Only one nation can help Syria recover: The Arabs

Middle Israel - The civil war’s victors wasted all six years in which they could have rebuilt the land they had destroyed

By AMOTZ ASA-EL DECEMBER 6, 2024 13:38

RESIDENTS OF Aleppo, Syria, line up to receive bread on Tuesday. (photo credit: REUTERS/Mahmoud Hasano)

With war’s fury gripping his land, seven-year-old Amineh Abu Kerech’s father fled Damascus to the unknown, taking with him Amineh, her mother, sister, and childhood. 

After one nomadic year in Syria and three more in Egypt, they proceeded to England, where Amineh – by then 13 – penned the prizewinning poem, “Lament for Syria.” 

“Syrian doves croon above my head,” she wrote, “their call cries in my eyes.”

“I’m trying to design a country,” she went on, a country “that will go with my poetry / and not get in the way when I’m thinking / where soldiers don’t walk over my face / I’m trying to design a country / which will be worthy of me if I’m ever a poet / and make allowances if I burst into tears / I’m trying to design a city / of love, peace, concord, and virtue / free of mess, war, wreckage, and misery.”

Tragically, the Syria for which Amineh longs this week grew even more distant than it already was. 

DISPLACED PEOPLE who fled from the Aleppo countryside ride on a vehicle with belongings, in Tabqa, Syria, this week. (credit: REUTERS/Orhan Qereman)

Military developments

THE MILITARY developments seem clear. 

Islamist rebels stormed Syrian outposts and bases, entering Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital, and seizing its airport. 

Tactically, the assault is reminiscent of Hamas’s October 7 attack, deploying riflemen and light vehicles while catching an unsuspecting military by complete surprise. Strategically, however, the rebels’ chances of rebooting Syria’s civil war are low. The Syrian arena is too crowded and contradictory for anyone to fully seize it. 

The insurgency is led by fundamentalists for whom the secular President Bashar Assad is an infidel. However, the same Assad’s staunchest allies are Iran’s equally fundamentalist mullahs. 

Syria’s Sunnis resent Assad’s tribe, the Alawites, but the anti-Sunni alliance’s Russian patron has a huge Sunni population, nearly 25 million Russians. The rebels’ patron, Turkey, is expectedly Sunni, but its main enemy in this theater are the Kurds, who are also Sunnis.

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Turkey is fighting the Syrian Kurds because of its own Kurdish minority, whose nationhood it denies and whose potential secession it dreads. The US, however, backs the Kurds, which places NATO allies Ankara and Washington on opposite sides of the Syrian war. 

Israel’s position in all this is even murkier. On the one hand, its Lebanese nemesis, Hezbollah, fought for Assad. On the other hand, the Sunni Islamists Hezbollah fought are, from Israel’s standpoint, just as dangerous. 

It’s a big mess, then, but three facts nonetheless loom beyond Syria’s regathered battle fog. 

First, Assad is firmly backed by Russia, which sees in its aerial and naval bases in western Syria major outposts in its imperial master plan. Second, Russia’s air power should suffice to stem the renewed rebellion’s thrust. And third, the 13-year war’s already massive devastation, dislocation, and despair are now set to further expand. 

Syria has become a battleground for a plethora of imperial predators, religious fanatics, and distant powers, none of which answers Amineh’s question: “Can anyone teach me how to make a homeland?” 

Syria's future

SYRIA CAN, and someday will, be rebuilt. But before young Syrians learn “how to make a homeland,” they must understand who will not remake their homeland. It won’t be any of the three non-Arab powers that assisted Syria’s suicide. 

It won’t be Turkey, whose military occupies hundreds of Syrian towns along a northern strip nearly twice the size of the West Bank. Having sheltered more than three million Syrian refugees, Turkey now wants them to return to their homeland, but Assad demands that Turkey first end its occupation. It’s a recipe for stalemate and yet more decay, disillusionment, and wrath. 

The Turkish demand is fair, but its refusal to retreat means it doesn’t care about Syria. It cares about Turkey. Worse, even if it wanted to help rebuild Syria, Turkey is in no position to help anyone because the lira, worth $0.26 when Amineh penned her poem, has since plunged to hardly three cents. The same goes for Russia, where the ruble tanked over the same period, from 16 American cents to less than one penny, not to mention Iran’s paper money, which now trades officially at 42,000 – and unofficially at more than 100,000 – rials to the dollar. 

It is now six years since these three countries concocted the deal that halted the fighting in Idlib and seemed to end the civil war. Alas, for the war to end, Syria had to be led from there to a path of massive reconstruction, the way the US was after its civil war, and the way Europe was after World War II. 

To end the war, Ankara, Moscow, and Tehran should have launched a Marshall Plan that would have carpeted Syria with thousands of new houses, factories, hospitals, and schools. Such thinking, besides being beyond their means, is beyond their minds. They do war, not peace.

There was a time when the West would assume such a role, but chances of such altruism happening during the approaching Trumpian era are as good as chances that Russia will join NATO. 

Only one nation, it follows, can help Syria recover, the same nation that Syria’s Persian, Turkish, and Russian intruders have so intensely bludgeoned and dishonored: the Arabs. 

The princes, emirs, and sheikhs of Riyadh, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, and Oman have not only the money Syria begs for but also the Arab ears that should hear, and the Arab souls that should feel what Syria’s foreign invaders will never hear or feel: the lament, as Amineh penned it, for “Syria, my love,” the land of “merciful soil” and “fragrance of jasmine,” the tormented motherland whose “screaming cry” she hears “in the cries of the doves” while reporting from afar that her wing is broken, like those of her lost country’s doves.

Middle Israel (originally slugged On the Agenda) today enters its 30th year.

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The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership