By John Damellos
After five years of bloodletting in the Arab world, we realize that the "Arab Spring" was a US strategy of controlling the popular aims and goals of the people of Maghreb and the Middle East for the sake of Globalization.
In the initial phases of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, demonstrators seemed to target “the effects of neoliberalism in their countries and the impoverishment of the middle classes, the censorship and control of the media, the unpopular Arab alliances with Israel, the US sponsorship of these dictatorships, the lack of official solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, and the continued lack of accountability and representation”. (1). Moreover, they saw themselves as “reconnecting with other Arabs and ending the isolationism of country-specific nationalisms that dictators (such as Gaddafi, Mubarak and Assad) promoted and which separated Arabs from one another in their struggles for democracy”. (1a)
However, while the West believed that the connecting bond of all those disenchanted Arabs could be Democracy and the global market, it was religion that finally won, as it was manifested in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood and in Syria, Yemen and Turkey as well.
Consequently, the Syrian civil War, has all the elements of a Holy War; while it started as a pro-Democracy affair, it has become a struggle among Islamic sects, the Syrian Sunni majority that wants to topple Assad vs the Shia and Alawi minorities of the country that support the regime.
Apart from the two superpowers involved in the Syrian Civil War, the desolated country has also become an arena where small and repressed ethnic groups fight for land and independence; such groups are the Kurds, the Arabs, the Assyrians, the Armenians, the Turkmens and the Circassians. (2) But the latter are only small players in this Holy war, compared to the organized religious sects involved in the bloody battles of Homs or Aleppo, such as the Aleppo Conquest, a joint operations room that includes 50 Western-backed Sunni and Salafist Islamist groups, or their foes, the Lebanese Hezbollah (Shia), the Iranian Quds Force or the Iraqi Shia Badr Brigades that fight alongside the Assad regime. (3)
Leading role in the crisis also has the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or Daesh, a Salafi jihadist militant group that follows a fundamentalist, Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam and controls 25,000 square miles of land in Syria and Iraq, an area roughly the size of West Virginia. (4)
Another player that is taking advantage of the situation is Turkey; its military forces, roam the eastern Syrian landscape, preventing the Kurds from creating an independent state west of the Euphrates and protecting their brethren, the Turkmens in Iraqi oil-rich Mosul. They are now converging on the Syrian town of Dabiq, where ISIS fighters have said they believe the end of the world will unfold, with an apocalyptic battle between Christians and Muslims. But they must be delusional, because there will be no Christians fighting this Holy War.
During the last five years, the Christian population in Syria has been reduced by two thirds, from 1.5 million to only 500,000 today. (5) So, it seems that not only the Arab Spring has managed to spread bloodshed between Muslim factions in the Middle East, but it has decimated the Christian community there as well.
This is the real Arab Spring: an intended act of hegemony by the United States and the old colonialist powers of the West, that not only failed to strengthen democracy and to raise the living standards of the Arabs, as the masterminds of Globalization had promised, but invigorated old religious schisms and divisions of Islam under the motto of Divide and Conquer.
Notes
1. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/201282972539153865.html
2. Rainer Grote & Tilmann J. Roder: Constitutionalism, Human Rights and Islam after the Arab Spring.
3. The Sunni-Shia Conflict: Understanding Sectarian Violence in the Middle East
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant
5. http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/03/16/aleppo-bishop-two-thirds-of-syrian-christians-have-been-killed-or-driven-away/
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