India And The West Asian Wars

The realpolitik, religion and proxy conflicts of West Asia are a policy challenge India must navigate deftly.

- Sarang Shidore

THE RECAPTURE OF ALEPPO by the Assad government in Syria has catapulted the Syrian civil war into every living room in India and elsewhere. The humanitarian horror on TV screens is, however, only the tip of the iceberg of a complex conflict that has deep roots and presents unique dangers to Indian interests, given our geographic proximity and selective dependencies with the region. Unlike many other civil wars with a limited number of factions, Syria is characterised by a mind-numbing array of actors and contests at many levels. Unscrambling their taxonomy is vital if we are to understand their geopolitics, and what it could all mean for India.

In fact, Syria is neither an isolated theatre nor a single war. Rather, it is part of a continuous, interlinked spatial terrain of conflict stretching from the Mediterranean coast all the way up to the Iranian border. Within this space, multiple fierce conflicts have been raging since the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions in 2011 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Alongside the conflicts in the Syria-Iraq region, there is also a separate but related conflict underway in Yemen.

First, the actors. Four levels, in increasing scales of power and geography, can be identified. Numerous armed non-state actors form the first and lowest level. These include the extremist Sunni Ahrar al-Sham, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (till recently, Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate) and Jaish al-Islam among many others, the moderate Sunni Free Syrian Army, radical Shia militias such as the Sadrist Kataib al-Imam Ali, the Alawite Shabiha, smaller factions of armed Assyrian Christians and Turkomans, and somewhat separately, the Kurdish nationalist PKK, confined to southern Turkey. These militias are small relative to the other actors, often territorially interspersed in byzantine ways, and are typically allied with one or more of the larger players.