LOL, I forgot about that gem. Not my finest, but at least it got the point across 
Here goes the story:
Syria is led by the Assad family who are Alawites (a minority Islamic group in Syria). This fact was irrelevant since: 1) the Assad’s government is a nationalist one that has neutralised religion for a along time, and 2) what people really wanted was to overthrow Assad and be free to elect their leaders. However, the situation was doomed to develop into a religious conflict. As Assad crushed and tortured the unarmed people, those who were sympathetic enough to interfere were individuals who were motivated by faith. Sunnis (the majority Islamic group in Syria and the world) from across the world poured into Syria to fight Assad and help the people. In accordance to that, freedom slogans were replaced by religious ones. As the people became stronger, what Assad had left was the support of religious groups who are long-time enemies of Sunnis: Iran, Iran’s Hezbbolah, and Shia’s militias in Iraq.
Syria is not Libya where crazy Gaddafi had no friends which made it easy to eliminate him in no time. Syria had Russia, otherwise Assad would be history now. In addition, though Assad is anti-america and anti-Israel, he understands the rules of power and knows his limits. Religious Sunni groups, his on ground opponents, do not share his understanding. This led to the US not intervening and actually preventing its allies from arming Assad’s opposition even when he used chemical weapons against his people.
A third mysterious powerful group emerged during the conflict. ISIS. Like many groups working against Assad, ISIS claims to be Islamic. However, unlike other groups, it is not endorsed by any Islamic scholar even the most extreme of scholars like the ones who support Alqaeda. ISIS didn’t fight Assad much, and Assad didn’t fight ISIS. Assad knows that ISIS can only make people long to his reign and make the world see him as an angel in comparison to ISIS. On the other hand, ISIS wanted to first have control over all the land that is not controlled by Assad. For this purpose, they employed a fear strategy which is the work of ISIS’s nationalist leaders. Yes, it is very complicated. The people of Syria are freedom seekers who had to run up religious Sunni slogans because religious Sunnis helped them, Assad is an Allawite nationalist who had to be sectarian because religious shiites helped him, and ISIS leaders are Sunni nationalists (kicked out of Iraq) who had to run up religious Sunni slogans to gather enough support to ultimately overthrow the religious Shiite system controlling Iraq where they used to govern.
Why is ISIS mysterious?
Because it was allowed to grow. Nobody would object to destroying them, not the people of Syria, not Assad’s Syria, and not Russia. Yet, they expanded in the eyesight of the world. Unless they had the power to throw knives at planes, they were easy to destroy. Assad understandably didn’t mind. But the the US was suspiciously hesitant to empower ISIS’s Sunni rivals.
The situation now
The ideology of ISIS is certainly a threat to any civilisation, the US included. However, with its current primitive capabilities, it poses no imminent threat to the US. the need to destroy ISIS remains. However, this could be done in a way that preserves the lives of civilians among which ISIS militants blend. Peacefully eliminating ISIS and its ideology requires:
- Overthrowing Assad’s regime, or if the us cant afford to anger Russia:
- empowering moderate rivals of ISIS to over throw Assad.
- Stopping the support of the Shiite government in neighbouring Iraq which pushes Sunnis to seek revenge through ISIS.
- Helping the moderate countries in the middle east neutralise religion (the US opposed the military coup in Egypt which overthrew the elected religious president).
I do like the OP’s username. Are you by chance a geologist or petrophysicist ?
From a much higher level situations like Syria can be explained by the rivalries between:
- major consumers of Oil who see continuity of supply as their national interest.
Much of what goes on in the Middle East is dominated by the fact that it has a resource that modern economies find essential for energy and industry. Without the politics of Oil, it would be a dust bowl.
There are some who can project military and economic power and others that cannot. The USA is in the former category, but it is somewhat chasened by the result of its previous adventures in the region. The uprising in Syria has spread to a very unstable Iraq. So a big part of the answer to understanding is why is Iraq unstable?
- regional powers that seek to influence the states around them
The big players are the Gulf States led by the Saudis and the Iranians who are Shi’ite. The Catholics and Protestants of the Middle East. Iraq has a lot of both. There is also Israel, whose national security benefits from keeping its neighbours weak and divided.
- political movements seeking to establish new regimes by destabising or overthrowing established states
Where do you start? Lebanon and Palestine are usually where you look to find such groups that focus on confronting Israel with competing claims of nationhood. However the ambitious Al Qaeda franchise of radical Sunni movements that have in the past confronted Russia and later the USA as a way of provoking regime change are perhaps more famous and tend to be heavily involved in states that are unstable or failing. The Syrian civil ware has spawned many of them. ISIS is perhaps the most famous.
- historical political settlements
The countries of the middle East did not draw their own borders, they were the result of competing colonial powers in the early 20th century who carved up the region into convenient chunks for their own purposes.
The states that were created often grouped together disparate peoples who really did not feel they belonged in the same country. Some peoples, like the Kurds ended up being spread across several countries: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. These countries were held together by military strongmen who enforced a national indentity by repression and bribery.
Syria is one of these states. Assad is just such a ruler and the diverse country includes groups who have religious connections with the Gulf state Sunnis including their radicals or the Iranian Shi’ites and their radicals. The surrounding states all have their proxies and client organisations fighting in Syria. The Assad regime is also supported by international supporters like Russia and Iran.
Where is the USA in all of this? Well it has its own national interest in Oil supply to consider, but that dependency on the Middle East is waning as Oil fracking develops to provide an alternative. However, the USA is heavily influenced by the concerns of it two major clients in the Middle East: Israel and the Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia.
The AlQaeda 9/11 attack successfully destablised the US and allowed the neo-con faction to gain power which led to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The latter resulted in a dangerously unstable country split between Sunni and Shi’ite factions supported by Saudi and the Gulf states on one hand and the Iranians on another.
The Syrian civil war expanded into Iraq because the current Iraq government was Shi’ite and was hated by the disenfranchised Sunnis (who ran Iraq under Saddam). Organisations like ISIS are numerically quite small, but in Iraq, they are not finding much resistance because large elements of the Iraq army find them prefereble to the Iraq government.
The USA is in an invidious position. It is war wearly, but it bears a heavy responsibility for leaving Iraq unstable and vulnerable. Only the US has the fire power to make a difference in conflict. But everyone knows that a ground wars are required to gain and keep territory. There is no obvious opposition in Syria that can be relied upon not to become an enemy.
At the moment the US has a coalition with various other powers with Oil interests and the Saudis and Gulf states to confront ISIS. However ISIS is quite probably being financed by some of these same allies. At the same time Iraq need a government that the people in the west of the country towards Syria will support.
The US neo-cons never really gave a lot of thought to creating a stable state in Iraq following Saddam (they were probably more interesting in rifling the US cookie jar.) They threw out the Sunnis who ran the country and left the country unstable and vulnerable to the influence of Iran who supported the Shi’ites. The Iranians are very influenced by the Iran - Iraq war which was devastating for both countries. They were pleased to see the end of the Saddam regime but and they never want to see Iraq pose a threat to them again, so they are heavily involved in ensuring the Shi’ites prevail. Spreading the Syrian uprising to Iraq through ISIS has given the Sunnis an opportunity to make a come back.
The situation in this part of the world is very confusing. The interests of all of these actors is shifting and there are two very unstable states: Syria and Iraq which are very prone to interference.
I guess the major driver for the US is to protect Israel (though it is an onlooker for much of this) and then to protect the Saudis and the Gulf states who invest in a lot of corporate America (all that Oil money went somewhere.) Also it did spend huge amounts on a very costly war in Iraq, so it is keen to ensure that it maintains a friendly government there. At the moment the ISIS guys are the baddies and their terrorism is again trying to spook the US into another disasterous war.
I think that Iran holds a lot of the cards here but the US is held back from dealing with them by its two dubious friends: Israel and the Saudis and money talks.
There is no obvious solution and an awful lot of double dealing going on
These are my impressions from a broad geopolitical point of view.
Thanks Sheikh and filmstar. Good stuff.
Wow, what a mess.
I looked into the differences between the Sunni and the Shia. A lot of what I found focused on deep matters of theology, which are utterly lost on me. This article from the Huffington Post that describes some of the day-to-day differences between the two sects was helpful, though I’m sure it only scratches the surface. If anybody could shed more light on the practical differences between the two sects in terms of how their beliefs affect this crisis, I’d appreciate it.
I saw in several places that the Shia are only 10% of Muslims worldwide, so I was a little confused by the fact that such a small minority has such a large impact. The discrepancy is explained by the fact that I forgot that most of the world’s Muslims do not live in the Middle East. Those who live elsewhere are more likely to be Sunni. For example, Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most populous country. 88% of Indonesians are Muslim, and 99% of those are Sunni as per Wikipedia. So, while Sunnis still dominate in the Middle East, the proportions there are more balanced than for the world as a whole.
Here’s a handy map from the BBCthat I found that shows the Sunni/Shia proportions of countries in the Middle East.
Does anybody know of a concise and recent list of the restrictions imposed by ISIS? My google-fu failed.
An aside: filmstar, you said that the Saudis were Shi’ites. Every source I saw said they were heavily Sunni. Que?
Whoops! The Saudis are indeed Sunni and a very strict form of the religion called Whabism.
The Syrian government is dominated by another sect of the religion called Alawites. Both the Shi’ites and Alawites have been persecuted in the past by Sunni rules, so Iran supports Assad.
This part of the world is a patchwork of religious distinctions and tribes and nations, some of whom found themselves sitting on top of the worlds greatest Oil reserves and borders roughly drawn for the convenience of foriegn powers.
Others were not so lucky and in the middle of this conflict those are the poor people who are being run out of their homes and persecuted by these fundamentalist fighters.