What is happening in Iraq and Syria is not the creation of a day and not of just a few players. It’s easy to put it down to just Sunni-Shia or Iran-Saudi Arabia [antagonisms], but in fact it’s much more complicated than that.
The conflict is built around four different theatres of action – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine – and you have to understand that each one has contributed to what we are seeing today.
Iraq
Start with Iraq, where I served from 1984 to 1987 and later went back as the number two in our embassy in Baghdad from 1997 to 1999. Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s experiment to keep the West out while using oil wealth to generate everything that the country needed and to hold it together.
You couldn’t call Saddam a benevolent dictator – he controlled the country with an iron hand and was ruthless in eliminating his opponents – but he managed to keep religious and ethnic differences firmly under control. Society under him was certainly not overtly Islamic.
There was a popular saying back then that Baghdad had more nightclubs than bookstores, and my neighbours, who were young women, would tell me that they used the burkha only on days when they hadn’t dressed well, to cover this up.
That’s not to say there was no religious favoritism: despite being a Shia majority country, most of the political leadership as well as the top people in the army were Sunnis, but Saddam’s government included both Shias and Kurds. There was peace in Iraq, but at the cost of an absolute absence of human rights and democracy.
The joke often went that if Saddam Hussein, George Bush and Margaret Thatcher were allowed to make one phone call to their home countries from their places in hell, Saddam’s would cost the least because his would be a local call.
We have also had excellent relations with Iraq over centuries. To this day in Basra, there is a market, a souq, called Souq al-Hindi (the Indian bazaar), where you can ask for “baharat,” spices that used to come from India. In recent times, we’ve had good trading relations, most significantly of us exporting tea, which Arabs love, as well as in other ways, such as with the Indian government-run Ircon and others building roads, bridges, flyovers, railway stations, housing projects, sewage and telecom projects for them there.
Indian companies weren't able to build world-class facilities in India that they were able to implement in Iraq. When Iraqi officials came to Delhi, officials insisted on taking them by chopper to Agra from Delhi so that they didn’t have to see the state of our roads.
What has always been evident about Iraq, though, is its tremendous oil wealth. It has 120 billion barrels of proven oil resources, and only about 40 per cent of the country has been explored. We also have a stake in this because we get some of our oil from there.
The key thing about this is that Iraq was one of the few places where Western oil companies had no foothold. This Saddam was always adamant about, and it was always clear that there were Western vested economic interests in entering the country.
Syria, Lebanon and Palestine
West of Iraq, Syria is a whole different matter. It barely has any oil. In its heyday it was pumping out something like 400,000 barrels a day, compared with 3.2 million barrels next door in Iraq. But Syria, which is also a very mixed country like Iraq, is important to the world in a very different way.
For one, with the validation of the Arab League, it is Syria that brought peace to Lebanon after its civil war. Hafiz al Assad was as bad a dictator as Saddam; it’s a question of degrees, but like him, Assad was responsible for bringing peace in a place ravaged by war. At the same time though, the Alawite Syrian Army used its position in Lebanon to take control of the economy, essentially smuggling a lot of its resources to its own country.
It was only when Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri – who was close to Saudi Arabia and opposed Syrian control – was assassinated, with all the circumstantial evidence pointing to Syrian intelligence as being behind the killing, that the Syrians were told to leave Lebanon.
Syria’s influence remains, however, and extends to Palestine. Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas, the party that currently controls the Gaza strip, was based in Damascus for most of the 2000s, while many of Hezbollah’s activities, such as its propaganda channel Al Manar, were also run out of Syria.
In a way, thanks to Hamas’s position of denying the existence of Israel, Syria became the main stumbling block in the Middle East peace process, which the US had promoted as its way of fighting back against the strident anti-Americanism that is prevalent in many countries in West Asia. This meant that Syria, like Iraq, has also often been treated as a pariah state by the West.
We, however, have always had good relations with them. In 2008, India was approached by Bashar al Assad to use its good offices [with different sides] in the Middle East peace process because we have excellent relations with both Israelis and Arabs.
Post-2003
The most important lesson of history is that we don’t take lessons from history.
What happened in Afghanistan was repeated in Iraq, after the invasion. The first thing that the Americans did was to disband the well-trained, battle-hardened Saddam army, and most of them left with arms and ammunition.
The Americans then tried to keep the peace despite this vacuum, with lots of well-armed Sunni men without jobs and just 160,000 US troops. Contrast that with the situation during World War I, when the Allied Forces stationed 250,000 soldiers in Iraq (including up to 60,000 Indian troops from the Raj) to oversee around seven to eight million people then.
All the people entering the new army and being trained by the Americans ended up being Shia, because Americans were suspicious that Sunnis were all members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party.
Moreover, the Americans placed a person in charge who was essentially controlled by Iran. Few people talk about the fact that Iraq PM Nouri al-Maliki’s political party was based in Tehran and he received much of his funding from there. So in a way, what Tehran tried for nearly eight years during the Iran-Iraq war it got thanks to the Americans. The US brought Iraq to Iran on a silver platter. Meanwhile, all of civil society, the intellectuals, people who could have stabilised Iraq were killed.
The Sunni vacuum beyond al-Maliki’s Shia control began to be filled by outsiders: Saudi, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Turkey, which led to a hodge-podge situation, with Kurds also watching from the side.
Meanwhile, in the other state that had been turned into a pariah by America, in March 2011, a group of people started getting inspiration from the Arab Spring and took out a procession against Bashar al Assad in Daraa, Syria. Soon these people were joined by outsiders – those frustrated mercenaries who were the fallout of battles in Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and other places. From 2011 to 2014 there was little success for them even in Syria, especially when it became clear that al Assad had substantial backing from Russia and China.
Then, when the Americans pulled out of Iraq, the fighters realised what an opportunity they could have across the border, and suddenly they became the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham. Now you can see how these militants have been able to exploit this, with the kind of success that they are having.
What’s left, now is no longer a Middle East peace process – it should be called a Middle East survival process.
Faultlines
India’s policy of neutrality has always worked well here, and even if it is an Islamist group that manages to take control, we have always been able to communicate with people in the region. When Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi was in charge, we even had him visit, so we know there is enough goodwill over there for us to talk to everyone.
There are many elements in the area that are controlled by other actors, outsiders, and very often their leverage can be stronger than the goodwill but our insistence on a neutral point of view continues to serve us well.
No country complains about any Indian attempts to intervene there, even though we do have lots of stakes in the region. We can only encourage all the actors to work towards a solution that is realistic, and inclusion, and I don’t think division – into a Sunni country, a Shia country and a Kurdistan – is a long-term answer.
The more dangerous trend is the ethnic and religious fault lines that have been exposed in the past few years. In Iraq and Syria, you have huge conflicts that were not there before, and it will take at least a generation to calm those, ad that too only if the actors act responsibly. It’s like the Hutus and Tutsis, who went hundreds of years without problems and then the genocide happened. It has taken 20 years for that gap to be bridged. Whether that can be done here remains to be seen.
Iraq will not turn into a failed state – it has too much oil. In Somalia, where I served during the period of closing the mission in 1991 because of the civil war, the country still remains so till date simply because they do not have natural resources to attract the West. Iraq will not end like that, but it will take at least a generation before things become conducive to peace.
-- As told to Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
(Ray is a former Indian diplomat who was charge d’affaires in Baghdad and served in Syria as well.)
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The conflict is built around four different theatres of action – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine – and you have to understand that each one has contributed to what we are seeing today.
Iraq
Start with Iraq, where I served from 1984 to 1987 and later went back as the number two in our embassy in Baghdad from 1997 to 1999. Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s experiment to keep the West out while using oil wealth to generate everything that the country needed and to hold it together.
You couldn’t call Saddam a benevolent dictator – he controlled the country with an iron hand and was ruthless in eliminating his opponents – but he managed to keep religious and ethnic differences firmly under control. Society under him was certainly not overtly Islamic.
There was a popular saying back then that Baghdad had more nightclubs than bookstores, and my neighbours, who were young women, would tell me that they used the burkha only on days when they hadn’t dressed well, to cover this up.
That’s not to say there was no religious favoritism: despite being a Shia majority country, most of the political leadership as well as the top people in the army were Sunnis, but Saddam’s government included both Shias and Kurds. There was peace in Iraq, but at the cost of an absolute absence of human rights and democracy.
The joke often went that if Saddam Hussein, George Bush and Margaret Thatcher were allowed to make one phone call to their home countries from their places in hell, Saddam’s would cost the least because his would be a local call.
We have also had excellent relations with Iraq over centuries. To this day in Basra, there is a market, a souq, called Souq al-Hindi (the Indian bazaar), where you can ask for “baharat,” spices that used to come from India. In recent times, we’ve had good trading relations, most significantly of us exporting tea, which Arabs love, as well as in other ways, such as with the Indian government-run Ircon and others building roads, bridges, flyovers, railway stations, housing projects, sewage and telecom projects for them there.
Indian companies weren't able to build world-class facilities in India that they were able to implement in Iraq. When Iraqi officials came to Delhi, officials insisted on taking them by chopper to Agra from Delhi so that they didn’t have to see the state of our roads.
What has always been evident about Iraq, though, is its tremendous oil wealth. It has 120 billion barrels of proven oil resources, and only about 40 per cent of the country has been explored. We also have a stake in this because we get some of our oil from there.
The key thing about this is that Iraq was one of the few places where Western oil companies had no foothold. This Saddam was always adamant about, and it was always clear that there were Western vested economic interests in entering the country.
Syria, Lebanon and Palestine
West of Iraq, Syria is a whole different matter. It barely has any oil. In its heyday it was pumping out something like 400,000 barrels a day, compared with 3.2 million barrels next door in Iraq. But Syria, which is also a very mixed country like Iraq, is important to the world in a very different way.
For one, with the validation of the Arab League, it is Syria that brought peace to Lebanon after its civil war. Hafiz al Assad was as bad a dictator as Saddam; it’s a question of degrees, but like him, Assad was responsible for bringing peace in a place ravaged by war. At the same time though, the Alawite Syrian Army used its position in Lebanon to take control of the economy, essentially smuggling a lot of its resources to its own country.
It was only when Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri – who was close to Saudi Arabia and opposed Syrian control – was assassinated, with all the circumstantial evidence pointing to Syrian intelligence as being behind the killing, that the Syrians were told to leave Lebanon.
Syria’s influence remains, however, and extends to Palestine. Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas, the party that currently controls the Gaza strip, was based in Damascus for most of the 2000s, while many of Hezbollah’s activities, such as its propaganda channel Al Manar, were also run out of Syria.
In a way, thanks to Hamas’s position of denying the existence of Israel, Syria became the main stumbling block in the Middle East peace process, which the US had promoted as its way of fighting back against the strident anti-Americanism that is prevalent in many countries in West Asia. This meant that Syria, like Iraq, has also often been treated as a pariah state by the West.
We, however, have always had good relations with them. In 2008, India was approached by Bashar al Assad to use its good offices [with different sides] in the Middle East peace process because we have excellent relations with both Israelis and Arabs.
Post-2003
The most important lesson of history is that we don’t take lessons from history.
What happened in Afghanistan was repeated in Iraq, after the invasion. The first thing that the Americans did was to disband the well-trained, battle-hardened Saddam army, and most of them left with arms and ammunition.
The Americans then tried to keep the peace despite this vacuum, with lots of well-armed Sunni men without jobs and just 160,000 US troops. Contrast that with the situation during World War I, when the Allied Forces stationed 250,000 soldiers in Iraq (including up to 60,000 Indian troops from the Raj) to oversee around seven to eight million people then.
All the people entering the new army and being trained by the Americans ended up being Shia, because Americans were suspicious that Sunnis were all members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party.
Moreover, the Americans placed a person in charge who was essentially controlled by Iran. Few people talk about the fact that Iraq PM Nouri al-Maliki’s political party was based in Tehran and he received much of his funding from there. So in a way, what Tehran tried for nearly eight years during the Iran-Iraq war it got thanks to the Americans. The US brought Iraq to Iran on a silver platter. Meanwhile, all of civil society, the intellectuals, people who could have stabilised Iraq were killed.
The Sunni vacuum beyond al-Maliki’s Shia control began to be filled by outsiders: Saudi, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Turkey, which led to a hodge-podge situation, with Kurds also watching from the side.
Meanwhile, in the other state that had been turned into a pariah by America, in March 2011, a group of people started getting inspiration from the Arab Spring and took out a procession against Bashar al Assad in Daraa, Syria. Soon these people were joined by outsiders – those frustrated mercenaries who were the fallout of battles in Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and other places. From 2011 to 2014 there was little success for them even in Syria, especially when it became clear that al Assad had substantial backing from Russia and China.
Then, when the Americans pulled out of Iraq, the fighters realised what an opportunity they could have across the border, and suddenly they became the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham. Now you can see how these militants have been able to exploit this, with the kind of success that they are having.
What’s left, now is no longer a Middle East peace process – it should be called a Middle East survival process.
Faultlines
India’s policy of neutrality has always worked well here, and even if it is an Islamist group that manages to take control, we have always been able to communicate with people in the region. When Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi was in charge, we even had him visit, so we know there is enough goodwill over there for us to talk to everyone.
There are many elements in the area that are controlled by other actors, outsiders, and very often their leverage can be stronger than the goodwill but our insistence on a neutral point of view continues to serve us well.
No country complains about any Indian attempts to intervene there, even though we do have lots of stakes in the region. We can only encourage all the actors to work towards a solution that is realistic, and inclusion, and I don’t think division – into a Sunni country, a Shia country and a Kurdistan – is a long-term answer.
The more dangerous trend is the ethnic and religious fault lines that have been exposed in the past few years. In Iraq and Syria, you have huge conflicts that were not there before, and it will take at least a generation to calm those, ad that too only if the actors act responsibly. It’s like the Hutus and Tutsis, who went hundreds of years without problems and then the genocide happened. It has taken 20 years for that gap to be bridged. Whether that can be done here remains to be seen.
Iraq will not turn into a failed state – it has too much oil. In Somalia, where I served during the period of closing the mission in 1991 because of the civil war, the country still remains so till date simply because they do not have natural resources to attract the West. Iraq will not end like that, but it will take at least a generation before things become conducive to peace.
-- As told to Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
(Ray is a former Indian diplomat who was charge d’affaires in Baghdad and served in Syria as well.)