The century's "Longest Theatre": Syria

The civil war in Syria, which began to intensify when the regime responded with ruthless violence to the civil demonstrations that began in March 2011 demanding the democratization / reform of the regime, has completed its 5th year.

During this period, both the international community's and especially the US-led interventions in the problem, with the US in fact bearing a serious share in turning the situation in Syria into a deep crisis, and the performance put on by the actors who emerged in Syria in the meantime, perhaps fully deserve to have the situation for Syria called a great theatre. What is each actor's role in Syria and what role will it play in the next scene? This is truly very hard to predict.

Against whom is the show being staged, and whom is it trying to persuade? Without fully working that out, it is of course impossible to understand which actor is playing with which codes. It was the US, for example, that from the start insistently dictated to all parties, as it were, that Assad had to go. This was the issue that, together with all its allies, it agreed upon and presented as the priority. Yet at one stage of the play an organization called DAEŞ emerged, and what this organization did with its theatrical shows, in fact because of massacres of the kind carried out by the other groups fighting in Syria and Iraq, suddenly succeeded in becoming the primary target of the American-led coalition. From that moment America left Assad alone and began to fight DAEŞ. That was not enough: it also began to support the PYD, which Assad had set up and backed, on the grounds that it "fights DAEŞ well."

Obama himself said that this support suddenly saved Assad from the brink of being toppled. This shows that the organization called DEŞ is of great use to Assad, and that precisely for this reason the whole international community has become the servant of Assad, who dangles the DAEŞ bait, which would clearly be an insult to the CIA's intellect, skill and intelligence capability. The US surely cannot be so oblivious to the field as not to know that its aid to the PYD or its struggle against DAEŞ means an emergency aid to Assad.

There is a game going on. A theatrical game that tries to manage the impressions of a certain audience with its show. In these days when we are at a new stage of the talks in Geneva, we have to try to understand the codes of this game.

When I saw the newly published book of the research academic Abdülkadir Şen, who has tried to lay out this theatre in Syria, calling it by its name, with long analyses and a documentary performance, I truly felt how much a comprehensive study of this process is needed. Unfortunately there is no work that lays out what has happened in Syria with this degree of documentary quality. The one or two texts that exist are, in the nature of an intelligence operation of the Assad regime in Turkey, works that try to hide the theatrical nature of the theatre. Those that appear more objective constitute a perfect example of the "Assadism on the sly" trend.

In this respect, the book prepared by Şen, titled Tüm Yönleriyle Suriye Devrimi (The Syrian Revolution in All Its Aspects), is an important work that will fill a gap in this field.

The title "The Longest Theatre of the Century" is the umbrella title of Şen's work, and it conveys very well the whole theatrical dimension of the roles and scenarios played out in the Syrian civil war.

For the work, which consists of 800 pages and contains nearly 2000 footnotes, more than 200 Syria Reports and Syria Analyses published by a large number of think tanks, research centers and similar institutions or organizations have been examined. It contains highly detailed information on the actors in the field. At the end of the book there is a timeline of over seventy pages. From this timeline you can follow the civil war in Syria day by day.

This timeline clearly reminds us of the responsibility of the bloody-handed Assad regime and its supporters in bringing events to this point. It shows that on 18-19 March 2011 regime forces opened fire on civilians protesting the detention of the youths arrested on 6 March for writing anti-regime slogans on walls. A careful examination of the timeline may also allow us to review our opinions on the Syrian Crisis, because it can be said that the events are conveyed here in such detail and wholeness for the first time.

A graphic added at the very end of the book is quite functional for understanding the positions of the armed groups on the ground in Syria. In the graphic, where we can also see which regions are controlled by which groups, the manpower of the armed groups is also expressed.

According to the information here, the militias affiliated with the Free Syrian Army and the Moderate Islamic groups are estimated to number between 90-120 thousand people. Against these groups, the DAEŞ Terrorist Organization is estimated to have a force of 25-35 thousand, the YPG Terrorist Organization a force of 20-30 thousand, and the Assad Regime a military force of around 90 thousand.

It appears that Iran, which supports the Assad regime, has a military presence in the region of around 15 thousand, that the military strength of Lebanese Hezbollah is around 5 thousand, and that around 40-50 thousand Iraqi Shiite militiamen and around 20 thousand Hazara forces from Afghanistan are fighting alongside the regime.

The study also lays out the dimensions of the military presence in Syria of Russia, another power supporting the Assad regime. I do not think we could find this information, which appears to have taken shape as the result of long and careful research, in any other source in Turkish or English in such a comprehensive form. Everyone, whether they know or not, talks about Syria, but Şen's book frames very well a subject with so many unknown dimensions.

Look, while talking about the book, we have not yet gotten into the book. In my piece on Wednesday, let us go into the book too.