There is a resounding declaration in the Preamble to the Syrian Constitution of 2012 that the besieged Bashar Al-Assad’s Ba’ath government had put in place in the wake of the Arab Spring protests of 2011. It says, “The Syrian Arab Republic is proud of its Arab identity and the fact that its people are an integral part of the Arab nation. The Syrian Arab Republic embodies this belonging in its national and pan-Arab project and the work to support Arab cooperation in order to promote integration and achieve the unity of the Arab nation.”

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The ironies in the text stare you in the face. The Arab League, a group of 22 countries, does not accept the political legitimacy of Assad. There is genuine hatred for Assad’s tyrannical rule. The Arabs are angry with Russia for entering the fray on the side of Assad. Independent-minded Arab columnists in the Egyptian and Saudi newspapers have been shrill in their opposition to the Russian entry into the Syrian civil war. And they blame the Americans for creating an opportunity for the Russians.

There is however conspicuous silence in the critical debate in the Arab press over  the great Sunni-Shia schism in the heart of Islamic societies. Many modern Muslims tend to brush aside the internal religious divide as a trivial issue and blame the Western world of wanting to rake it up as a means to weaken Islamic unity. But the Gulf Arab countries are quite disapproving of the minority Alawite rule of Assad and his Ba’ath party. Assad has sinned on both religious and secular grounds, in the eyes of the Gulf Arabs. He is both an unacceptable Shi’ite sectarian as well as an atheistic socialist. They believe that Iran’s support for the Assad regime is based on the sense of Shia solidarity. Iran’s support for an Arab Shia regime in Damascus is the proverbial red rag to Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), comprising the Gulf Arab governments. 

The great enemy of modern Arab intellectuals and conservative Gulf Arab governments is the alliance of Shi’ite Iran, the Shia-dominated government in Iraq, the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon, Russia and Assad. The columnists in Saudi Gazette and Arab News, two English newspapers published in Saudi Arabia, have launched a savage attack on Russian military presence in Syria. One of them had taunted Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah as to why he was silent on the Russian military presence in Syria while he objected vociferously to the presence of American military in the region. Though these columnists do not approve of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its violence, their anger is greater against Assad, against Hezbollah, Iran and Russia. They long for a modern Arab, Islamic polity where the old sectarian animosities are given a quiet burial.

The governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt are worried about the ISIS. A top Saudi cleric had condemned the ISIS killing of Shias in the eastern part of the country, and the Saudi government emphasised harmony and peace between the different sects of Islam. Similarly, the Egyptian government Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi said the violence of ISIS-supported Islamists  in Sinai as unacceptable. Egypt does not want an ISIS-supported revival of the Muslim Brotherhood which the Egyptian military had suppressed ruthlessly in the latest round of power contest. Al-Sisi also fears Islamic radicals because of their attacks on religious minorities; for example, on Coptic Christians. The Arabs are also angry with Turkey for facilitating the passage of foreign recruits to get to the ISIS bases across the border in Syria. 

There are two military developments that the West-dominated world media as well as the Arabs have overlooked. First, the US-led military alliance of the Gulf Arab governments which has been carrying out air raids against the ISIS since September, 2014. Apart from curiosities like a woman squadron leader from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) air force leading an air raid, it is not clear as to how effective the military operation has been. 

The other aspect is the actual military strength of the ISIS. In September 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had reckoned that there were 32,100 ISIS soldiers, and there were 15,000 foreign recruits. A Kurdish commander speaking to the British newspaper, The Independent, dismissed the CIA assessment and gave his own exaggerated view that the ISIS had 200,000 soldiers. He reasoned that the ISIS was fighting on seven fronts simultaneously, and that it would not have been able to do so if it did not have those numbers. The latest American intelligence reports say that the foreign contingent of the ISIS has grown to 30,000. There is no indication of the military strength of the ISIS.

The Arabs then generally seem to be at sea as to what to do with the ISIS even as they are determined that Assad must be removed. They want the Western powers, especially, the US to support those anti-Assad rebel groups which do not subscribe to Islamic radicalism. They suspect that the Russians will destroy the non-ISIS groups to make things easy for Assad.

The Arab confusion is legitimate and they must sort it out for themselves. But they should not look to the West to solve their problems. They cannot justify American intervention to remove Assad while objecting to Russia for defending Assad. Is it possible for the Arab intelligentsia and the governments to tell the outside powers to leave the region? They have to create their own mechanism to solve the inter-state issues. 

Saudi Arabia has done this by involving other governments of the region when it attacked the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Riyadh had gone as far as to request Pakistan to be part of the coalition. Islamabad had, of course, demurred. Going by the same logic, an Arab coalition must deal with the Assad government on behalf of the Syrian people. And the same coalition must take a similar firm stand against the ISIS. 

Arab governments will have to do more than pay lip service to the idea of the “Arab nation” that has been mentioned in the Syrian Constitution. The Arab League as it exists now seems to be of no consequence. It does not even serve as a forum for discussing the crises affecting the region. The Arabs will have to talk to each other rather than blame Iran, Israel, Zionists, Turkey, the US and Russia for their own woes. 

The author is consulting editor, dna