against Islamic jihadism. Supporting secular Assad could be presented in the same light as standing up against jihadism, something which became easier when al Qaeda and then ISIS moved in.

There’s another interpretation, which is that Russia had precious little influence over the Assad regime, but shrewdly bet it would be difficult to oust, and gambled on its endurance. Then, once committed, and having been criticised in the West and the Arab world fir its support, it became a matter of prestige, sticking to its guns.

3. Turkey

The leading figure in Turkish politics for the last 20 years has been Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who was prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014, president of Turkey from 2014 to the present.

Turkey began to change its attitude to its neighbours in the Middle East after Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (the AKP) was elected to government in 2002. The AFK launched a pivot away from the West (and from the secular policies of Turkey’s modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), encouraging Islam and engaging more with its neighbours in the region (pages 35 and 70).

In this spirit Erdoğan set out to overcome decades of enmity with Syria – Turkey had for decades been part of NATO while Syria was firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence. Thus he cultivated a friendship with young Bashar, even flying to Damascus to sign a free trade agreement in 2004.

Turkey’s longest land border is with Syria (566 miles) so the two countries had a vested interest in coming to agreements about trade, crossing points and the vexed issue of water supply.

However, when the protests began at the start of 2011, and especially when Assad’s regime began to crack down, Erdoğan was quick to criticise the regime. By July Turkey was harbouring the group which announced itself as the Free Syrian Army. Erdoğan continued to try to persuade Assad to stand down behind the scenes, but by September had given up and in November made his first speech publicly calling for Assad to go and comparing him to Hitler (p.72).

Phillips suggests a number of reasons for this volte-face. One was that Erdoğan felt personally let down by Assad’s behaviour, and then chagrined that he turned out to have so little influence over him. Second reason is Erdoğan’s Muslim faith and his policy of making Turkey a more Muslim country. Much of the opposition to Assad was Islamic in nature and devout Muslims turning against a secular-militarist regime in Syria exactly mirrored what the AFK was doing in Turkey, trying to dismantle the military, Kemalist ‘Deep State’ in order to make Turkey more Islamic.

Lastly, Erdoğan is a populist and he wanted to make Turkey a leader in the region by appealing directly to the people, to ‘the street’. Hence his support of the Arab Spring revolts, and hence his quick realisation that his position would be jeopardised by association with a man who was hell-bent on turning into a genocidal tyrant (Assad). (This, for example, explains Erdoğan’s recent speeches in support of Hamas; all part of his ongoing campaign to make Turkey leader of the Arab ‘street’, with Erdogan still polling as the most popular leader for Arab youths.)

The situation quickly became very complex but three major facts emerge: 1) Turkey has taken over 4 million Syrian refugees, at obvious cost and burden; 2) Erdoğan remains implacably opposed to the Kurdish forces in Syria and any attempt to set up an independent Kurdish entity; 30 despite much criticism, Turkey appears to have supported al-Nusrah and ISIS, the two most extreme jihadist groups.

4. Saudi Arabia

Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has been King of Saudi Arabia since 2015 and was Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia from 2015 to 2022. Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, known as MBS, is Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia.

For decades Saudi worked behind the scenes and kept a low profile. The Iraq War changed that by significantly boosting Iran’s reach and influence. The Saudis perceived the rise and rise of Iran as a threat to be countered, so when the Arab Spring came along in 2011, they reacted in two ways. They were, in general, against populist uprisings because they feared something similar might happen in their own tightly controlled kingdom. And they were against the kind of radical jihadism which had struck several times within the kingdom (p.120). Nonetheless, the biggest decider for the Saudis in Syria was Assad’s traditional alliance with Iran. Being anti-Iran meant they were anti-Assad, and so the Saudis from very early on a) supported anti-Assad forces and b) jostled with Qatar to take control of, host and organise the anti-Assad opposition.

Saudi Arabia is run by a large extended family which have created a complex bureaucracy. Part of the reason it likes ‘leading from the back’ is because it often takes a while to develop a policy position. Compare and contrast smaller, nimbler, quicker Qatar.

5. Qatar

When the war broke out Qatar was ruled by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. He abdicated in 2013 in favour of his son, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who is current Emir of Qatar. Qatar has developed, over the past two decades, increasingly ambitious plans to be a player in the region. A central symbol of this was the establishment of the Al Jazeera 24-hour news channel in 2006.

Qatar took the lead in the Arab League in the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, which gave it an inflated sense of its own power, and its ability to sway the West. Its rulers thought they could pull off the same thing in Syria (p.135).

Phillips not only explains how Saudi and Qatar developed new foreign policies in the aftermath of the Iraq War, he goes on to explain in immense detail, the rivalry and jostling between the two states to support, host and finance the Syrian opposition and how this had the unintended consequence of further splitting and dividing an already highly fractured opposition.

After an initial optimistic moment in 2012, the intervention of the two rival Gulf states had the net effect of making whoever they nominated as leaders of the opposition seem just that, external nominees with little support in Syria itself (p.117). It was damaging and promoted factionalism (p.124).

Qatar supported the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia loathed it. Thus Qatar was livid when Riyadh backed the Egyptian military’s overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo, in July 2013 (p.193).

6. Iran

Iran supported Assad with money, munitions, men and loans, with food and oil for his population. Most importantly Iran lent Assad Qassem Sulemanei, a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, from 1998 until his assassination in 2020 commander of the Quds Force, an IRGC division primarily responsible for extraterritorial and clandestine military operations. According to Phillips Sulemanei was responsible for organising Shia militias in Iraq in their insurgencies against the occupying US forces. Therefore, on the one hand, he had immense experience at organising armies for asymmetrical warfare. On the other hand, the Iranians found the command structures of Assad’s security forces less controllable than they expected.

Sulemanei brought in experienced fighters and officers from Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon, to strengthen and organise the National Syrian Army which was felt to be weak and undisciplined by comparison.

At its most extreme some critics accused Iran of effectively annexing Syria and keeping Assad on as a figurehead. But Phillips rejects this theory, stating that Assad was always his own man, irritating his Iranian patrons by his obstinacy.

(Israel)

Israel was never a player in the Syrian civil war like the six countries described above. Israel had been enemies with Syria since the latter was one of the Arab nations who attacked the new state at its inception in 1948. Syria then lost the Golan Heights neighbouring north Israel in the 1967 war and failed to retrieve them in 1973.

That said, Assad father and son were content to mostly keep the peace with Israel, preferring to work through proxies in civil war-torn Lebanon. When the protests broke out in Syria in spring 2011 and as the situation deteriorated into civil war, Israel’s position was relatively straightforward: a civil war in Syria kept all its enemies nicely tied up, so Israel was content to watch and not intervene.

The worst case scenario for Israel was the overthrow of Assad by either an Iranian-backed Shia regime (disaster), or a militant Sunni regime (bad), either of which would feel tempted to attack Israel to appease their domestic constituencies. But as the protests turned to conflict and this descended into chaos, it suited Israel for the civil war to be dragged out indefinitely (p.174). Over the 12 years of the war Israel has mostly limited its interventions to local air strikes on what they thought were transports of missiles to Hezbollah forces along their northern border, or the occasional targeted assassination of Hezbollah leaders.

The same continues to be the case in light of this new Gaza Crisis i.e. Israel wants to keep its northern border quiet in order to finish off Hamas (if it can).

An academic study

Phillips is very much the academic, being Professor in International Relations at Queen Mary College, University of London. Sometimes academic studies can be a bad thing and Phillips’s book is certainly dry and schematic instead of dramatic and journalistic. But in his case it’s a good thing. The war quickly developed into a multi-player game of 12-D chess, with a confusing array of forces both inside and outside Syria, whose positions continually changed and evolved i.e. it is fiendishly mind-bogglingly complicated. So I liked the clarity with which Phillips presented the positions and interests of all the different parties: it was like a series of PowerPoint slides, clear and logical.

Actually, more than that, on each slide he does the academic thing of presenting all the reasons for an interpretation (action or decision) and then all the reasons against and I found this very neat and satisfying. It is like a series of hundreds of little academic debates. Could the Kofi Annan peace plan ever have worked? Could the opposition have been organised quicker and more effectively but for the rivalry of Saudi Arabia and Qatar? Might early pressure from Russia have forced Assad to the negotiating table? Phillips notes hundreds of decision points on the journey into anarchy, describes them lucidly, and then assesses with logic and clarity.

It’s quite a hard book to read because it is so dry, and because the situation is so bewilderingly complicated: by about page 150 I was drowning in names and acronyms, and sometimes struggling to focus on his many balanced analyses of the pros and cons of the positions adopted by scores of different countries, leaders, foreign secretaries, armies, militias and so on. It’s a lot to take in and process. But ultimately very worthwhile. I enjoyed it and I respected Phillips’s approach.

Papers and studies

Throughout the text Phillips cites academic studies, papers and theories and some of these are worth recording. He cites the work of J. Michael Greig on civil wars which suggests that peace cannot be achieved until both sides reach ‘a hurting stalemate’ and that this doesn’t occur until about 130 months of fighting and 33,000 deaths (pages 102 and 192).

Russia steps up

The second edition of Phillips’s book was completed in mid-2020. From 2015 to 2020 I had the impression that events moved faster than in the first four years of complex stalemate.

The key turning point in Phillips’s account appears to be Putin’s full-on despatch of Russian forces to Syria in September 2015, the first time Russian forces had been outside the territory of the old Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War. Relations with the US had tanked after Russia annexed the Crimea in March 2014. Russian troops expanded old Soviet bases and runways and the Mediterranean port it had used in the olden days. Russia then mounted air strikes which it claimed to the world were against ISIS but as often as not were against other anti-Assad forces. It was able to assume a dominant role vis-a-vis its nominal partner, Iran. And having boots on the ground brought it into dangerous proximity with Turkish forces as the latter took an increasingly pro-active role, with a limited incursion in 2016 followed by a full-scale invasion of north Syria in 2019. This move, codenamed Operation Peace Spring, was designed to expel Kurdish forces from Turkey’s neighbour and create a 20 mile deep buffer zone. The Turkish aim was also to relocate some of the nearly 4 million Syrian refugees who had taken refuge in their country. Both attacking the ‘terrorist’ Kurds and resettling refugees were domestically popular policies in Turkey, but the brutality of the incursion brought condemnation and sanctions from the West, and Turkish and Russian forces came close to blows until Putin and Erdoğan signed a deal for join patrolling of some of the seized areas.

Anyway, from the Russian intervention of September 2015 onwards, the story speeds up with Assad’s forces, backed by Russia or Iran, slowly retaking key towns and cities and reasserting control in the most populous west of the country; Idlib in the north becoming a sort of safe haven for opponents, where those who surrendered in cities like Aleppo were bussed; uncertainty about how long Turkey will continue to occupy a strip of northern Syria as a ‘buffer zone’; and the fate of the sparsely populated east of the country, liberated by American and Kurdish forces, remains uncertain.

Summary

Having detailed events and turning points up to 2020, Phillips ends his text with a summary of winners and losers, mainly losers:

Turkey

Turkey’s goal of promoting itself as a regional ‘hegemon’ (power) has been ‘shredded’ (p.305). The ‘buffer zone’ Turkey created along its southern border also acts as a physical barrier to greater involvement in the region. The war:

• resulted in at least 3.5 million Syrian refugees
• increased domestic terrorism by ISIS and the PKK, who have reignited their violent campaign in eastern Turkey
• helped a shift towards more autocratic government by Erdoğan

Qatar

Qatar is worse off as a result of the war. Its domestic situation is stable as is its alliance with the US, but:

• its initial success backing the rebels in Libya soon came to be tarnished by the collapse of the Libyan state
• it support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt came to an abrupt end in 2013 when the MB government was overthrown in a military coup
• Qatar was eclipsed as main Arab sponsor of the Assad opposition by Saudi Arabia
• relations with its Gulf neighbours reached a nadir when, in 2017, Saudi and the United Arab Emirates, along with Egypt and Bahrain, cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and imposed a trade and travel ban

The outcome was the opposite of the region-bestriding influence Qatar had hoped to project after its successful support of the opposition in Libya in 2011.

USA

Barack Obama wanted to turn the page on the Bush wars and he succeeded in resisting siren calls for a full-on engagement against Assad in early and mid-2011. No more occupying Middle Eastern countries, good. When he did intervene it was in specific areas to help specific allies (the Kurds) destroy ISIS and, when that goal was more or less accomplished, he withdrew. I admire Obama for this.

But critics say he was responsible for a massive diminution of America’s reputation in the region. All the opposition groups were disappointed, as were regional allies such as Turkey and especially Saudi Arabia, by America’s failure to intervene. America’s limited intervention opened the space for the expansionism of Iran but especially of Russia.

Trump was worse. Despite claiming to be the opposite of everything Obama represented, Trump, following his instinctive isolationism, had the same general effect of undermining American authority and fostering a more multipolar Middle East. More chaotic, harder to control. Hence lots of articles like this:

• America’s military decline in the Middle East

Saudi Arabia

Experienced a mild succession crisis with the death of King Abdullah in 2015 but, in the event, he was smoothly succeeded by Salman and his activist son, Mohammed bin Salman. But MBS, as he’s known, hasn’t found foreign policy as easy as he thought. Saudi:

• failed in its aim of overthrowing Assad
• failed in its aim of stemming Iranian influence (although supporting the opposition in the field ensured that Iran drained its coffers supporting the regime and Hezbollah)
• has found it difficult to end the civil war in Yemen which it exacerbated (the Saudis support Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government against the Houthi rebels who are supported by Iran; it’s a proxy war between the two, as is Syria)

Iran

On the plus side, Iran:

• preserved the Assad regime and hugely increasing its say and influence in Syria
• which meant also securing a land route to supply its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah
• maintained sway over Iraq
• three developments which go towards creating a crescent of Iranian influence from Iran, through Iraq, through Syria and into Lebanon

On the downside, Iran likes to project itself as a defender of all Muslims but its defence of Alawite Assad, using Shia Hezbollah, and fighting against the numerous Sunni opposition groups, badly damaged that unifying goal. Also, all this came at a large economic cost, exacerbated by ongoing US and Western sanctions (some about Syria, some ongoing squabbles about Iran’s nuclear programme).

Israel

Israel managed to keep out of the war and to stop it spilling over onto its territory, by a) coming to selective agreements with rebels holding the Golan Heights, b) by launching selective strikes against Hezbollah, with Russian acquiescence (after personal meetings and negotiations between Netanyahu and Putin, which Phillips describes in fascinating detail).

Russia

Russia is arguably the biggest winner from the Syrian civil war. Russia:

• secured domestic security from Islamic terrorism (Russia was happy to see thousands of jihadis from the Central Asian republics head off to Syria to be killed)
• continued to expand its economic reach into the Middle East
• boosted its regional credentials at the expense of waning US power

However, with no end in sight to the war, there are questions about how long Russia can continue to pour aid into a broken country, and Syria is unlikely to ever become a profitable trading partner.

Credit

The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East by Christopher Phillips was first published by Yale University Press in 2016. References are to the revised paperback edition, published 2020.

Related reviews

• New World Disorder reviews