The Innocent, The Guilty, The Middle East

There now, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is "on its last legs".  All will be well.  "We are entering a sensitive phase", claims the new head of the Syrian National Council.  His predecessor, Burham Ghalioun, stepped aside amidst charges that he was too chummy by half with the Muslim Brotherhood.   Abdel Basset Sayda will be more careful.


The Syrian National Council, which claims to represent the interests of the new Syria and the protest movement, but is hardly recognized by them, let alone the Free Syrian Army, makes no mention, needless to say, that among the ranks of the protest movement lurk Hamas and al-Qaeda. Equally challenged by the regime's friends, Hezbollah and Iran's Republican Guards al-Quds forces. 

Should they meet, as it appears they are likely to do, on a final battlefield that will most certainly grip the entire country in a convulsion of hatred, revenge and slaughter before moving on to other regions of the Middle East, there will be blood and gore to spare.  The hated regime of President al-Assad, although oppressive to the Sunni majority did, for the most part, maintain order.

There was, in fact, a symmetry of a kind between the Syrian Baath party and the Baath party of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.  The majority Sunni populations in both of those countries were deprived of equality with the Shia-Alawite component of the country's minority group.  And just as dreadful paroxysms of carnage took place between the sects in Iraq when the country threatened to descend completely into civil war, a like situation occurs now in Syria.

In Iraq, the Shia are now in the ascendancy, and the Sunni have been side-lined.  Relations between them have seldom been more bitterly opposing and fraught with future promise of relapses into collective viciousness.  This is the Middle East where the prevailing faith in Islam is complicated by the variances in Islamic historical faith issues, and where the Islamist fanatics representing each of the branches are carrying the tribes and the sects forward in mutual hatred.

But the mutual hatred does not confine itself to Islamic countries, although each prey on the other incessantly.  There are other victims; the Christian Arab populations that have long lived in the Middle East, much predating the Muslims, and whose numbers have been shrinking as they flee violent attacks.  And even there, it is not restrained by the immediate geography, since Africa is engulfed, and there is also the outreach to Europe and North America.

However, in Syria, the Syrian National Council's new leader expresses his faith that, as a Kurd, he can bring the rival factions together in amity: "We would like to reassure all sects and groups, especially Alawites and Christians, that the future of Syria will be for the all of us", he said conciliatingly.  "We will work for [the Annan plan] to be included under chapter VII of the UN Charter, to force the regime to implement it and to leave all options open."

But, after all, who can trust the Assad regime to make good on any of their promises.  Talk is cheap and useful; action never follows.  Except the action relating to the horrors of sectarian violence.  Take, for example, the cleansing of Houla, the targeting of innocents, whole families wiped out.  Ah, just one moment please, for reflection.  The Assad regime was held universally responsible for that slaughter, yes indeed.

So how is it that a German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (a new report) is now alleging that it is the jihadi rebels that were responsible for that slaughter?  Eyewitness accounts now contend those who were so mercilessly slaughtered represented families representing Houla's Alawi and Shia minorities.  In Houla, over 90% of the population is Sunni.  A family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament thought of as a collaborator was among the dead.


But several dozen people of one family which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam were among the dead.  Along with members of an Alawi family, the Shomaliya.  Grisly intrigue sums up the Middle East with all its sinister plots, its hatreds, its tribal and sectarian allegiances; its inability to govern and restrain itself, without the oversight of a determined dictator.