Syria’s dilemma: locals hope for peace, foreigners hope for pipes

Alameen Templeton
Abdallah Sheikh, the rebel commander overseeing the town of Qatana in Syria’s south, says occupying Israeii soldiers, just eight kilometres away, will go no further in their attempts to take over the country.
Qatana has seen its share of conflicts. It has twice been the staging point for Syrian troops in the 1967 and 1973 wars and now finds itself staring directly down on the Zionists’ return.
The Israelis say they don’t want to invade Syria; Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has said it looks forward to cooperation with Israel.

Chessboard thinking
So, Sheikh, the rebel commander, may be more right than he knows, but probably not the way he expects.
Whatever truth may be in reports HTS has received direct and indirect Pentagon and Mossad support for the duration of its short, corporate existence, it is taking time for its acceptance in the ranks of the Pentagon’s Department of Dirty Tricks to filter up through to the ranks of the politicians and other lawmakers.
So, while London and Washington start trying to disentangle HTS’s Al-Qaeda and ISIS roots from the veil of public perception and to delist it from the official ranks of “terrorist organisations”, Moscow is wasting no time establishing contacts with the corporate jihadis in a bid to keep its military bases inside Syria, including its naval base in the Port of Tartous and the Khemimim Air Base near the port city of Latakia.
Sky News reports Russian deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov says Moscow wants to retain its military bases and talks with HTS are “proceeding in a constructive fashion”. He said he hoped HTS would fulfill its pledges to maintain law and order and ensure the safety of diplomats and other foreigners.
“The bases are still there, where they were on Syrian territory,” he said. “No other decisions have been made for the moment.
“They were there at the Syrians’ request with the aim of fighting terrorists from the Islamic State.
“I am proceeding on the basis of the notion that everyone agrees that the fight against terrorism, and what remains of IS, is not over.”
Resurrecting the bogeyman
That’s OK by the Americans, because they also need ISIS’s existence, be it just on paper in a registrar’s office or on the ground in Syria, to justify their continued presence in Syria. And Israel is there, ostensibly for the same reason.
So, the threads of systemic convenience that contrived Syria’s role as a proxy on the global chessboard remain in place and the red-white-and-blue alliance of America, Russia, Britain and France will continue taking their cuts from the much-reduced carcass.
And its “all in the interests of protecting Syria”; even the foreign fighters who comprise much of HTS’s ranks are there for the same reason.
The patient might not survive the operation, but everyone in the abattoir is convinced it will be a success.
So, Vladimir Putin hasn’t been invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration, but that doesn’t mean the incestuous sharing of low hanging fruits between Washington and Moscow in Syria won’t continue on another level.
Türkiye is the joker card in the alliance, trying to carve out its own position while desperately seeking to avoid falling into the proxy pit.
Syria, with its shoreline as the eastern buttress to the Mediterranean, is the inescapable terminal to many oil routes out of “Pipelinestan”, the fossil fuel-rich oil fields of central Asia around the Caspian Sea and the Arabian Gulf.
All routes lead to Syria
Turkiye is buddying up with the Israelis because they want to build a gas and oil supply route connecting the Kirkuk (Iraq) and Baku (Azerbaijan) oil fields through Tblisi and Ceyhan (Turkiye) to Ashkelon and Eilat in Palestine to supply south east Asia and Africa. It must pass through Turkish, Syrian, Lebanese, Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian waters on the sea route from Turkiye to Eilat.
Qatar and the US want a pipeline from Qatar, via Syria and Türkiye to Europe; Russia and Iran want a pipeline from Iran, via Iraq and Syria, to Europe.
Standing on the frontline of all those global ambitions is Abdallah Sheikh, the rebel commander overseeing the town of Qatana.
“We refuse to let anyone enter Syria,” he tells Middle East Eye from his new headquarters in the town’s municipal building.
Israel’s invasion forced Syrians outside Qatana to flee. Sheikh says people ae nervous.
“Israel wanted to enter the area to maintain chaos,” he says. “It probably wants Syria to remain weak.”
Syria’s rebels have other priorities right now. “We are working on rebuilding Syria,” Sheikh says.
But, everyone says that nowadays, so the statement has lost its capacity to reassure. Eighteen-year-old Abdel-Malik Abdullah of Qatana is falling back on common sense for reassurance: “The rebels aren’t doing anything (to us) because Syria cannot afford another war,” he observes.
Sixty-year-old Ahmed Weyda glumly points to places the Israelis bombed in 1973 and says only “If the Israelis wanted to be here, they’d be here by now.”
Syria defanged
Every day, Israeli warplanes bomb sites across Syria. From ships in Latakia to jets in Damascus, Syrian military gear now in rebel hands has been incinerated. There have been more than 600 raids in a week, Middle East Eye reports.
One “expert” tells the BBC Syria is “now a de facto demilitarised country”, other than the tens of thousands of corporate jihadis considering their next move, US soldiers and contractors waiting for word from Washington, Israeli soldiers waiting for the same, Russians in Tartous and Khemimim, and Turkish soldiers advising HTS.
More accurately, Syria is defanged in geopolitical chessboard terms. It doesn’t have an air force, air defences, conventional warfare capacity or an ability to defend its borders. It’s lands have been flattened in preparation for its “Pipelineistan” role.
Scurrying around at grave and grassroots level are the local tribal militia who have been “bombed back into the Stone Age”. They’re just trying to meet bread-and-butter issues, to keep water running and the lights on; geopolitical strategies mean nothing to them as they have been forced to weigh one invading army’s demands against another’s.
Just as their forefathers did when Chingiz Khan’s, Chagutay’s or Timurlane’s forces destroyed their cities and built mountains of skulls, 100 000 high, they must now fall back on the Kalimah and sabr for their main weapons that are free of prejudice, systemic convenience, or geopolitical value.
If ever the conditions for a true Islamic revival are being prepared, then they are taking root in the lands of Sham, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Sudan, and Allah knows best.