There is a big Sunni hole at the heart of international efforts to find a way out of Syria’s civil war and turn the tide against the Sunni jihadis of Isis and their menacing power-base in Syria and Iraq. From the UN Security Council in New York to the Syria forum convened by the US and Russia in Vienna, the architecture that diplomats are struggling to erect looks as riddled as a Swiss cheese.
Last month, after the Isis attack on Paris but also after five years of fighting that has razed vast swaths of Syria, the Security Council issued a unanimous call to arms against Isis. With France on a war footing, the US and Russia ostensibly putting aside their differences from Ukraine to the Middle East, and even Britain extending its modest role in the anti-Isis fight in Iraq into Syria, it seemed as if the lead external actors in the region were starting to coalesce. The Vienna diplomatic summit, with the presence of Iran, which kept Bashar al-Assad’s regime alive until Russian reinforcements arrived in Syria in September, agreed unanimously on a tentative transition out of the Syrian conflict. Is there substance to any of this?
The US and Russia, the two main powers embroiled in Syria, remain on opposite sides. President Barack Obama leads a coalition against Isis backed, at least in theory, by Sunni Arab states and Turkey. President Vladimir Putin has put himself at the head of the Iran-backed Shia axis, whose main goal is to prop up the Assad regime, which came perilously close to being toppled by mainstream rebels over the summer. Yet they are both trapped in a dynamic that is conspiring to eliminate any centre ground — widening that already large Sunni hole.