Sueida: Arab Stalingrad

The battle for Suwayda as the Stalingrad Levantine minorities

Each passing day seems to confirm it.

The new Syrian regime was acting too aggressively for just a police action. Similarly to Syria’s costal area, the brutality suggested a push to drive the local Druze community away. It is similar to what’s happening to the Alawites in Syria’s coastal areas, as well as in to the Kurds of Afrin. It is part

But the brutality in Suweida was magnified.

It all felt rushed.

Maybe because a lot more was at stake there. For the new Syrian regime and its Turkish patrons, Suwayda controls the old TAPLINE route. That route is the shortest link between Arabia’s oil and gas fields and Europe’s energy hungry markets. It is only real competitor to Turkey’s Ceyhan route, which now exports only Kurdistan’s oil.

In the middle of that route, we have Suwayda, the Druze stonghold. If Turkey wants to remain in the energy game, it needs to control it.

It mattered little that Suwayda’s Druze opposed the previous Assad regime and helped his overthrow.

That was yesterday. Even before, Suwayda’s Sultan Basha El-Atrash fought for Syrian independence from the French. But past deeds are just like money in the bank; they get inflated away in the heat of modern politics. What really matters is that Suwayda’s population is inconvenient to the new regime.

The new regime is dominated by Sunni fundamentalists. It is going beyond its Turkish patron, and is fanning the flames of Sunni nationalism and oppressing Syria’s minorities.

This is aside from the fact that “minorities” is a misleading concept in Syria’s context. Alawites, Druze, and Kurds are often majorities in their specific regions. It is mostly the Christians that are spread around. They’re like a glue that holds the country together…

But this is a new world, with Turkey as a resurging hegemon. Syria’s new regime may allow other religious communities to exist only as museum curiosities. It needs total control, especially if an updated TAPLINE brought Qatari and Iranian gas to Europe. So Suwayda’s Druze have to go. Their best hope of those minorities is the Arabs of the peninsula.

It happened before.

Half a century ago, during the 1948 War, Israel pushed deep into South Lebanon, under the pretext of the attack on the Galilee’s Kibbutz Manara by the “Qawukji unit” of the Arab Liberation Army. Around October 24, 1948, Israel replicated the more extreme tactics that British Wingate taught its burgeoning army, and a platoon of the Carmeli brigade conquered the Lebanese village of Hula and executed around 50 of the village’s men, an echo of this summer’s pacification of Suwayda. By October 29, Israeli forces had reached the Litani bend, and they blocked the future path of the TAPLINE.

Their supply lines were exposed to counter attacks.

But what really saved the day was the TAPLINE. Both Ibn Saud and the US State Department had insisted on avoiding Palestine, a land that “may be, for at least another generation, a land of bitter Arab-Jewish conflict”. So, under Saudi pressure, the American and French pressured Israel to withdraw. They stayed at the Franco-British 1923 “Paulet-Newcombe” line, and even signed their only border demarcation agreement with the Lebanese.

So, Just as Israel once crossed a line and was forced to retreat, the new Syrian Regime and its Turkish patron will be forced to retreat?

That’s the hope. For the sake of peace. Suwayda is not about Suwayda; it is about the future of the Levant, and the economic independence of the Arabian peninsula. Arabs surely don’t look forward to a return of Turkish supremacy.

They hold Stalingrad or they lose the Peninsula.