Editorial: Instability in Syria Saturday, 15 October 2011 03:19

Syria is under the threshold of a full-blown civil war or an armed struggle with protests inside and outside the country calling for the ouster of President Bashar Al Assad. The 46-year-old president has repeatedly shown he has no intention of leaving despite protests spreading from the suburbs of Damascus to the southern province of Daraa, the northern provinces of Aleppo, Idlib and Hassakeh, and to the central regions of Homs and Hama. The UN human rights office estimates that more than 3,000 people have been killed since the uprising began in mid-March. Thousands have been arrested, detained, forcibly disappeared and tortured.  

The revolt has crippled the economy, destroyed tourism and polarised the various groups inside the country, which has been ruled by the Ba’ath party. How to deal with the ongoing violence continues to trouble Sunni Arab states and Europe, who fear an inexorable slide towards civil war if Assad does not introduce a comprehensive reform programme, or cede power to a nascent opposition. Assad again pledged reforms over the weekend, in particular the establishment of a committee to draft a new constitution.

Syria denounces the Syrian National Council (SNC), an umbrella body formally set up on October 2 that pulls together most of the groups opposing Assad. But Qatar’s Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani hailed as an “important step” the creation of the opposition front, urging Assad to talk to them. “It is in the interest of Syria that the government sits with and reaches an agreement with this council over the nature of a new constitution that would preserve the balance of the Syrian nation,” the Emir said.  Countries across the globe have expressed outrage over the instability. The European Union and the US have imposed sanctions against the regime. The Gulf Cooperation Council urged an immediate meeting of Arab League states to discuss the country’s violence. Syria is a member of the Arab League.

Sporadic individual calls for international military action have begun to arise among Syrian protesters. But most protesters and Syria’s opposition leaders have so far resisted the idea. The reason is a brew of political complications, worries over civil war and plausible risks of touching off a wider Middle East conflict with archfoes Israel and Iran in the mix. And Assad has more powerful friends and carries far more wild cards than Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Even Israeli officials have not been pressing for Western-led attacks to bring down Assad. An upheaval in Syria could raise new security questions in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967. For all Assad’s hostility against Israel, he has kept the Golan front largely quiet for decades.

For the moment, the most likely channel for possible outside military help runs through Turkey, where a group of Syrian military defectors have set up a faction called the Free Syrian Army.