Post-conflict Syria

With Hezbollah building Iran’s Shi’ite strategy in Syria, what is the forecast for Assad’s benighted regime?

By NEVILLE TELLER
Syrian anti government protesters holding assad pic 370 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Syrian anti government protesters holding assad pic 370
(photo credit: REUTERS)
When the dust settles on Syria’s civil war, what sort of a situation will the world in general, and the Middle East in particular, be facing? Even if Russia and the US agree that a negotiated settlement is the way forward, there is no guarantee that either the Assad regime or his opponents would come to the table without imposing conditions that the other side would find unacceptable.  A negotiated settlement, moreover, takes no account of the aims, ambitions and interests of the score of other groups – jihadists, Islamists, extremists – that have attached themselves to one side or the other in the conflict.
Chief among these “hangers-on”, in what began as a home-grown protest movement in Arab Spring mode, is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iran has long had political ambitions regarding Syria. Over the years it has invested huge resources in converting Syria to the Shi’ite version of Islam, and in its heyday the Assad regime freely allowed Iranian missionaries into the country to strengthen the Shi’ism. 
Syria is an indispensible element in Iran’s strategy to achieve hegemony in the Middle East.  In January 2012, the commander of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qasem Suleimani declared that in “one way or another”, the Islamic Republic controlled Iraq and South Lebanon.  Now, with the old collaborative arrangement between two independent regimes looking increasingly shaky, control of Syria is in their sights.  Mehdi Taaib, who heads the think tank of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, recently stated that “Syria is the 35th district of Iran and it has greater strategic importance for Iran than Khuzestan [an Arab-populated district inside Iran].”
A few weeks ago, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah paid a secret visit to Tehran where he met with the top Iranian officials headed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and General Suleimani, who had prepared an operational plan for winning the civil conflict in Syria.  The Arab political weekly, Al-Shiraa, published in Lebanon, reported on March 15 that the Suleiman plan includes three elements:
First, the establishment of a popular sectarian army made up of Shi’ites and Alawites, to be backed by forces from Iran, Iraq, Hezbollah, and symbolic contingents from the Persian Gulf; the army will have a total of 150,000 soldiers and finally, it will be integrated with the Syrian army.
It is, perhaps, significant that all this Iranian-led manipulation of Hezbollah does not go unchallenged within Lebanon. NOW is an on-line Lebanese journal, published in English and Arabic, covering Lebanon, the Lebanese Diaspora and the Middle East.  On 4 May it published an article claiming that, in his visit to Iran, Hassan Nasrallah received guidance on how to present Hezbollah’s escalating – and increasingly unpopular – involvement in Syria to the Lebanese public.
Hezbollah, though in fact a Shi’ite militia, has long sought to enhance its legitimacy in the Sunni Arab world by presenting itself as a non-sectarian, pan-Islamic resistance movement against Israel.  But its activities in Syria do not fit this picture, and Hezbollah has been having trouble in portraying its involvement to the Lebanese public, especially in view of the increasing number of fighters killed in the conflict.  Ceremonies for burial of the dead are frequently held clandestinely, sometimes at night, so as to avoid anger and resentment. The families, however, have raised harsh questions about such unnecessary sacrifice that is not within the sacred framework of jihad against Israel, which Hezbollah claims as its raison d’être.
Hezbollah needs a convincing narrative, beyond the fact that it serves Iran’s regional interests, to justify the toll of dead and wounded from its Syrian adventure. Conjuring up the specter of hostile Sunnis coming after Shi’ite villages and religious places serves that purpose. So, in a recent speech on Hezbollah’s TV station, Nasrallah offered that up as the rationale for the movement’s involvement in Syria.
But Hezbollah relies on its pan-Islamic, anti-Israel stance for its popular support. Which explains the dispatch of a drone over northern Israel a few weeks ago.  As NOW put it: “Although Nasrallah reiterated his party’s denial that it was behind the drone he, and the group more broadly, were clearly taking credit for it and boasting about it as an achievement.”
The drone was almost certainly authorized by Iran’s leaders during Nasrallah’s visit to Tehran – as was Hezbollah’s reaction following it.  The drone would be Hezbollah refocusing the public’s attention on its anti-Israel activities, but it would not go the whole hog and claim responsibility, for a retaliatory Israeli attack on Lebanon is far from what Iran’s leaders want at present. They would prefer to safeguard Hezbollah’s military capabilities in readiness to counter any strike on their nuclear program.
So Hezbollah is engaged in building Iran’s new strategy in Syria, acting in tandem with Iran against the Sunni Islamic groups that threaten Iran’s interests in that benighted country.
As Dr Shimon Shapira, of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, recently phrased it: “For the Islamic Republic, this is a war of survival against a radical Sunni uprising that views Iran and the Shi’ites as infidels to be annihilated. If the extreme Sunnis of the Al Qaida persuasion are not defeated in Syria, they will assert themselves in Iraq and threaten to take over the Persian Gulf, posing a real danger to Iran’s regional hegemony. Khamenei does not intend to give in.” 
The writer is the author of “One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine” (2011) and writes the blog “A Mid-East Journal” (www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com)