In late 2010, a revolutionary wave engulfed the Middle East and North Africa and was soon styled as an ‘Arab Spring’ in popular discourse. The uprising in Syria in March 2011 and the thus far decade-long civil war is perhaps the most destructive and consequential of these conflicts.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented the death of 388,622 people though the actual toll is likely higher. Sparked by local grievances the conflict spiralled to draw in regional and international actors with ramifications far beyond its borders. Alongside up to 6.2 million internally displaced people, over 5.5 million people fled the country. Most ended up in neighbouring states such as Turkey and Lebanon but there were refugee flows into Europe. This human tragedy, characterised as a crisis and a threat by some, featured in the UK’s Brexit debate in 2016 and was used to nurture right-wing, anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe.
William Faulkner’s once wrote ‘the past is never dead, it’s not even past’ and this especially resonates in the case of the Syrian Civil War. Sure, contemporary issues such as corruption, lack of opportunity and a dearth of civil and political rights motivated many. And climate change was another factor. However, the objectives and motives of others involved were shadowed by history; fighting battles whose lines were drawn during the World War One when the Ottoman Empire unravelled and later Cold War imperatives that cast long shadows across the region. The rise of the theocratic Islamic State (IS) was, in part, forged by these historical forces and would have a profound impact on the course of the civil war. IS would skew the conflict in a sectarian direction, complicate support for the splintered anti-government opposition, undermine pro-democracy forces and, ultimately, benefit the Assad regime.
The land IS seized and temporarily unified on either side of the Syria-Iraq border was divided nearly a century before in the midst of World War One. Overseen by British and French diplomats, the Sykes-Picot line carved Syria and Iraq out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire that had ruled the area for centuries. This treaty dishonoured the pledge made by the British to the Sharif of Mecca (in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence) of an independent, unified Arab state across this region in return for supporting British aims in the war.
This line in the sand served the imperial interests of its creators but gave little consideration to the people it arbitrarily divided. The region that IS would fashion its caliphate from straddled this line re-uniting this territory and its large Sunni population. To celebrate, IS released a video titled ‘the end of Sykes-Picot’ demonstrating that for them the past was certainly not dead, it was not even past. However, the genesis of IS and its eventual involvement in the civil war in Syria also has roots in another conflict – the Cold War.
CIA involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s helped to enable Osama bin Laden’s development of an ‘Arab foreign legion’ which didn’t fade away following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. Instead, some of these battle-hardened mujahedeen continued to fight across the Muslim world though many still based their training camps in Afghanistan where the Kabul government exerted little control beyond the major cities.
In the 1990s, Bin Laden objected to the presence of US soldiers in Saudi Arabia following George HW Bush’s Gulf War of 1990/91 and issued fatwas condemning the US and calling for a jihad against the country. This culminated in the infamous events of the 11th September 2001 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan by yet another superpower just twelve years after the Soviet Union was routed.
Around this time, a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war and associate of bin Laden, Abu al Zarqawi, left the camp he ran in southern Afghanistan and later emerged in Iraq. There, amid the chaos that ensued following the US invasion, he established al Qaeda in Iraq – the precursor to IS – to fight the US occupation. Zarqawi died in 2006 but his organisation continued its mission merging with another group to form the Islamic State in Iraq. This drew support from Sunnis disaffected by the de-Baathification programme and the sectarian policies of the Iraqi Shia government and, later, from Syrian Sunnis struggling for political power in Assad’s pro-Shi’a regime. The caliphate also attracted recruits from around the world which security analyst Shashank Joshi likened to the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War.
In March 2013, IS took over the Syrian city of Raqqa – the first provincial capital to fall under rebel control and less than a year later it overran the predominantly Sunni city of Fallujah, in western Iraq. It then took Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul causing an estimated 500,000 people fled the city. The seizure of Mosul called into question the Iraqi government’s ability to control all of its territory. By the end of June 2014, IS amalgamated its territories in Syria and Iraq under the banner of a new Islamic State or caliphate undermining both Iraq’s and Syria’s territorial integrity.
IS violent and fearsome reputation generated further refugee flows and, for a time, centred worldwide attention on the Syrian Civil War. In recent years, IS has suffered considerable setbacks and only controls about 2% of its previous ‘state’ but without imperial meddling and the Cold War proxy conflict in Afghanistan in the 1980s it may never have come into existence.
Ultimately, IS comprised just one element of this destructive, complex conflict that has embroiled regional powers such as Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia backing competing forces alongside interventions from the US and Russia. Currently, a decade in, Syria is in tatters, its people traumatised and impoverished, the possibility of peace appears remote and Bashar al-Assad position seems increasingly secure.
Jacqueline Fitzgibbon 
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