War Nerd analiza momentalnog stanja, po meni najrealnije i bez navijackih pretenzija.
Najverovatnije ce uvrediti po malo obe strane navijaca (pro i anti Asadovce)
http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/syria-fractal
Sometimes group identity is pretty straightforward, providing you with both identities: religious and ethnic. But not in Syria. It’s 90% Arab, ethnically, but those Arabs are divided into the Sunni majority in the north and east, the Alawites and Druze in the coastal hills and Damascus, and the Christians, mostly scattered along the coast. So the two biggest gangs in the country at the moment, Alawite and Sunni, both consider themselves Arabs; for them, it’s officially a “religious” war, not an ethnic fight.
But people get the wrong idea when you say it’s a religious war, as if two kids from the same house join up in different churches and start fighting. It doesn’t happen like that. You’re born into a religion—if that’s not what does it, the world sure is full of weird coincidences, because Sunni families have a lot of Sunni kids, Baptist families have a lot of Baptist kids, and Unitarian families… well, I’m not sure there are Unitarian families but if there are, I suspect they have a lot of cats, instead of kids. Rescue cats.
So your religious identity, especially in a place like Syria where the different religions each have their ghettos, is not just about church, it’s the neighborhood, the family, the songs you learn when you grow up, the massacres you’re trained to remember and resent, the grudges it’s a sin to forget, the whole landscape and history. What matters is where you split from the others, not the fact that you look alike or speak the same language as the heathen over the hill in the next village.
Identity like this gets real, real important when it’s a matter of extermination, which it is in Syria. If you live in a condo in Seattle, you can take your parents’ church or leave it at home with your old bike. But if you live in a Syrian neighborhood where the people a few miles away really do consider you kaffirs and really do want to wipe you out, that’s not an option. You either stick to the group or desert in the face of the enemy.
So right now, all kinds of Alawite Syrians who used to hate Assad, for clan reasons or just for being such a lunkhead fascist, are coming back into the fold like the lost sheep churchy people love to sing about, because it’s a matter of loyalty—and besides, it’s just not safe declaring yourself a Unitarian in an environment like that.
If the Sunni win, they’re going to shoot Alawites, and it won’t do any good to tell them, “I’m one of the broadminded ones.” In fact, that sort of attitude gets you shot faster than anything in most war zones. It’s like prison: if you try to make a point by sitting at the wrong table—the white table if you’re black, the black table if you’re white, the nortenos if you’re sureno or vice versa--they’ll make a point of you in a way you won’t like.
And that’s not just because they’re bad people. This kind of war is about what military bureaucrats call “unit cohesion.” In a sectarian war, the whole group is a military unit. And if it don’t cohere, it may not be around very long.
But at the same time, there are all these levels of identity that don’t come into play, like the fact that both Alawite and Sunni officially consider themselves Arabs. In that case, religion beats ethnic identity as something to fight over. It’s not always that way, though — sometimes ethnic identity trumps religious identity. And that’s where the next big fault line is going to open up in Syria: The Kurds.
Kurds are about 10% of the population in Syria, and like every other group in the country they’ve got their own patch of turf — in two blobs along the northern border. The Syrian Kurds are regular Sunni Muslims, totally in agreement on all that stuff with the Sunni Arabs who are fighting Assad’s Alawite heretics.
But Kurds are not Arabs. Very, very not-Arabs. Kurds and Arabs have a long history, and though there are some bright spots (Saladin was a Kurd), it hasn’t been a very sweet little story of “harmony in diversity” or any of that crap. We’re talking about the Middle East here, and they see diversity the way we see fungal infections: you just can’t get rid of the damn thing, but you sure keep trying.
Kurdish territory includes South East Turkey, Northern Iraq, and North West Iran as well as Northern Syria, and the Kurds have been stomped by all their neighbors — with the occasional mirage of reconciliation.
Saddam’s kin got so sick of dealing with the rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq that in 1988, back when we were friends with Saddam and he felt like he had a long leash, he gave the nod to a chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. You’ve probably seen the pictures that came out of that attack, some pretty sickening stuff—mothers holding their babies, dead in their tracks, cellars full of dead people and so on.
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Lately, the world champion Kurd-bashers are the Turks, who’ve been fighting a war of quasi-extermination against the Kurds on Turkish territory for decades. The main Kurdish party in Turkey is the PKK, one of those classic ethnic-liberation parties that started out commie, when commie was cool, and veered right to become a straight ethnic ticket. The PKK is still doing “armed struggle” in SE Turkey, and the Turks are reacting in their usual way, dragging suspects behind APCs for a few miles over bumpy roads until they’re more inclined to discuss their acquaintances.
Of all the people on this planet, Turks are the least in favor of diversity. They took Woodrow Wilson seriously in 1918, when he pretty much told Europe it had to be broken up into ethnic enclaves. The Turkish officers’ response was like “OK, we don’t get to be this big polyglot Ottoman Empire? Fine, Woody, we’re gonna be Turkey, a unitary ethnic state, only we’re gonna take it to eleven, you Presbyterian pickle-faced Sunday-School dupe! We’re gonna declare everybody on Turkish territory a Turk, and everybody else is welcome to get the Hell out!”
That’s what you might call “the birth of modern Turkey” in 100 words or less, and as you can guess it was more bad news for the Kurds. Ataturk officially declared that they weren’t Kurds at all, anyway; they were “mountain Turks,” like the Yeti version of a real Turk. He also made it illegal to speak Kurdish anywhere in public, and as for anything more militant than that…well, the Turkish Army has lots of APCs, and plenty of tow ropes, so if you felt like proclaiming your Kurdish identity, you were sure of a free ride, like the one Hector’s corpse got behind Achilles’ chariot.
That crackdown made the survivors more militant, like most crackdowns do. You kill one Kurd, you make his brothers and cousins soldiers of the PKK for life. Which was OK with the Turkish Army, because fighting Kurds was a nice safe way to rise through the ranks. (CI wars are popular with a lot of officer corps for the same reason.) The guerrilla war in SE Turkey has been burning like a peat fire, slow and underground, for fifty years and doesn’t look like stopping any time soon.
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The Kurds' version of Sunni Islam is roughly, “Yes, we’re Sunni already, now leave us alone”... whereas the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) take is: “The Sunni-er, the better.”
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Svaka analiza mu je top.
Preporucujem za oko Sirije i ove:
http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/the-syrian-boot
http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/cleanse-thy-neighbor
