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Abstract
The article explains the complexity of the Syrian crisis by analyzing three dimensions of its manifestation: domestic, regional and international. It focuses on the regional level of the crisis but also on the international one with all its ramifications: the resurgence of a „cold war" of sorts in the Middle East, the emergence of ISIS and a new terrorist threat and the refugee problem.
Keywords
Syrian crisis; diplomacy; Middle East
In 1965 the British writer and historian, Patrick Seale, published his classic book „The Struggle for Syria, 1945-1958". In it he described how the weak Syrian state became the focus of regional and international rivalries. Regional powers, primarily Egypt and Iraq, but also Jordan and Saudi Arabia, meddled in Syrian politics and stood behind a variety of army officers who staged a series of coups d'etat. These regional moves also had an international dimension as Britain and France, and to a lesser extent the United States, participated in what the CIA operative Miles Copeland called „The game of nations". This stormy period ended in February 1958 when Syria merged itself into the United Arab Republic, dominated by Egypt. Syria seceded from the UAR in September 1961 and a Syrian entity was reestablished. Another nine years of weakness and instability followed until Hafez al-Asad established his Ba'ath regime in November 1970. Asad was the first ruler in Syria to establish a powerful state and a relatively stable regime but he could not fully overcome the fundamental frailty of the Syrian state and political entity determined primarily by the failure to form a political community that would accommodate the country's diversity. First and foremost, the country's Sunni Arab majority could not accept the dominant role of the Alawite heterodox community. Hafez al-Asad himself quashed in 1982 a lengthy rebellion killing more than 20, 000 of his own people in the cities of Aleppo and Hama.
After almost 30 years of apparent return to stability the country's fundamental frailty was again exposed when in March 2011, under the impact of the Arab Spring, a civil war broke out in Syria. This war has continued down to the present and has wreaked havoc in the country, claimed the lives of more than half a million Syrians, displaced...