What Happened to Syria?

As in most things, the events currently going on in Syria and Iraq leading to the rise of ISIS can’t be narrowed down to one cause. Widespread unrest and civil war are usually caused by a multitude of divergent events coming together at the same time to put pressure on existing social structures until they begin to fracture. We too often mistake the last link in this causal chain for the one reason such an event occurs and the rise of ISIS is no exception.

The roots of what is going on in Syria can be traced back to WWII. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which actually took a couple of hundred years, corresponding to the outbreak of WWII western powers found themselves drawn into local conflicts in the region. After the Allies defeated the Axis powers a new dynamic of power developed. Large scale machination of ships, tanks, and airplanes put a new emphasis on energy sources that both sides immediately understood to be crucial for maintaining power in the world.

As the middle east was relatively rich in oil it immediately became an area of great interest for all major industrial nations with their newfound dependence on large sources of fossil fuels. The region was quickly carved up and divided into areas of influence by France, England, the US and the newly powerful USSR. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Jordan were newly important regions. Lines of influence and borders were arbitrarily created in many of these areas completely independent of what the native population wanted or even recognized in the scramble that ensued.

With the arbitrary establishment of Israel in response to Germany’s attempted genocide of the Jewish race, the region had a new irritant added to the mix. Native populations all across the region found themselves ruled by newly installed leaders controlled by larger industrial nations that they knew nothing about previously. In most cases local chieftains amenable to foreign control were installed as leaders in many of these newly created countries. Many of these newly established rulers had been tribal leaders of small groups previously and proceeded to immediately create a ruling class from amongst their own tribe without any thought of building a national consensus. This was the norm rather than the exception all across the region. As long as the new leaders cooperated with the industrial nation given a sphere of influence over them there weren’t too many other qualifications necessary.

Naturally, this led to problems when the other tribal leaders who had once had some power lost it. Unrest led to violence which led to further persecution and tighter controls from dictatorial leaders with foreign support and this scenario played out over and over again all across the region. When such leaders sometimes faced uprisings they couldn’t control their industrial nation supporters either stepped in to help quell the uprisings or simply replaced them with someone more brutal and able to maintain control. This is basically how a Sunni minority from cooperative Saudi Arabia gained a foothold in largely Shia dominated British controlled Iraq originally. It is also how a small Alawite minority group in Syria managed to take over a largely Sunni dominated Soviet controlled Syria.

Meanwhile in US controlled Iran, our chosen local tribal leader; the Shah carried out a brutal coup over an elected Iranian leader with the help of the CIA. The Shah’s rule was notably repressive with arbitrary prisons, torture, and all manner of human cruelty a hallmark of his rule. Eventually, the people themselves got enough of this and rose up against him behind a Shia religious Ayatollah who had conveniently been safely hiding in France. When this group took over and basically threw the remaining US influence out while at the same time taking US hostages all over Iran it set off a chain of events that has spun increasingly out of control ever since.

In response to this action the US began arming and supporting the same Sunni dictator that had sprung up in Iraq when the British had enough and pulled out of the continual mayhem there; Saddam Hussein. Hussein also relied on arbitrary prisons, torture, assassinations, and all manner of brutality to maintain control in Iraq but he was willing to fight our new enemies in Iran so we began supplying him arms, training, and large amounts of money which he used to further consolidate his power in Iraq and attack Iran.

Meanwhile, a centrist government in Afghanistan was overthrown by a couple of upstart communist groups. The Soviet Union, anxious for more influence in the fossil fuel rich middle-east, and losing influence in Egypt and Libya threw their support in the way of arms and training for this relatively small group. Unfortunately for the Soviets this group soon split into two groups that began fighting each other and brutalizing everyone else which touched off several organized fundamentalist religious groups being formed in response. Brutal mass killings became the norm amongst the many tribal and religious feuds that had been simmering for a very long time. Saudi Arabia sent in support, arms, and money for their Sunni brothers and Iran sent in support, arms, and money for their Shia brothers and the whole region devolved into a massive violent vortex.

The Soviet Union, anxious to preserve its tenuous foothold in Afghanistan sent in arms, advisers, and finally its own military to quell the mess. The US government, anxious to harm its cold war enemy in any way possible, began sending in arms and support for a number of fundamentalist Islamic groups on both sides. Even though no one really knew who they were supporting from the outside Afghanistan found itself having arms and money from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and the US sent to all manner of insurgents willing to fight the USSR on one side and the USSR support and military on the other.

Meanwhile, our rogue leader in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, began threatening other oil rich countries in the region besides Iran. He became so powerful and full of self-importance that he invaded neighboring Kuwait as they had a lot of well-developed and prosperous oil fields and 15 years of constant warfare against Iran had tended to erode his country’s infrastructure. Hussein didn’t see it as much of an issue, after all his supporters in the US had done much worse over the last half century to protect their interest in the region and Kuwait was relatively tiny and unimportant in his mind.

He didn’t take into account the delicate balance between industrial backed oil fiefdoms and soon found himself under attack from a well-organized US led coalition of nations that did understand the necessity of this balance if the western world is to continue to depend on Middle Eastern oil. As he quickly retreated back into Iraq a strange thing happened. Some people within the intelligence community of the US convinced our then president George Bush Sr. that if we removed Hussein Iraq would quickly devolve into sectarian violent chaos amongst Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish nativist populations that might destabilize the rest of the region similar to what was going on in Afghanistan.

Bush Sr. understood this idea from his time serving as the head of the aforementioned CIA. He also understood that Hussein was armed with chemical weapons because the US had supplied them to him during his wars against Iran. As the coalition troops backed off after chasing Hussein back to Baghdad Hussein began inflicting heavy punishment against the Shia forces in southern Iraq that had risen up while he was under attack from coalition forces. He also proceeded to use the chemical weapons we had given him in putting down a Kurdish insurgency in northern Iraq along with US arms and equipment that he had been given earlier. This set up a distrust of US promises that was to rear its head again a few years later when George Bush Jr. invaded Iraq but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Eventually, fundamentalist Islamic forces with the help of Saudi, Pakistani, and US aid in weapons and money combined with a collapsing economy at home managed to force the Soviet forces to withdraw. This led directly to the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic Taliban taking over and fomenting more slaughter against all their perceived enemies in the region. While this should have come as no surprise to the US, it certainly wasn’t a surprise to the Saudis who had been pushing for an international fundamentalist Sunni rebirth all over the world for quite some time previous by running Madrasa schools in many areas of the region free of charge that served as public education in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and many other poverty stricken areas of the middle east.

Unfortunately, this group also became an international clearinghouse for violent religious based Jihad. With their US furnished weapons plus those they took from the retreating Soviets they were now well armed, well trained and quite effective warriors who began exporting violence in the form of terrorism throughout the world. Much of the money came directly from foreign companies operating in Saudi Arabia who demanded they submit a 20-80% tax Zakat to leaders of the faith who then turned huge amounts of this money over to the Taliban. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of Saudi money that flowed into this Zakat came from US consumers filling up our SUV’s with gas that had originally come from Saudi oilfields. Between this money and their massive revival of the poppy production used to make heroin the money flowed in just as fast as the radical ideas flowed out.

It wasn’t too long before some Taliban trained terrorist who were actually Saudi citizens flew a series of planes into buildings in the US on 9-11. Naturally, an attack on US soil was not to be tolerated, especially when it came from an openly supported group in Afghanistan who we didn’t need to buy oil from. With much anger and indignation US forces quickly attacked and subdued the Taliban and its partners al Qaida in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, at the same time we had elected an administration full of people who had been in favor of removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq ever since Bush Sr. had left him in power at the end of the first Gulf war.

They knew he had chemical weapons because they had given them to him years before. They knew he wasn’t too squeamish about using them because he had used them against the Kurdish insurgents in Iraq recently and had been accused of using them against the Iranians in their last war. Besides, they also knew he was sitting on a large supply of undeveloped oil that could be used later to pay for the whole thing. They suspected he was friendly with terrorist groups because of his open support of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel. He had already proven to be a loose cannon by attacking peaceful Kuwait. It was time to take him out as well, while we were in the neighborhood; at least that was how the logic flowed in the Bush Jr. administration.

It wasn’t too hard to convince angry US citizens upset over 9-11 that Hussein was a threat. It didn’t seem to bother us that it was actually Saudi citizens who had attacked us on 9-11. At any rate, we soon invaded Iraq. Unfortunately, the people who had warned Bush Sr. about what might happen if Hussein was removed were right and the people who suggested the Iraqis would be grateful to us as liberators were wrong. Although history plainly shows that invading a sovereign nation rarely brings gratification from its citizens we didn’t seem to understand that reality either and in we went.

The violent chaos that immediately ensued seemed to stun the Bush Jr. administration. Shias that had been jailed, tortured, and massacred in several uprisings decided it was payback time on the Sunni minority that had been persecuting them for years. Kurdish forces in the north reacted similarly and begged US forces to arm them so that they could defend themselves from both. Unfortunately for the Kurds, Turkey to their north was one of our allies and they were deathly afraid that a well-armed Kurdish group to their immediate south would cause further problems for them in Southern Turkey which was also populated heavily by a Kurdish native population anxious for their own nation.

In a very short time the whole country became a conflagration of violent sectarian tribal violence. It didn’t help things that we had taken out much of the remaining crumbling basic infrastructure of electrical grids, water systems, and oil pumping capabilities when we went in. Murder, extortion, kidnappings, and mass killings became the norm and we had neither the manpower present to stop it nor the understanding necessary to understand its cause. Perhaps Bush Jr. could have taken some advice from Bush Sr. and understood the situation on the ground before we went into Iraq. In a blindly impossible effort to establish a unified democracy in a nation where there were three sectarian groups intent on killing each other and refusing to share power, we failed again and again to establish an environment stable enough to allow for the re-establishment of a civilized society.

Finally, we got enough and decided to leave. More accurately, we were asked to leave by the Shia elected government intent on completing their take over of all power and control in the country. This group had the backing and support of the Shia government in Iran and they neither trusted the US government nor wanted our forces around to interfere with their brutal takeover of all political power in Iraq.

Unsurprisingly, the brutal retaliation against the Sunni population in Iraq had a backlash. As Sunnis fled Iraq both with the US invasion and the later Shia takeover of the government they fled into Syria and Libya. Many of those who stayed began organizing insurgent warfare against the US supported Shia forces in Iraq. Numerous US officials warned that the US should force the Shia to share power but this advice was ignored in favor of getting out.

These Iraqi Sunni forces became the nucleus of a new power in the region; ISIS. ISIS is quite literally claiming itself to be the renewed and proper caliph headquarters for the Sunni faith. They are intent upon uniting all Sunni forces in opposition to what they consider to be members of the faith led astray by imposters; the Shia. Of course they also don’t hold a lot of love for the great Satan of the world which in their view is pretty much all imperialist groups who have been the hand behind the puppets in the region since WWII. This includes France, England, the US and Russia.

The first western propped up puppet to fall was in Tunisia but this was soon followed by a bigger puppet leader in Libya, Gaddafi. Gaddafi had been something of a hero to many in the region when he stood up to the British who put him in power and nationalized the oil companies in the late seventies. Unfortunately, he had started down a long slide towards brutal dictatorship that often accompanies absolute power and by the time 2011 rolled around he was so out of touch he didn’t see that the tide was turning.

Meanwhile, inside Iraq ISIS was gaining more and more power. Large groups of refugees from Iraq that had fled into Syria during and after the US invasion found themselves in even worse poverty than they had left in Iraq. They also found a large local population in Syria suffering terrible poverty and economic collapse because of several factors including another dictator from a minority sect willing to apply brutal tactics to maintain control in the region. Assad had been backed by the Soviets and later the newly formed Russian Republic since his family’s takeover in Syria many years before. With the rise of opposition forces in Syria he responded the only way he knew how; with devastating and indiscriminate military force.

ISIS is currently based in Iraq and neighboring Syria. They claim this region as their own sovereign nation and rule it with an iron fist reminiscent of the Taliban in Afghanistan only more controlled and more organized. This is not a shadow group like al Qaida intent on international terrorism, this is a group based in what they consider to be a sovereign nation. They likely have support both military, monetary, and political in neighboring Turkey ever anxious to hold down the likelihood of a Kurdish threat.

Meanwhile, US forces are attempting to train and arm western alliance forces wanting to remove Assad. Turkoman forces of Turkish ethnicity in northern Syria help fight Assad’s forces and ISIS believes itself to be involved in a death struggle to maintain what they consider to be their sovereign nation which includes much of northwestern Iraq. Recent Russian air raids against Turkoman forces in northern Syria have already touched off one incident of Turkish fighters shooting down a Russian aircraft and more is likely to follow.

As bad as all the politics that led to this situation are, there are other factors as well. We know what happened in Iraq to lead to the ongoing slaughter between Sunni and Shia because we caused much of it by invading Iraq and removing Hussein. Previous to our removal of Hussein we largely crippled the Iraqi infrastructure with economic sanctions for many years and then we destroyed what was left when we invaded. For all his bad qualities, Hussein understood what it took to keep these factions from fighting which is why he largely removed all religious connotations from political forces in Iraq.

This doesn’t explain what happened in Syria. As it turns out, there are other reasons than Assad why the people in Syria were so stirred up before refugees from Iraq began streaming in. From 2004 to 2011 Syria experienced the worst long term drought in a thousand years according to a Global Assessment Report. People in northern Syria experienced a 75% total crop failure during this time. Livestock herders lost around 85% of their livestock. In 2009 the UN estimated that 800,000 Syrians from rural Syria had lost their entire means of livelihood as a result of the droughts.

Experts estimate some 2 million Syrian people from rural areas were forced to move into cities to seek means of avoiding starvation. Add to that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees fleeing the destruction in Iraq and a picture starts to emerge of the economic chaos and human suffering that touched off the uprisings in Syria.

To be sure, a part of this problem was simply poor or indifferent governance by Assad. Based upon short term assessment studies during years of plenty Assad implemented large subsidized shifts in farming methods to irrigated cash crop farming of wheat and cotton. A huge rise in the number of wells dug for this effort along with the terrible drought led to every increasing water shortages in both rural and city populations in Syria as the exact same time large numbers of jobless, penniless refugees from Iraq arrived.

However, and this is worth noting as well, a NOAA study published last October found strong observable evidence that the recent prolonged period of drought in Syria is linked to climate change. This study further observed that if recent trends continue crop production in the whole region of the middle-east will decline between 29 and 57% in the next 35 years. There is a large argument over whether this is caused by man-made activities or normal cyclical climate change but there is no argument that displacing large populations of largely self-sufficient rural populations into deeper and more hopeless poverty inevitably leads to radicalization and violence.

The oft ridiculed statements of Bernie Sanders and President Obama come to mind when one takes note of the fact that real time climate change problems are very much a part of what is going on in Syria right now. All evidence suggests this situation will get worse before it gets better. Add to that the ridiculously inept foreign policies we have pursued in the middle-east since WWII and the whole region seems like even more of powder keg. A powder keg that is getting drier and more easily ignitable with each year of continuing drought in the region.