Who is Fighting Who in Syria?

[fitpOsitive]

Are you serious about this, or just trolling? Should I reply? I would like to raise a few questions but am scared. Please don't sucker me into a discussion where you are metaphorically leaning back lazily and using your toes on the controls?

Go ahead please I am ready.

 

[royalharris]

@Moonlight The people of Syria wanted a democratic government based on the lines of Turkey, however Assad and his minority Alawites did not want this to come to fruition as it would have meant an end to their power and potentially being bought to justice for crimes that have been committed in the past, at the same time their were other players in the region that did not want to see a successful democratic regime mainly some of the Gulf arab nations as they would have felt threatened by an emerging Arab democracy in the region, all hell broke loose when Assad and his forces started to fire on demonstrators and the Gulf Arabs started to export their Wahhabi acolytes into the country, then Iran intervened for it's own strategic interests as did Turkey, Russia, USA etc.Kudos

Regime change games, but too many involved, out of control

 

[Moonlight]

Regime change games, but too many involved, out of control

Agree.

Some are to show we are super power, some to gain power, some for lobbying. But no one cares about innocent lives being taken away.

 

[Erhabi]

Every Syrian I have met in KSA is against Assad's regime including my project manager in the company I work for. He is a 60 years old man prays 5 times a day in mosque doesn't even have beard(If anyone thinks he is one of those extremist guys) Assad have alot of innocents blood in his hand. If Syrians dont like him I dont understand why Iranians are still helping him ? Iran will have to pay a huge price for this.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Go ahead please I am ready.

Tomorrow, please. I just emerged from a short, exhausted sleep after surviving a MOST unpleasant, noisy thread, where both sides were behaving like delinquent juveniles. Utterly exhausting, intensely dismaying.

 

[Moonlight]

Every Syrian I have met in KSA is against Assad's regime including my project manager in the company I work for. He is a 60 years old man prays 5 times a day in mosque doesn't even have beard(If anyone thinks he is one of those extremist guys) Assad have alot of innocents blood in his hand. If Syrians dont like him I dont understand why Iranians are still helping him ? Iran will have to pay a huge price for this.

Thank you so much! It is a very helpful post. Any way of contacting this uncle?

If Syrians dont like him I dont understand why Iranians are still helping him ? Iran will have to pay a huge price for this.

Exactlyyyy what my question is.

 

[Erhabi]

Thank you so much! It is a very helpful post. Any way of contacting this uncle?



Exactlyyyy what my question is.

Giving his contact like this might land me in trouble but I will surely ask him if he is okay with it. I will let you know within a week InshaAllah.

 

[Moonlight]

Giving his contact like this might land me in trouble but I will surely ask him if he is okay with it. I will let you know within a week InshaAllah.

Yes please. Any email? It would be really helpful. JazakAllah.

 

[fitpOsitive]

Tomorrow, please. I just emerged from a short, exhausted sleep after surviving a MOST unpleasant, noisy thread, where both sides were behaving like delinquent juveniles. Utterly exhausting, intensely dismaying.

Ok ok .. but I will be waiting. Really want to hear on this from you.

 

[Joe Shearer]

It began with the Ottoman Turks. Ruling a swathe of territory from north Africa to the present Yugoslavia to the borders of Persia, and throughout the Arab peninsula, they had all kinds of ethnicity within their empire, and had worked out ways of coping with this diversity without losing control. As Empires do, they declined, with an increasingly unhealthy court culture, redolent of overfilled harems, and eunuchs with excessive power and clashes between rival princes and their mothers, while their provincial governors arrogated more and more power to themselves and distanced themselves as safely as they could from central authority.

The decline of this Empire was clear through the second half of the nineteenth century, interrupted by the emergence of outstanding talent from some of the later Emperors. The pressure on their western borders, represented first by the Hapsburgs from Lepanto onwards, grew and grew; slowly the western empire was whittled down, and gave way to what in today's world we know as Romania, Bulgaria, the constituents of the former Yugoslavia, Greece herself and Moldavia.

But our story is about the 'Middle East', or rather, the Levant.

When I read T. E. Lawrence, a noted Arabist, he described the state of the Levant beautifully. He described a chequerboard, divided from east to west, actually starting far beyond the Levant in Basra, but for the purposes of his account, from roughly where Iraq is today, to the sea-coast; again, from the north, the mountains around Anatolia, demarcating today's Turkey, down to the Sinai Peninsula in the south. Each cell was filled by a different ethnicity, and very often by a different sect; so Alawi, and Druze, and Sunni jostled each other in those narrow confines. I will not even dare to classify and list them all, being too discouraged and too pessimistic about the fate of humanity to put in further effort. Suffice it to say that as was the case in Mughal India, there was a general societal consensus, and there was generally a PaxTurcica, to use a term from modern days to those times before the First World War.

In that war, the Triple Entente, Great Britain, France and Imperial Russia, took on the Triple Allliance, Germany, Austria and, ironically, the greatest enemies of Austria, Turkey. At a fairly advanced stage of the war, the French and the British decided that they were winning, and sat down to discuss what to do with the defeated Ottoman Empire. Their thoughts turned naturally to what colonialists in those days were prone to do, to divide out the territories and swallow them up. And that, more or less, is what they did. Two diplomats, Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot, (guess who represented which country?) sat down and discussed the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.

 

[punit]

Maybe if Assad steps down and allows someone else to come and take his place maybe than things can improve. Syria at this moment needs a strong leader who can control his own country win the trust of his people and all these countries should stop treating Syria as if their weapons testing ground and actually do something for Syrians if not than try to stay out of it maybe?
May Allah ease the sufferings of Syrians

if Assad steps down. it will be disastrous many times over ! that will be the end of State of Syria officially.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Of course, in doing all this, they stabbed Lawrence and the Arabs in the back. A small detail. Not really relevant. To summarise the situation, this is what was happening then:

1. There was an existing, old agreement between the European powers and Ottoman Turkey to internationalise Beirut, and to separate it, in some way, from the Vilayet of Syria (Syria was everything between present-day Turkey and the Sinai, and up to Mesopotamia to the east), under a Christian Governor, the Mushir, the first one being a Turkish Christian named Daud Pasha, to head the Beirut Mutassarifate; this protected the Maronites, the Greek Orthodox, the Greek Uniates, the Druze, from attack;
   1. This was the result of the Christian massacre of 1860, when the Emperor of France decided to intervene. 12,000 European troops were posted to Palestine, and the Ottoman Emperor agreed to carve out a separate district from the Syrian Vilayet to protect the Christians;
   2. George Curzon, the former Indian Viceroy, then active in managing British foreign affairs, pointed out that this was flatly contradicted by the Sykes-Picot agreement;
2. Based partly on Lawrence's assurances to the Arabs, Henry McMahon had in an agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, later called King Hussein by the British, agreed that the Arabs would be given sovereignty and independence, over Arabia itself, and over what is today Jordan, Syria, Iraq (=Mesopotamia) and the coastal strip of Palestine;
   1. It is not clear what would have happened to the Mushir and the Mutassarifate of Beirut;
3. Sykes and Picot had contradicted this, according to the French, and gone beyond this without excluding it, according to the British, by suggesting that the northern part, Syria, and the northern part of Mesopotamia, today's Iraq, should be part of the French sphere of influence. How the British thought that these two could be reconciled is something that only a Briton can tell us. However, one clue is that the agreement provided for an Arab state, or a confederation of Arab states, in the British and the French areas jointly. This was for Areas A and B, the British and French areas; nothing stopped the imposition of suzerainty (British Crown over the Indian princes is an example) over the rest of Arabia, say, southern Mesopotamia and peninsular Arabia, today's KSA
   1. There was still room for reconciling the McMahon Hussein agreement and the Sykes-Picot agreement, if the French could be persuaded to go along;
4. Another agreement, the Anglo-French agreement, between Lloyd-George and Clemenceau, made a further hash of things by flatly contradicting the McMahon Hussein agreement.

This is the point where the Balfour Declaration came in and finished things off.

@Moonlight
@fitpOsitive

Is this OK so far? I have to get past this to the 50s for the present hungama to make complete sense, but this is where the complications started.

 

[fitpOsitive]

Of course, in doing all this, they stabbed Lawrence and the Arabs in the back. A small detail. Not really relevant. To summarise the situation, this is what was happening then:

1. There was an existing, old agreement between the European powers and Ottoman Turkey to internationalise Beirut, and to separate it, in some way, from the Vilayet of Syria (Syria was everything between present-day Turkey and the Sinai, and up to Mesopotamia to the east), under a Christian Governor, the Mushir, the first one being a Turkish Christian named Daud Pasha, to head the Beirut Mutassarifate; this protected the Maronites, the Greek Orthodox, the Greek Uniates, the Druze, from attack;
   1. This was the result of the Christian massacre of 1860, when the Emperor of France decided to intervene. 12,000 European troops were posted to Palestine, and the Ottoman Emperor agreed to carve out a separate district from the Syrian Vilayet to protect the Christians;
   2. George Curzon, the former Indian Viceroy, then active in managing British foreign affairs, pointed out that this was flatly contradicted by the Sykes-Picot agreement;
2. Based partly on Lawrence's assurances to the Arabs, Henry McMahon had in an agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, later called King Hussein by the British, agreed that the Arabs would be given sovereignty and independence, over Arabia itself, and over what is today Jordan, Syria, Iraq (=Mesopotamia) and the coastal strip of Palestine;
   1. It is not clear what would have happened to the Mushir and the Mutassarifate of Beirut;
3. Sykes and Picot had contradicted this, according to the French, and gone beyond this without excluding it, according to the British, by suggesting that the northern part, Syria, and the northern part of Mesopotamia, today's Iraq, should be part of the French sphere of influence. How the British thought that these two could be reconciled is something that only a Briton can tell us. However, one clue is that the agreement provided for an Arab state, or a confederation of Arab states, in the British and the French areas jointly. This was for Areas A and B, the British and French areas; nothing stopped the imposition of suzerainty (British Crown over the Indian princes is an example) over the rest of Arabia, say, southern Mesopotamia and peninsular Arabia, today's KSA
   1. There was still room for reconciling the McMahon Hussein agreement and the Sykes-Picot agreement, if the French could be persuaded to go along;
4. Another agreement, the Anglo-French agreement, between Lloyd-George and Clemenceau, made a further hash of things by flatly contradicting the McMahon Hussein agreement.

This is the point where the Balfour Declaration came in and finished things off.

@Moonlight
@fitpOsitive

Is this OK so far? I have to get past this to the 50s for the present hungama to make complete sense, but this is where the complications started.

Very nice sir, really appreciated.
But my statement about UN...waiting for you reply.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Very nice sir, really appreciated.
But my statement about UN...waiting for you reply.

sure. but was it useful up to this point? I will come to the UN very shortly, after I return from a meeting at 17:30.

 

[fitpOsitive]

sure. but was it useful up to this point? I will come to the UN very shortly, after I return from a meeting at 17:30.

Yes sir.