UPHEAVAL IN LEVANT RAISES UNCERTAINTY AROUND THE WORLD

The governance of Syria can well fall into the hands of fundamentalist groups. Global powers must work towards dousing such a fire rather than reigniting it

- LT GEN SYED ATA HASNAIN (RETD)

The geopolitical complexities of West Asia make it one of the hotbeds of conflict based upon territorial ambitions, political influence, economic considerations, and ideological factors. Since all these domains remain dynamic, predictive analysis is always a challenge.

Three major conflict situations have highlighted the combative environment of West Asia for fairly long. These are the Israel-Palestinian, Iran-Israel, and the Iran-Saudi (read Shia-Sunni) conflicts. There are subsets within these conflicts that pepper the region. For example, there is the Yemen affair that is a proxy fallout of the Iran-Saudi contestation. The Palestinian-Israel standoff is meshed with the Iran-Israel affair, with Iran's proxies in the Gaza war zone and the Levant. In the midst of all this, there was the Syrian civil war, which dominated the West Asian security scene for almost a decade and was made worse by the presence of ISIS (Daesh).

The presence of this ambitious and highly ruthless transnational terrorist group helped complicate the strategic environment of West Asia by many notches. Without a known sponsor and with little known about the actual ambitions of Daesh, the only way to battle it was in the physical domain. It took five years doing this, drawing the Russian, US, Iraqi, Syrian, Kurdish, and Iranian armed resources into battle at different times before Daesh was defeated. West Asia remained in the throes of high instability through this period (2014-19), with little clarity on who needed to fight whom.