Middle Eastern rivalries are alive and kicking despite de-escalation
By James M.
Dorsey
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Middle
Eastern battlegrounds are alive and kicking even though rivals seek to balance
contentious relations.
Take efforts by the United Arab Emirates, and more recently
Saudi Arabia, to bring Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in from the cold in a
bid to drive a wedge between Syria and Iran and address numerous fallouts from
the more than decade-long brutal war he waged to keep himself in power.
Sanctioned by the United States
and Europe, Mr. Al-Assad was also a pariah in the Arab world after the
22-member Arab League suspended Syrian membership in response to his conduct in
the war. A meeting of the League’s foreign ministers decided on Sunday to readmit Syria.
With sanctions and international isolation failing to
topple Mr. Al-Assad or moderate his policies, the UAE and Saudi Arabia hope
engagement will be more productive.
That hasn’t prevented the UAE from continuing to counter
the influence of Turkey and Iran in Syria, two countries with which it has
formally buried its hatchets.
In the latest round, Mazlum Abdi, the commander-in-chief
of the US-backed, predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), also
known as Mazloum Kobani, reportedly
traveled last month to Abu Dhabi to seek UAE assistance in negotiating an
agreement with the Assad government.
The SDF
played a crucial role in helping the United States defeat the Islamic State in
Syria.
Mr. Abdi was accompanied by Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK) leader Bafel Talabani. The PUK is one of two major rival factions in
Iraqi Kurdistan.
Emirati
officials confirmed Mr. Abdi’s visit but denied reports that he met UAE
national security adviser Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.
The UAE is
concerned that further engagement with the Kurds could strain relations with Mr.
Al-Assad.
Mr. Abdi’s
visit came days after a Turkish drone targeted him as he was travelled in northern
Syria with three US military personnel in a PUK convoy.
Kurdish
officials read the drone attack and an almost simultaneous Turkish ban on flights
from Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, a PUK stronghold, as a warning against involving the UAE
in Kurdish affairs.
Turkey said its airspace was closed due to increased
activity in Sulaymaniyah of the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). Turkey
asserts that Mr. Abdi’s SDF is the Syrian wing of the PKK.
The PKK has been waging a decades-long intermittent guerrilla
war for greater Kurdish rights in Turkey.
The attack
on Mr. Abdi was part of a relentless Turkish drone campaign designed to weaken, if not destroy,
the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria. It was also
intended to facilitate the return of some four million Syrian refugees in
Turkey, which hosts the world's largest Syrian refugee community.
Thousands of
Turkish troops were dispatched to northern Syria to support the campaign.
The attack likely reinforced Mr. Abid’s fear that
uncertainty about the US commitment to the Kurds, a potential rapprochement
between Turkey and Syria that would involve a withdrawal of Turkish troops from
northern Syria, and a restoration of Mr. Al-Assad’s control of Kurdish areas
could put the Kurds at risk.
Even so, the Kurdish
administration has been reaching out to the Assad government since 2019
when the Trump administration initially announced it was withdrawing US troops
from Syria, essentially abandoning the SDF and the Kurds. Due to bipartisan pressure in Congress, Mr. Trump
subsequently reversed
his decision.
In response, in a deal
brokered by Russia, the Kurds allowed Syrian troops to deploy along the
border with Turkey to deter a Turkish military offensive.
Mr. Al-Assad
has demanded a return to the situation prevalent in northern Syria before the
civil war outbreak and the Turkish incursions as a condition for a
rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus.
Mr. Abdi's
concerns were likely heightened last week when the foreign ministers of Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq joined their Syrian counterpart to demand the restoration of the Assad
government's sovereignty in all of Syria and an end to operations by armed groups, militant organizations,
and all foreign forces in Syria.
Mr. Al-Assad
sees as foreign interference the presence of some 900 military personnel in Syria,
US support for the SDF, and the deployment of thousands of Turkish troops in
the north.
A UAE-mediated agreement between the Kurds and Mr. Al-Assad
would facilitate a Turkish withdrawal from Syria and Mr. Al-Assad’s
rehabilitation.
Russia has facilitated talks between senior Turkish,
Syrian, and Iranian officials to achieve that goal. However, the officials have
disagreed on the terms of a meeting between Mr. Al-Assad and Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Al-Assad has made a meeting conditional on Turkey’s willingness to withdraw its military
from northern Syria and restore the situation that prevailed before the
Syrian war.
For now, that seems unlikely.
On the campaign trail in advance of presidential and
parliamentary elections on May 14, Mr. Erdogan used
the Kurds as a foil to prepare the ground for a possible judicial coup
should he fail to be reelected.
“My nation will never hand over this country to someone
who becomes president with the support of Qandil,” Mr. Erdogan said in a
reference to PKK bases in Iraq’s Qandil Mountains and Kurdish support for his
opposition, which scores well in opinion polls.
Mr. Erdogan’s posturing, alongside the Russian and Emirati
moves, suggests that improved relations between rival states have yet to do
much, if anything, to resolve the region's powder kegs.
The same applies to Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt, which
maneuver in conflict areas such as Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.
Instead,
conflicts and rivalries play out differently.
The
jockeying also demonstrates the risks inherent in fighting proxy wars by
supporting armed non-state or renegade state actors, like the various Kurdish
groups, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan (RSF).
The risks
run from reducing conflict to a zero-sum game to proxies exercising their
agency and weakening state institutions.
As evident
with Turkey and the Kurds, recent de-escalation in the Middle East highlights
those risks.
Mr. Al-Assad
was likely strengthened in his resolve to get Turkish troops out of Syria and
restore his control over the Kurds by
last week’s visit to Damascus by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the first by
an Iranian head of state since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
Iran, like Russia, has supported Mr. Al-Assad throughout the war.
A Jordanian plan to “step by step” return Syria to
the Arab fold notes that “current conditions” enable "Iran to continue
imposing its economic and military influence on the Syrian regime and several
vital parts of Syria by taking advantage of the people's suffering to recruit
militias."
The paper
warns that "Iran's proxies are becoming stronger in the main areas,
including the southern region, and the drug trade generates significant income
for these groups while posing an increasing threat to the region and
beyond."
Mr. Raisi
opted for Damascus rather than seeking to deepen Iran's China-mediated rapprochement
with Saudi Arabia by honoring Saudi King Salman's invitation to visit the
kingdom.
On the back
of the Arab rapprochement, a victory for Iran and Russia, Mr. Al-Assad’s main
backers, Mr. Raisi hoped to fortify Tehran's relations with Damascus by tightening economic cooperation. His foreign, defense, oil,
transport, and telecommunications ministers accompanied him.
At the same
time, hopes that Iranian-Saudi de-escalation would facilitate an end to Yemen’s
war are diminishing. Talks between the kingdom and Iranian-backed Houthi
rebels, who control the north and the capital Sana’a, are likely to produce a longer ceasefire at most.
The talks
began long before China mediated an agreement in March to restore diplomatic
relations between the kingdom and Iran.
Eight years
after intervening in Yemen, Riyadh wants a face-saving exit from a war that has
failed to oust the Houthis, weakened its negotiating position, and proven
costly in economic and reputational terms.
The Houthis
have made a timetable for the unconditional withdrawal of Saudi and Emirati foreign
forces a condition for a more permanent ceasefire.
A withdrawal
under those conditions offers little opportunity to save face.
Moreover, a
ceasefire may not halt UAE support for the secessionist Southern Transitional
Council (STC) in south Yemen and proxy militias in Shabwa and Hadramawt. That
support has increased since the Emirates said in 2019 that it was withdrawing
its troops from the country.
Similarly,
the civil war in Sudan underscores the risks of supporting non-state or dissident
state actors.
This week,
supporters of Army Gen. Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman al-Burhan, Sudan’s de facto
ruler, demanded the expulsion of Emirati diplomats in retaliation for the UAE’s backing of Rapid Support Forces
commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a.k.a. Hemedti.
The UAE has
long worked with Mr. Hemedti and facilitated his lucrative gold exports through Dubai but was put in a difficult
position by the eruption of hostilities in Khartoum that threatened Emirati
strategic and maritime interests and could yet spark a broader conflict in the
Horn of Africa.
The Kurds,
Iran, and Sudan demonstrate that, in the end, the principle of “The king is
dead, long live the king” applies to de-escalation in the Middle East.
De-escalation
may dial tensions down a notch and help manage conflicts to ensure they do not
spin out of control. It offers no resolution and allows open wounds like
Kurdish aspirations to fester.
Responsible
Statecraft published an earlier version of this story.
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Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning
journalist and scholar, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological
University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of
the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M.
Dorsey.
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