World Exclusive: US urges UK and France to join in supplying arms to Syrian rebels as MPs fear that UK will be drawn into growing conflict.<\/i><\/p>\n
Washington\u2019s decision to arm Syria\u2019s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.<\/p>\n
For the first time, all of America\u2019s \u2018friends\u2019 in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama\u2019s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
The Independent on Sunday<\/em> has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran \u2013 even before last week\u2019s presidential election \u2013 to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years.\u00a0 Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad\u2019s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic\u2019s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new \u2018Syrian\u2019 front on the Golan Heights against Israel.<\/p>\n In years to come, historians will ask how America \u2013 after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for\u00a0 2014 \u2013 could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed\u2019s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor \u2013 a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala \u2013 continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between \u201cPapists and Protestants\u201d.<\/p>\n America\u2019s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan \u2013 flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees \u2013 may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle.\u00a0 Up to 3,000 American \u2018advisers\u2019 are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria \u2018no-fly zone\u2019 \u2013 opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries \u2013 will turn a crisis into a \u2018hot\u2019 war.\u00a0 So much for America\u2019s \u2018friends\u2019.<\/p>\n Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America \u2018liberated\u2019 from Saddam Hussein\u2019s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has \u2013 against all US predictions \u2013 itself now largely fallen under Tehran\u2019s influence and power.\u00a0 Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad\u2019s forces.<\/p>\n Washington\u2019s excuse for its new Middle East adventure \u2013 that it must arm Assad\u2019s enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them \u2013 convinces no-one in the Middle East.\u00a0 Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush\u2019s claim that Saddam\u2019s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria\u2019s Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad.\u00a0 The Damascus regime\u2019s victory this month in the central Syrian town of\u00a0 Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power.\u00a0 Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed \u2013 unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf \u2013 not to be sustained.\u00a0 Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.<\/p>\n In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms \u2013 almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles \u2013 only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army.\u00a0 The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy.\u00a0 They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.<\/p>\n From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus – every war crime committed by the rebels – will be regarded in the region as Washington\u2019s responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2011 \u2013 who are America\u2019s greatest enemies as well as Russia\u2019s \u2013 are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism.\u00a0 His experience in Chechenya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric \u2013 he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian \u2013 and his belief that Russia\u2019s old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechenya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia\u2019s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.<\/p>\n For the Russians, of course, the \u2018Middle East\u2019 is not in the \u2018east\u2019 at all, but to the south of Moscow;\u00a0 and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier.\u00a0 Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim.\u00a0 Six of the Soviet Union\u2019s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni.\u00a0 And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims.\u00a0 For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.<\/p>\n Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah\u2019s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon \u2013 with the maintenance of the militia\u2019s \u2018intelligence\u2019 teams inside Syria \u2013 Iran\u2019s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither.\u00a0 They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran\u2019s help in withdrawing from Afghanistan.\u00a0 The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran\u2019s active assistance.\u00a0 One of the sources claimed \u2013 not without some mirth — that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran\u2019s help.<\/p>\n It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel\u2019s security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria.\u00a0 Indeed, Israel\u2019s policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.<\/p>\n Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad\u2019s rule.\u00a0 One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as \u201cIsrael\u2019s man in Damascus\u201d.\u00a0 Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator.\u00a0 In vain.<\/p>\n If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians.\u00a0 The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or \u2018viable\u2019.\u00a0 \u2018Peace\u2019 envoy Tony Blair\u2019s attempts to create such a state have been laughable.\u00a0 A future \u2018Palestine\u2019 would be a Sunni nation.\u00a0 But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.<\/p>\n Another of the region\u2019s supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the \u2018super-terrorists\u2019 of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs\u2019 desire to crush Assad.\u00a0 Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.<\/p>\n In Arab eyes, Israel\u2019s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West\u2019s support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive.\u00a0 Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.<\/p>\n ____________________<\/p>\n Robert Fisk, based in Beirut, is a multiple award-winning journalist on the Middle East and a <\/i>correspondent for <\/i>The Independent, a UK newspaper.\u00a0 He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East<\/a>.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n