Almost dormant for four years, last week the volcano of the Syrian uprising erupted with a vengeance. In four days, its lava covered the country’s second largest city Aleppo before moving towards central cities of Hama and Homs on its way to the capital Damascus.
The force that carried out the operation came under the label “Mission to Liberate the Levant” (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) but was quickly identified as a reincarnation of the Victory Front (Jebhat al-Nusra), which was the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.
Whoever redesigned that force as a “new and improved product” wanted to achieve three goals.
The first was to transform it into something resembling a regular army with uniforms, high class arms and materiel and plans for creating an administration in conquered areas.
The second aim was to distance it from jihadism by claiming it will protect religious minorities and avoiding the usual blood-curdling jihadist rhetoric. Thirdly, it is marketed as an army of liberation whose primary aim is to drive out unspecified “foreign occupiers.”
Nevertheless, the use of the label “Levant” (Sham) puts a question mark in front of the “liberating force.” Using that medieval term instead of the word Syria, which jihadists have always regarded as alien because it was put in use under the French mandate, the group and its backers implicitly deny the existence of a Syrian nation-state.
Instead they see a vast ungoverned land, which could be reshaped in a variety of ways including the creation of several mini-states reflecting the current reality on the ground.
Over the past decade, Syria has been divided into several fiefdoms with Russia, Türkiye, Iran, the United States, the remnants of the Islamic Caliphate (Daesh) and the truncated Assad regime controlling patches of territory through local elements or imported mercenaries.
The idea of carving Syria into mini-states is most reflected in the Turkish media but also echoed elsewhere.
For the past two years, Türkiye has made several moves in that direction by forming an administration in areas under the control of its allies in Idlib and imposing the Turkish lira as the local currency.
It has also started “encouraging” some of the Syrian refugees in Türkiye to return home often as employees of Turkish businesses.
The capture of Aleppo by the “Levanter” force could enable Ankara to revive Turkish economic presence in the industrial heart of Syria.
Before the Syrian civil war started in 2011, more than 400 Turkish companies, including many small and medium businesses, were located in Aleppo representing over $50 billion in direct investment, the country’s second biggest venture after the one in Libya.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have another interest in seeing Syria redesigned as a galaxy of mini-states: the elimination of the Kurdish threat supported by the Syrian state under the Assad dynasty since the 1970s.
Some in Turkish political circles regard the creation of “artificial states” after the fall of the Ottoman Empire as an act of revenge by Western powers against the Turkish caliphate, which for centuries had represented the Islamic challenge to Christendom’s goal of ruling the world.
Erdogan has always seen the treaties imposed on the Turkish Republic, especially the Treaty of Lausanne, as a humiliation. Next year marks the centenary of that treaty and its legal expiration, something that Erdogan has hinted at as an opportunity to “correct injustices done to Türkiye.”
In Erdogan’s view, that could reopen the Turkish claims, if not of sovereignty at least as having “special rights,” to parts of Iraq and Syria.
By shattering the illusion of re-stabilizing Syria under Assad, last week’s events encourage those who regard Syria as an artificial state. Pro-Erdogan Turkish political circles, however, forget that all nation-states are artificial because none fell from the skies fully shaped. The Turkish Republic, created in 1924 is only 22 years older than the Syrian Republic, which was born in 1946 at the end of the French mandate. Independent Iraq was born only eight years after the Turkish Republic.
The argument that dividing the region into mini-states would reduce the risk of war is also unsustainable. One example is Gaza, which isn’t even a state.
Denying the existence of a Syrian nation with full right to statehood and territorial integrity poses a risk to the security and stability of the whole region.
Anyone familiar with realties on the ground would know that while the term “Levant” (Sham) is an arcane shibboleth, the word Syria designates a national identity that none could deny.
This sense of “Syrianity” started to take shape soon after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
In a series of reportages about Syria under French mandate, the writer Joseph Kessel observed the emergence of “Syrian identity” in its earliest phases.
In a different tone, the same reality is reflected in the 1951 Hollywood movie “Sirocco” which depicts the Syrian national liberation struggle against the French.
English novelist Agatha Christie observed the same reality in the 1930s when she spent two years in Raqqa with her archaeologist husband Sir Max Mallowan. They arrived in Raqqa assuming Syria was a desert inhabited by Bedouin tribes in perpetual conflict and with no sense of belonging to a broader concept named Syria. She found that they had been wrong. The result was “Come, Tell Us Who You Are,” a fascinating reportage on how Syria, a chunk of old empires, was morphing into a nation.
Those who deny the existence of the Syrian nation cannot masquerade as friends of Syria and advocates of stability in the Middle East.
