Introduction.
After the annihilation of the guerrilla supporting bases of the Islamic State (the dispersion and the loss of the will of defense, not the physical disappearance) in Iraq, and soon in Syria, the political social panorama that the Southwest of Asia presents is distressing, curled and gloomy.
The possible «allies» of the global or regional powers, who exist in the geopolitical pandemonium of the Southwest of Asia are complicated and tangled internally and are very needed from «helps» for his recovery and for his maintenance during a lot time. They are empty, burdensome, parasitic and without substance «allies».
AGUSTÍN DE FOXA.
Here we might paraphrase the Spanish ambassador Agustín de Foxá, count of Foxá, when, in certain occasion, during the World War II, he was present at an invitation in Rome. During it, the count Ciano, son-in-law of the Duce and Italian Secretary of State, with the evil intention of treading and to laugh of the Spanish, asked him: «Certainly, Foxá, when does Spain think to join, finally, the international fight against the Bolshevism, that are sustaining the powers of the Axis?» Don Agustín answered him: «Count Ciano, do you believe that the Reich can permit to have (to support) another ally?…» The following day, Foxá was indicated that he should leave Italy.
These possible unsuccessful «allies» allow to establish «military permanent bases» to a regional powers with ambitions of expansion (Iran, Russia). But, that do not serve them as “forward military bases” to spread out for any other country around. Also, they can be established in them «temporal bases» for the heavy fire support in their operations with his allies and for civilizing or training (United States). But that either do not have any operational transcedence out of their porous borders.
There is no here, in these teared countries, force, vigor and solidity as nations.
The national actors.
The irreconcilable contradictions, which were defining the relations of power and beliefs between the ethnias and the countries of the Southwest of Asia, before the last appearance of the salafists jihadists in the 90s, are not solved. And the resort to the armed total violence to annihilate the Islamic State, has inflamed some antagonistic differences. And it has encouraged the separatist zeals of some actors of this tragedy without equal: sunnis and Kurds Syrian and Iraqi. Arguing the social politic discrimination that suffer in both States, the war merits and the rights to have a national State, based on the sovereignty over a sufficient and defensible territory. Though that total violence has been applied in the coordinated actions of the national coalitions, more or less voluntary and integrated.
The regime alauí of al-Assad has broken his political and social bonds with his people. And has lost the legitimacy that the Moslem countries grant, as temporaral part of the Umma, to their despots and more or less absolute leaders. That arises from a balance of care, protection and well-being of the people by the part of the leaders, with the respect and the necessary support (effort, taxes, levies) that their subjects offer to them. Because he has crushed and destroyed his people with the indiscriminate heavy fire used in the combats in urban areas. That were crammed with innumerable civilians, terrified, reduced to the misery and ,often, without exit of the sieges of the populations. And that both the National Army of Syria and his foreign allies used systematicly as war weapon. To save own casualties and for the lack of own trained forces in the assault of populations: the real, alternative or fictitious rebels positions and the urban habitat that was covering them, were pulverized at the distant and medium combat ranges. The affected civilians and their properties were «collateral dameges», that were accepted without great sorrow, especially by the allied foreign forces.
The unsteady and elusive politics of the USA in the Southwest of Asia and concretely in Syria, created a «emptiness of power» real, in the way of support. That president Putin proposed to occupy. This time, the Russian autocrat waited, to assure him that the USA was not there, not even were waited. With his military intervention in Syria, Russia was seeking to justify a mediating and relevant role in the damned chessboard of the regional powers of the Southwest of Asia. Also that intervention was going to assure him an increased sponsorship over Syria, with the elevation to «permanent» his naval (in Tartus, Latakia, in the Oriental Mediterranean) and ground bases in the country. And neither the life, nor the possessions, nor the personal and familiar sufferings of the Syrians were mattering for him. If they were converting into an obstacle to his political military strategy in defense of al-Assad.
DOES HE LOVE HIM MORE THAN THE SYRIAN PEOPLE?
The Turks are trying to increase his protagonism and influence in this geopolitical area. Seeking to turn into a great regional power. To it take them the successive inconvenients raised by the European Union during many years to his by right incorporation in Europe. And, the government of Erdogan pushes them definitively. That plays his long-term advantages, by successive approximations, in short stakes, trying to turn the Ataturk’s republic to a radical Islam one. Without the military men, constitutional guarantors of her, get cross him and knock down him.
His renewed strategic preferences lead them to look for a long time to the East. Turkey, with almost 80 million inhabitants, can try to do a sunni moderating role towards the Republic of Iran. The great operational problem for Turkey is that it was the dominant power of the zone, until less than one century. The Ottoman Empire lasted from the 15th century to the beginning of the XXth. And the Turks are not ethnically Arabic and his culture is different.
HE GAVE DESTINATION AND PRIDE TO HIS PEOPLE, DEFEATED IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR. WHERE THE MISTAKES OF THE SULTANATE (CALIPHATE) TOOK HIM .
The Turkish Secretary of State, Ahmet Davutglu, declared categorically that «to intervene in the north of Syria is a natural right of Turkey». And Erdogan stressed that «those who attack Turkey, will feel his breath in their nape». The Turks will not allow that terrorist groups as al-Qaeda or the PKK (recognized as terrorist by the UNO) establish there. But, Turkey knows that the Kurdistan is long in Kms. And that his Kurdish rebels operate from the Iraqi Kurdistan, with safe bases in the Candil mounts. Where they have coverage in his south slopes and supplies from their Kurds inhabitants.
The Separated Conflicting Brothers.
Sigue planteado, si no se ha exacerbado más, el conflicto dentro del Islam entre chiíes y sunníes. Conflicto que es, en sí mismo, una aberración ideológica, una contradicción antagónica, desgarradora y esencial. Si ha habido una Revelación de Allah, destinada a todos los hombres, ésta debe ser clara y sencilla. Para que los hombres comunes y normales la entiendan y la acepten. Y esto fue más necesario tras la Hégira, en los inicios “iletrados, nómadas y pobres del siglo VII”. Porque Allah ama mucho al hombre común, ya que lo ha creado y crea en tan gran número.
The Koran, religious common source of the shiites and sunnis, is not highly revealing about the “internal armed disputes” within the believers’ universal community or Umma. In the epoch of the Prophet this problem was not contemplated. And if those had existed, on having joined with the external harassment that the Muslims were suffering, probably they were leading together to the dispersion and the disappearance of the faithful group. In the Sura (chapter) 49, aleya (verse) 9 is ordered: «When two believers’ nations are in war, try to reconcile them… The believers are your brothers (it is the maximum relation of consanguinity). Solve, so, the differences of your brothers and be afraid of God, so that He has piety of you.» And in 4, 33: «Oh, believers… do not kill between yourself … (or, do not kill yourself)». The beginning of the verse is directed against the greed and the illicit appropriation. And the Legislator could have extended it to the murder (death of the innocent) and its variants (as example, the suicide).
A fundamental problem for a sincere and stable approximation of the «sisters conflicting communities» constitute the concepts of the legitimate origin of the command, of the control and development of the «dogma and morality». And of the immense economic politician religious structures, alive and with their own interests, created by both expressions of the Islam, almost from his beginning.
Another serious origin of offenses and irreconcilable distancing, especially at national level, are the forms of violent fights between both beliefs. When they attack between themselves, they try to damage the utmost, coming up to the intimacy of the kinship. And this way the targets are looked in the mosques, markets, peregrinations, concentrations and in the frequent or in mass movements of the peoples. Places where there usually are members of the same family. It is the uncontrolled violence and taken to her unnecessary, immodest, insanity and paradoxical (do not they practice the same religion?) social limits. Between the clans and tribes, only ethnically speaking, this wave of murders, outrages and hurts in the goods, always generates an “intergenerational chain” of “unavoidable vindications” for the assaults, the reprisals and the «blood offenses» suffered. This essential and indestructible Gordian knot, for what it seems, only can be cut by the sword of the generosity, the altruism (looking not what we «lack», but looking forward in communion and construction) and the pardon, which should be more attainable between a confession brothers.
ALI KHAMENEI CALLED HIM: «LIVING MARTYR» OF THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION.
At the eastern end of the Southwest of Asia is the shiite theocracy of the ayatollahs. These, when want important and rapid results against his neighbors, use commands or units of the Republican Guard. That can train, equip and support his allies of Syria and Iraq. And that are capable of fighting at the near and of assault ranges, as a specially trained light infantry. The Republican Guard is overlapped in the regime, forming the unconditional and effective military wing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, acting like the modern «Immortal of the Shas of Persia». The shiite regime is taken root in a complex of councils, boards and assemblies, designed, created and organized to assure, keep and perpetuate his oligarch social religious functioning. But the regime is unable to develop modern and economically a country with the resources and the demographic exuberance of the Iranians. Iran is better galvanized, as almost all the absolute dictatorships, opposite to the exterior problems. That for the daily, patient and effective work of the political, social and economic development of a country. That demands an environment of peace and serenity that the social tensions alienate.
Iran is a Great Shiite Island placed in an enormous Sunni Ocean. That embraces her, from the west to the east, through all her south, from Turkey to Pakistan, passing for Afghanistan, Arabia, Jordan, Palestine. Her «islands and adjacent capes» are The Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Bahrain; having more strength in Iraq and The Lebanon. The results of the so called «Arabic spring» have not been favorable to the shiites, which are kept immersed in the sunni «hostile ocean«. The «big seas» tributaries of that Ocean are Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as principal protagonists and representatives of the sunnis. The former offers his strength and his demography and the later uses his economic exuberant capacity, to support and to extend the reason of the sunnis throughout.
And the loss of the regime of the al-Assad in Syria not only will reduce to Iran a convenience ally, that not of religion. Since the Syrian alauis are really, «the heresy inside the heresy (shiite)», according to the sunnis. But it will obstruct very much all the logistics of the immense and strategic support to Hizbullah and to Hamas, in the Gaza strip. That is the form of expression of Iran of a «belligerency by third parties interposed», opposite to the West and his allies in the geostrategic zone. This is confirmed by the recent indefinite operational entry in the Syrian civil war of Hizbullah’s regular militias and Afghan fatimies voluntaries in favor of the government. Seeking to recover the progressive social wear of Assad’s regime, with military victories.
Epilogue.
The swords will continue in high place. The Islamic State is a contagious and serious infection, which concerned an intricate and up to explosive situation, of a geopolitical region with too much interests and problems for resolving. The difficult and slightly grateful Asia of the Southwest. As we have described previously.
Egypt will be a sunni powerfully competitor of Turkey and of his pretensions. And Saudi Arabia and the countries of the great Arabic plateau will support it. Iran will have kept the countries with shii influence, that already existed. And by the horizon appears Trump and his direction changes. That are more fearsome for unpredictable that for rapid. Putin will remain boxed in the region, in a ruined and socially defeated country. He has embraced lately to Turkey; already it will not serve him for nothing.