US to
Balkanize Syria Under Kurdish Pretext
By
Marwa Osman
April 03, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- As early as 2013, Western powers have been
rooting for the balkanization of Syria as the
best possible outcome of the war tearing apart
the country since 2011.
Since
the war against Syria is significant in this
period of imperialism, watching how it was led
by the US, imperialist proxies and their
so-called allies, one can fully understand that
the war against the Syrian Arab Republic has
been decades in the making.
Throughout history, the imperialist powers have
been facilitating and empowering the most
intolerant, bigoted ideologies and groups in the
region starting from the
Balfour Declaration,
passing through the infamous Sykes-Picot
agreement and ending in the invasions of Iraq
and Libya before making their way into Syria.
The latest group to gain the full
support of the
US on the ground in Syria is the Syrian Kurdish
YPG forces (People's Protection Units).
The US threw its lot in with the Kurds in Iraq
at first as it supposedly tried to find partners
who reportedly pose a credible threat to ISIS.
Thus, their pick of the
Peshmerga
Kurdish group came as a result of mutual
interest in the region. The Kurds wanted to
establish their own autonomous state in the
region and the US wanted to reenter Iraq under
the pretext of helping the Kurds fight ISIS.
Kurdish
Political Ambitions
The first direct coordination between US forces
and Kurdish groups was between October 2014 and
January 2015 in the battle of
Kobani, inside
Syria, where Kurdish forces reached out to the
Americans after ISIS forces surrounded them. The
US then hit the terrorist group’s targets in the
area with airstrikes, while the Kurdish forces
on the ground assaulted ISIS positions that
ended up inflicting heavy losses on the
terrorists and drove them out of the area.
This
battle represented a historic opportunity for
both political wings of the Kurdish movement,
the Iraqi Peshmerga and the Syrian PYD (The
Democratic Union Party) to realize their dream
of independence. The PYD’s armed forces known as
the YPG (People's Protection Units), which has a
fighting force of 50,000 fighters, became
determined to take control of the vast majority
of Syria's border with Turkey fully backed by US
airpower.
The PYD then
stated that its
priority focused on uniting traditional Kurdish
areas of Syria (known as Rojava), extending from
Afrin to the Tigris river into one attached land
mass.
That statement took me back to the
words of former
US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 2013
when he commented on the Syrian situation,
expressing his preference for a broken-up and
balkanized Syria to emerge out of the current
so-called “Assad-controlled unity.” The
man said he supports the partitioning of a
unified state.
Oldest plan in
the book: Balkanize Syria
The
US’s vision of the future Syrian map was
detailed by Kissinger during a presentation at
the Ford School Syria with pretty much a
distorted history lesson. He stated that Syria
was not a historic state “It was created in
its present shape in 1920, and it was given that
shape to facilitate the control of the country
by France, which happened to be after a UN
mandate,” he said.
Kissinger then claimed that the current Syria
was conceived as a more or less artificial
national unity consisting of different tribes
and ethnic groups.
This same theory was also presented by the
Israeli
Oded Yinon plan
which is an article published in February 1982
in the Hebrew journal Kivunim ("Directions")
entitled A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s.
This plan is an early example of characterizing
political projects in the Middle East in terms
of a logic of sectarian divisions and the
dissolution of all the existing Arab states.
Hence, supporting the partitioning of Syria
began with the US and Israel’s full support of
the so- called “Rojava
Project”.
US helping
Kurds put plan into effect
The US’
support for the YPG has gained public sympathy
in the West viewing the Kurds as the most
forward-thinking “rebel” group in the
battle against extremism. The same cannot be
said for the countless factions receiving aid
from regional backers, many of which have
cooperated with Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate,
Nusra Front (Ahrar Al Sham).
However, you would have thought that the PYD's
connections to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)
- a US, EU, and Turkey-designated terror group -
are problematic. Despite this fact, the US
appears to be committed to maintaining its air
support for the Syrian Kurds, both near the
Euphrates in the west and the outskirts of Raqqa
in the south.
Thus
since the US favors the balkanization of Syria,
it is now working openly to empower Syrian and
Iraqi Kurds. So by choosing sides, the US may be
signaling that it is preparing for all
contingencies, including the fracturing of Syria
and the complete collapse of the state in Raqqa.
During
the past couple of weeks, Raqqa, ISIS's main
urban base of operations in Syria, is the focus
of an ongoing campaign by the newly formed
US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The
SDF is a coalition of Kurdish (YPG), Sunni Arab
(FSA-Free Syrian Army) and Syriac Christian
fighters, but is completely dominated by its
Kurdish element (YPG).
The
main Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG, already
controls swathes of northern Syria as well,
where Kurdish groups and their allies are
working to establish a decentralized system of
government in areas captured from ISIS. This
political project is causing deep alarm in
Damascus, which sees the YPG and its political
affiliate, the PYD, as a potential threat with
their current loud and clear alliance with the
US.
According to
Reuters, Saleh
Muslim, the co-chair of the Syrian Kurdish PYD
party, stated that the northern Syrian city of
Raqqa is expected to join a decentralized system
of government being set up by Syrian Kurdish
groups and their allies once it is freed from
ISIS.
As per
these comments, I spoke with Fares Shehabi, a
member of the Syrian Parliament for Aleppo and
Chairman of the Syrian Federation of Industry
who firmly guaranteed that “the statement of
Saleh Muslim is irresponsible since the Syrian
government will not recognize any presence in
Raqqa or any other province other than the
legitimate Syrian state represented by the
Syrian Arab Army.”
As I spoke with Mr. Shehabi, a heavy US-backed
operation near Raqqa was
blocking any
advance by the Syrian Arab Army from the west in
preparation for the balkanization process. Thus
I asked Mr. Shehabi where the Syrian government
stands from this process as seemingly the
Kurdish forces are fully under the control of
the US. The Syrian MP responded resolutely that
“no balkanization of Syria will be allowed”
stating that “the Kurdish Forces do not have
the field power to enter or stay in Raqqa
because that would cause an unwanted and
unrealistic change in the fabric of the city.”
Mr. Shehabi then explained that any sort of a
Kurdish uncalculated incursion whether from YPG
or SDF on the city of Raqqa would backfire since
their move will not be accepted or tolerated in
the city.
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In March, the SDF announced it had
captured the
Tabqa air base, 45 kilometers (28 miles) west of
Raqqa, with direct US substantial air and ground
support provided.
The Telegraph reported on that mission that five
helicopters, supported by five fighter jets,
dropped dozens
of SDF fighters near the northern town of Shurfa
without stating whether or not US soldiers
accompanied them.
Meanwhile, the Syrian Arab Army’s main ally
Russia has always been aware of US plans to pull
Raqqa into a “decentralized”
government, which would be the first step toward
balkanizing Syria. As early as October of 2014,
Sputnik
reported:
The
Pentagon’s reliance on Kurds to liberate Raqqa
may indicate that the US is actually ready to
support the federalization of Syria, said
Alexander Babakov, a member of the Foreign
Affairs Committee at the upper house of the
Russian parliament.
“It
would be hard to imagine that American plans on
Raqqa are aimed only to bring peace to Syria. It
cannot be ruled out by using Kurds to liberate
the city from Daesh the US wants to support the
federalization of Syria, including establishing
an autonomous Kurdish region,” Babakov told
the Russian newspaper Izvestia.
Therefore, since the United States and Israel
have never denied their aspiration to see Syria
divided up into small, vulnerable and easily
manipulated territories, and since the Kurds
have provided the US and Israel with the pretext
to do so, it remains to be seen how the Syrian
government and its allies will respond. Now that
a foreign army and its proxies are blocking the
Syrian Army from liberating its own country from
terrorists, we wait to see if balkanization is
next.
Ms.
Marwa Osman. PhD Candidate located in Beirut,
Lebanon. University Lecturer at the Lebanese
International University and Maaref University.
Political writer/commentator on Middle East
issues with many international and regional
media outlets.
This
article was first published at
RT
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
See
also -
In case you missed it;
The Zionist Plan for the
Middle East:
Israel must 1) become an imperial regional
power, and 2) must effect the division of the
whole area into small states by the dissolution
of all existing Arab states.
In case
you missed it:
A ‘Greater Israel’ In The
Making: Experts;
The United Kingdom and the U.S. alongside with
their allies are assisting Israel in this
‘machiavelic’ plan that includes the
partitioning of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq and
Syria, said analysts in Indonesia and Malaysia.
