HRW: Iraq security forces and police involved in August massacre at a Sunni mosque in Diyala

According to HRW witnesses the massacre was basically broadcast live thru the mosque's loudspeaker but there was no response from the nearby Iraqi army and police checkpoints.

Iraq's descent into an all-out sectarian war would not only ruin the US plan to contain ISIS. The perception that US warplanes provide air cover for a Shia genocide of Sunnis in Iraq/Syria may put at risk the governments of some Sunni members of the anti-ISIS coalition.


# CNN 
By Chelsea J. Carter and Raja Razek () {

Date = November 2, 2014

(...)

Victims of the massacre "by Iraqi pro-government militias and security forces recognized the attackers and knew them by name," the report said. Some wore Iraqi police uniforms, according to the report.

The rights group called on the government to make public details of its findings into the attack, which HRW said was consistent with a pattern of killings being carried out in Iraq by Shiite militias, including al Haq, the Badr Brigades and Kataib Hezbollah.

"Pro-government militias are becoming emboldened and their crimes more shocking," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at HRW.

HRW called on the United States and its allies to stop providing Iraq "with military support and assistance until the government ensures that such widespread war crimes and crimes against humanity have ended," the rights group said.

(,,,)

"Don't move. No one leave," a gunman wearing a dark green T-shirt and a headband typically worn by militiamen affiliated with Asaib al-Haq, the survivor said.

"He aimed his first shot at the sheikh, and then he continued shooting the rest of us. When I heard the first gunshot, I dropped to the ground," the survivor said.

The attack, according to witnesses, was carried out in two stages, with gunmen opening fire inside the mosque and then shooting would-be rescuers outside.

"The witnesses said there was an army checkpoint about 200 meters (656 feet) from the mosque and a police checkpoint about 150 meters from the mosque, but that no security forces responded to the attack even though the shooting was broadcast over the mosque loudspeaker," the report said.

Witnesses testified the shooting carried over the loudspeaker could be heard at a distance of at least 600 meters (1,969 feet), it said.

Source = http://t.co/rxyqxwtIR5 }

Video = HRW interviews survivors of the massacre at a Sunni mosque in Diyala Iraq 

Iraq Next Time Bomb

The article parsed below was published by Rudaw on October 1. That is, exactly one month ago.

Yesterday, Rudaw reported another clash between Kurdish peshmerga and the Shia Badr militia. This time the Shia militias took some peshmerga fighters prisoner

The dysfunctional Iraqi army apart, Peshmerga and Shia militias are pretty much all the US got to rely on for ground forces in Iraq.

# Rudaw
Sunni Arabs seek Peshmerga protection from Shia militias in Kirkuk () {

By = Hiwa Hussamaddin
Date = 1/10/2014

(...)

Sherwan Hamid, a Kurdish Peshmerga officer near Kirkuk, told Rudaw, “The policy and behavior of Shiite militants have changed completely. In the beginning their only goal was to retake Shiite areas, but now they have started seeking revenge.”

Hamid added, “Following the liberation of Amerli, Suleiman Beg and some other villages, the Shiite militants entered the village of Yenginje and destroyed all the houses, stores and shops that belonged to Sunni Arabs.”

“When they find an IS militant corpse, they behead it and drag the body from the car in the streets,” he maintained.

(...)

Pola Ahmed, director of Daquq security station south of Kirkuk, said, “IS still controls several areas within Kirkuk’s borders. The security authorities, with the help of the Iraqi army, have a plan to retake those areas and the Shiite militants are expected to participate in the operation. This has raised grave concerns among the Sunnis.

Ahmed added, “We have been approached by Sunni Arabs in those areas via tribal leaders. They have informed us that they would like to have the Peshmerga forces attack their areas and that they are ready to surrender themselves and their arms to Peshmerga forces on the condition that Shiite militants can’t attack their areas,” Ahmed added.

(...)

The director of security in the town of Tuz Khurmatu in Salahaddin province south of Kirkuk, said the Peshmerga worked well with the Shiite militias on anti-IS missions but their relationship has deteriorated over the past few weeks.

They “attacked our checkpoint at Khurmatu gate, but we repelled the attack,” he said. “The Shiite militants, on a daily basis, make problems for Kurds inside the town of Khurmatu.”

Source = http://t.co/7voEU3sxxn 

}

Houthi scream marks the expanding boundaries of rising Houthi power

Vice News. The Houthi sarkha/scream marks the expanding boundaries of rising Houthi power in Yemen.

The most intriguing part of the article is the surprise of residents of Sanaa on seeing Houthi checkpoints to be  manned by their neighbors who previously couldn't care less about Houthis.  This may indicate further sectarianization of the conflict with Zaidi Shia outside the Houthi traditional stronghold of Saada increasingly flocking to the group.

# Vice News
The Houthis Are Battling al Qaeda Amid a 'Slow-Burning Coup' in Yemen () {

By = Peter Salisbury
Date = October 28, 2014

(...)

Checkpoints manned by Yemeni men in traditional garb sprang up across Sanaa. Many of the men decorated their guns, their cars, and even their foreheads with stickers and banners bearing the Houthis' sarkha slogan spelled out in red and green on a white background

"Death to America, Death to Israel, Damned be the Jews, Victory to Islam."

The sarkha is visible just about everywhere the Houthis are. It's a supremely effective piece of marketing, marking anyone who chooses to display it as a supporter of the group. The slogan's presence in Sanaa has come to be seen as a signal that the Houthis — once a small religious revivalist movement, now a popular and powerful political movement — are an unstoppable military force that is effectively in control of the capital. When the slogan is seen elsewhere in the country, it is seen as a sign that the Houthis are on their way.

And the slogan is everywhere. In central Yemen, the group is battling al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the local franchise of the extremist movement that the US government saw as the most dangerous radical Islamist group in the world before the Islamic State sprang up in Syria and Iraq. In mid-October, sarkha-bedecked men took control of Hodeidah port on Yemen's western coast. The group has also expanded south into Ibb and Taiz provinces, where it is battling both al Qaeda affiliates and local tribes.

Where a year ago they would have scoffed at such an idea, residents of Aden, a port city in the south of Yemen, are now genuinely worried that the Houthis, who hail from the other side of the country, could soon be surveying the Indian Ocean.

(...)

Khaled, who lives in central Sanaa but was working outside the capital during the fighting there, described his surprise to VICE News upon returning to find friends and acquaintances who were agnostic in their politics manning Houthi checkpoints in the city center. "I know these people," he said. "They aren't Houthis. They… couldn't care less about the Houthis."

Sanaa residents have by now realized that most Houthi checkpoints are manned not by fighters from Sadah, but by locals. As a result, talk has been less about the "Houthi takeover" of Sanaa and more about the "takeover of Sanaa."

This reassessment is not unique to the capital city. A resident of Taiz disputes the extent to which the "Houthi" presence in the area is made up of bona fide fighters from the north. "All the people here that I can see who say they are Houthis, I recognize," he says, indicating that the supposed Houthis are instead locals. He adds that the bulk of the armed men in the city come from a local division of the Republican Guard, a military unit once run by Saleh's son. Even the fighters who aren't local, he says, aren't from Sadah. Their accents don't match up.

(...)

Source = https://t.co/JHp8UEBpKq }

Video = A boy performs the Houthi "scream" during a demonstration in Sanaa

BIG PARTY IN A DESERT

My article for the American Spectator in 2012.
First published here

The war in Libya is over but its aftershocks keep shaking the region. A rebel Tuareg army swept across northern Mali, taking over the famous city of Timbuktu. Tuareg rebellions have long been a recurring phenomenon in Mali and Niger, but this time it was different. Ever since the regime of Gaddafi was overthrown, the governments of Mali and Niger were sounding alarm bells over the influx of heavily armed Tuareg fighters who used to serve in the army of the late dictator. Hundreds of these fighters, and the skills and the weaponry they have brought from Libya, have created a new and seemingly unstoppable type of Tuareg rebel army that has finally achieved what eluded the previous rebellions. Within a few weeks the rebels routed the minuscule Malian army and effectively partitioned the country in two. The Malian government has meanwhile collapsed altogether.

On 6 April, the veteran Tuareg national movement -- National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) -- declared a new independent state in Gao, the biggest of the three towns in the North. It was not very surprising that the MNLA's declaration of independence immediately hit a wall. The State Department, the EU, the African Union, Mali's neighbors and its government, all flatly rejected this idea out of hand. The surprising part was that the declaration was rejected from within the rebel ranks as well. For decades uprisings by Tuareg nationalists have been a major headache for local governments and their outside sponsors. Now a previously unknown rebel faction, which calls itself Ansar ed Dine, said it had no interest in independence whatsoever and its goal was instead to impose the Islamic law on the entire country of Mali

2006. Tuaregs having fun in Timbuktu

It's a story familiar in the Middle East and North Africa -- if it's not nationalists, then it's Islamists. Nature abhors a vacuum. Where the former fail, the latter often step in. The capital of the de facto independent Iraqi Kurdistan has been transformed from a neglected backyard of Iraq into a sea of construction cranes. American flags are posted proudly on dashboards. Not one single American soldier had died here. But in South Yemen it's no longer the defeated nationalists who are fighting battles against the northern army, but instead Islamic fundamentalists are imposing Sharia law on towns and areas under their control.

Nevertheless, the emergence of Tuareg fundamentalists has amazed some observers. The Tuaregs are known as occasional providers of logistic services to radical Islamic groups, but until now the nomads were not usually known as naturally born fundamentalists. As a matter of fact, MNLA has repeatedly offered its services in fighting Al Qaeda in the strategically important Sahara region to the West and the international community in exchange for recognition of Tuareg independence.

The tradition of men covering their faces certainly gives the Tuareg men a rather sinister look. In fact, in Roman times, their ancestors were called the Garamantes, and controlled lucrative caravan routes across the Sahara from Mali. They repeatedly clashed with the Romans on various occasions and the last proconsul to earn a triumphus -- Lucius Cornelius Balbus -- won this distinguished honor from Augustus in 19 BC for having defeated the Garamantes in a series of skirmishes in modern-day Fezzan. Yet, even though the poet Virgil prophesied the subjugation of these tribesmen in his renowned epic the Aeneid, the Garamantes always remained independent of Roman rule in the province of Africa.

Modern day Tuaregs do have a reputation for smuggling, raiding and providing ruthless mercenaries to regimes across the region, including the one of Muammar Gaddafi. But Tuaregs also have a less known soft side of the bon vivants of the Sahara desert, fans of booze, partying and a peculiar music style known as Tuareg rock or Tuareg blues. Other aspects of the Tuareg culture also make them unlikely converts to the Islamist cause. The Tuaregs are largely matrilineal. Though they are not matriarchal, traditionally, in the Tuareg society women were accorded higher social status compared to Arabs and other Berber peoples. Not a bunch of folks one would normally expect to submit themselves readily to the bleak and dry routine of a Sharia state.

The leader of the new faction himself is a perfect example of this dramatic change. A renowned rebel, who single-handedly kick-started a previous Tuareg uprising, as late as 2008, Iyad ag Ghali still appears in Wikileaks sharing intelligence about Al Qaeda with U.S. diplomats. Ag Ghali's transformation into an Islamic fundamentalist is even more surprising given the existence of personal accounts that indicate that not so long ago the man was still a big fan of smoking, drinking and partying. In this Ag Ghali was certainly not unlike many other Tuaregs of the region.

2009. The desert comes to party in Europe. Tinariwen performing live in Rubigen, Switzerland

The Tuareg uprising in Mali has received limited media coverage and was largely overshadowed by the ongoing battles of the Arab Spring. Syria, in particular, grabbed the attention of international audiences and produced an unholy amount of analyses and plain speculations. But behind the two uprisings in Mali and Syria, happening in different parts of the region and at the first glance unrelated to each other, is lurking the same reality of absurd borders and impossible ethno-sectarian configurations. It's a reality that hails back to decisions made by the former colonial ruler of these lands many years ago.

In 1959 on the eve of Mali's independence a group of Tuareg tribal chiefs wrote a letter to French President Charles de Gaulle:

Permit me, your honor Mr. President, to remind you that joining the Tuareg nation to the government of Mali is unjust and it is not what General Joffre agreed to. It's the opposite of those who ruled over us before the French government, and the Tuareg will never accept the present position of their country, which is divided between the government of Mali and the government of Niger. The principle, according to the French government when it decided to leave the Tuareg country, is that it should not disperse them between different peoples with whom the Tuareg people do not share the same ethnicity, religion, or language

More than two decades before this, 1936 to be precise, a group of Alawite notables in Syria wrote a letter to the French colonial master, begging him, admittedly in a rather grotesque form, that the Alawites should not be made part of the future Syria:

The Alawites refuse to be annexed to Muslim Syria because, in Syria, the official religion of the state is Islam, and according to Islam, the Alawites are considered infidels....
There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the Mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation, irrespective of the fact that such abolition will annihilate the freedom of thought and belief.… 

…The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children. 

… We assure you that treaties have no value in relation to the Islamic mentality in Syria. We have previously seen this situation in the Anglo‑Iraqi treaty, which did not prevent the Iraqis from slaughtering the Assyrians and the Yezidis.

Ironically, among the signatories of the Alawite letter was nobody else but Sulayman al-Assad, the grandfather of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, currently denounced around the world for his bloody crackdown on a largely Sunni uprising against his rule.

These two letters were the beginning of two very different stories. But with all the difference between the two, the two stories also share two common denominators: namely, they began with letters and they both ended badly.

In Syria the Alawite minority has resigned itself to the French decision but not to its fate of a downtrodden minority. Al Assad's descendents have eventually taken over the whole country and established one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East hell bent on exporting instability all around. In 1982 this regime has set a new standard of oppression in the Middle East, summarized by Thomas Friedman in the term "Hama Rules," named after a big Syrian city reduced to a pile of rubble by the regime's artillery during crackdown on an Islamist led uprising. Come 2012 and the Hama Rules no longer help as violence in Syria is spiraling out of control.

In Africa, two of the poorest nations on Earth -- Mali and Niger -- were left to struggle with an impossible task of controlling vast expanses of Sahara populated by a hostile desert minority. Two hopeless landlocked basket cases, basically bankrolled by the international community. It's therefore no wonder that one of them has now collapsed under repeated assaults by rebellious Tuaregs, whose national struggle seems to have started mutating into a hardcore fundamentalist Islamic movement.

2008. Tauregs in Mali. Sitting in the sand, listening to music

On April 8, the president of CMA, a world organization representing all Berber peoples including Tuaregs, wrote an open letter to the candidates for the French presidential election. The letter restated the previous MNLA promise to establish a secular and democratic state and the intention to drive Islamist factions out of all the territories of Azawad. As its two predecessors more than half a century ago, the letter warned the, now former, colonial master about the dangers of arbitrary and unsustainable borders:

The Tuaregs like other oppressed peoples in the world do not want to live forever colonized. The international community has understood this by favoring the access to the independence of many countries in Europe during the last 20 years or even recently in Africa with the independence of the South-Sudan.

When the French Minister declares that "it is not possible to question the sovereignty of Mali," we remind him that it is not any more allowed for France to continue to draw the map of Africa as one pleases. The time of the colonialism is gone, it is the moment to make speak about the international law concerning the right of the peoples to their self-determination. Furthermore, as the ancient colonial power, France is placed well to know the arbitrary and artificial character of the borders which she drew in Africa, what is at the origin of the conflict of today.

If the history of letter writing in the region has any lesson to offer, it would be that this letter will fare no better than its predecessors. On the ground MNLA appears to be steadily losing to Ansar ed Dine, buoyed by the influx of hundreds of foreign fighters sent to ag Ghali by the likes of Al Qaeda in Maghreb and the Nigerian Boko Haram. The deal, MNLA was originally planning to offer to the international community, fell apart. If anything it's now MNLA itself who needs the international community to save it from the fundamentalists. But on the international scene MNLA and its declaration of independence have received no support whatsoever and the mood seems to be gradually shifting in support of military intervention.

These are bad days for the Tuareg nationalists. Yet, as they are watching their surprising victory to slip out of their hands, it's now their former colonial tormentors themselves, oh the irony of it, who are finding themselves slipping into the nightmare of another failed experiment in creative borders and wishful mixing of peoples and cultures. "Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong," wrote Bismarck in 1876. "Europe is a geographical expression." More than one hundreds years later the "geographical expression" is struggling to survive a utopia imposed on it by the well-meaning enthusiasts of togetherness.

The severe economic crisis has put to test both the viability of a single European currency and the sense of solidarity between its members. The anti-German sentiment is exploding along the Eurozone's southern periphery with an intensity unseen in Europe since the World War II. Unemployment hitting above 20% in Spain and Greece, the practice of burning German flags and chanting "Nazis out" pioneered by protesters in Greece may yet become a new habit in the Eurozone's Mediterranean belt.

Across Europe anti immigration and nationalist parties are rising. Scotland is likely to see an independence referendum in 2014. Belgium has recently smashed all world records for the longest period without a government amid constant infighting between the Flemish nationalists and their French-speaking opponents. Elevating the entire euro zone to the status of transfer union may sound like a good idea in theory, but right now this notion is threatening to split the very country which is home to the EU headquarters, no less.

France does not seem to be having it any better in the United States of Europe than other members. President Sarkozy spent his term vigorously deporting Roma migrants, threatening to strip foreign-born rioters of citizenship and plotting with the Germans to reestablish border controls within the Schengen area. To no avail. As the world of fantasy is crumbling in Europe, large chunks of the French electorate failed to get impressed and the voters turned even more massively towards the anti euro and anti immigration National Front.

Ours is a world of absurd borders and impossible unions. But from Africa through the Maghreb and the Middle East, all the way to Scotland and Flanders in Northern Europe, they are rising: nationalists, separatists, regionalists. They are coming in all shapes and colors and they are legion. Ag Ghali and his fundamentalists may have spoiled the party in Mali, but the big party is far from over. If anything, it has barely started.

2010. Bombino aka Omar Mokhtar, also nicknamed the Jimmie Hendrix of the Tuaregs,

 firing up a rock party at the feet of an ancient adobe mosque in Agadez, Niger

DEMOGRAPHY IS DESTINY IN SYRIA

The article I co-authored for the American Spectator in 2012.
First published here

The "peripheralism" and Malthusian underpinnings of an unexpected uprising.

Among the second wave of Arab Spring uprisings that followed Tunisia, Syria was the most spectacular "out of the blue" that suddenly arose in the face of the media and analytic community. Just days before Deraa exploded with protests last March, some analysts were still scrutinizing Syria's circumstances and declaring the country to be immune from the Arab Spring. Nor did reporters who visited the country spot signs of a brewing storm.

In fact, throughout the Arab Spring, the media and experts repeatedly fell into the same trap of confusing the capital city with the whole country. On the eve of the Islamist landslide in Egypt's elections various polls and informed individuals were putting the popularity of radical Salafis at between 5% and 10%. The Salafis have indeed won about 10% of the vote… but only in Cairo. Nationwide they took almost 30%, beating even those unrepentant pessimists who were betting on a Muslim Brotherhood spring. In some provinces they grabbed all of 50%.

This routine of the periphery ambushing the media and analysts during the Arab Spring and making a mockery of their reports and predictions has reached such grotesque proportions in Syria partly thanks to the media restrictions imposed by the regime, but mostly owing to the very peripheral nature of the Syrian uprising itself. This "peripheralism" has also laid waste to the best efforts of Iranian advisers who came to Syria to share with their Syrian colleagues the know-how accumulated by the regime in Tehran in crushing the Greens.

In truth, the escalation in Syria took by surprise only the people who never bothered to examine Syria's population pyramid. It was no "out of the blue" to anybody even slightly familiar with the basic facts on demography and climate in the region. In the Middle East's long list of hopeless basket cases Yemen is surely beyond competition. However, for quite a while Syria has positioned herself as a formidable contender for respectable second place.

In some respects, the seeds of the current disaster were planted as far back as 1956, when Youssef Helbaoui -- head of economic analysis in Syria's Planning Department -- famously declared: "A birth control policy has no reason for being in this country. Malthus could not find any followers among us." Since then Syria has been living in a state of one uninterrupted demographic cataclysm. The regime was so obsessively pro-natalist that in the early 1970s, the trade and use of contraceptives in Syria were officially banned. By 1975, the birth rate reached 50 live births per 1,000 people, with Hafez al-Assad asserting that a "high population growth rate and internal migration" were responsible for stimulating "proper socio-economic improvements" within the development framework.

Even when other nations in the Middle East began to take measures to curb their population growth as the danger of demographic collapse started to loom over the region, the regime in Syria was struggling to make up its mind on the issue. Only in recent years has the regime introduced some measure of family planning, but by now the sheer amount of population momentum accumulated in previous decades has kept the population swelling to new highs. It's true that the average Syrian woman entering the child bearing age now is expected to have no more than three children in her lifetime. Yet, the sheer proportion of such young people in the population continues to propel the population forward. And the workforce is still expanding at a neck breaking rate of 4%.

The impact of the rapidly mounting population pressures on the economy has been exacerbated by the steady depletion of natural resources that, critically for the regime, included declining oil production, with an output of 385,000 barrels per day (bpd) as of 2010 against the peak of about 583,000 bpd back in 1996. To give the reader some perception on the decline, even after hitting the bottom the oil sector still accounted for a majority of the country's export income and about a quarter of government revenues.

The final blow came during the last decade. With Malthus sending broad smiles in the direction of Syria from his grave, the climate change that has hit the region has wrecked Syria's countryside. Shifts in rain patterns have led to prolonged droughts all around the Middle East in recent years. But their impact was particularly devastating in Syria, where agriculture remains a major part of the economy and the lifestyle of a large section of the population, some 20% of Syria's GDP being generated by this sector. With water shortages reported in many parts of the country, some rural areas have become impoverished disaster zones. Whole villages and fields have been abandoned, while slums around Syrian cities have been swelling with hundreds of thousands of climate refugees.

In 2009, the International Institute for Sustainable Development noted that a decline in rainfall and subsequent aggravation of water scarcity led to the abandonment of around 160 villages in northern Syria in the period 2007-2008. In eastern Syria, the Inezi tribe saw some 85% of its livestock killed between 2005 and 2010 because of prolonged drought. In 2010 the United Nations estimated that more than a million people have left the northeast of the country, "with farmers simply not cultivating enough food or earning enough money to sustain them."

Basically, Syria's GDP per capita was declining during the 1980s and stagnating in the 1990s. This trend was reversed only with the beginning of market reforms in 2000s, but the economic renaissance was largely confined to Damascus and Aleppo and struggled to spread to other parts of the country. A measure of prosperity brought into some cities by the economic liberalization, unevenly distributed in any case, was simply not enough to balance out the tremendous demographic and social pressures that were piling up in provinces like Deraa and Deir ez Zor and spilling into the center from the periphery. Regardless of whether the urban classes in Damascus and Aleppo were fully aware of their precarious existence living by the side of this volcano, they showed limited enthusiasm for fireworks once the volcano finally erupted and sent its flames towards the suburbs of their cities.

To be sure, the peripheral character of the uprising in Syria makes the task of ensuring the survival of the Assad regime rather difficult compared with the experience of its patrons in Tehran. However, getting rid of the regime would be an easy task for the country compared to surviving the post-revolution.

The uprising in Syria has many characteristics of a poor man's revolt and a "periphery against center" conflict at the same time and as such it's the exact opposite of the kind of unrest the regime in Tehran was facing in its big cities in 2009.

While the protest movement in Iran was led by the urban classes of the capital and major city centers, the Syrian uprising is very much powered by the same underclass that in Iran is providing the bulk of the recruits for the Baseej squads that eventually crushed the Green opposition. In Iran, Tehran was the epicenter of the protests, but the Syrian revolution started in the heavily Bedouin and undeveloped Deraa, and from its very beginning the uprising featured a rather unusual degree of mobilization in the countryside against the regime. Protests were regularly reported in villages and small towns. During the siege of Deraa and Hama, nearby villagers were reported trying to break blockades with supply convoys and clashing with security cordons.

Even where the Syrian regime was successfully keeping city centers clean of protesters, the unrest persisted in suburbs and the countryside. In far-flung provinces, towns and localities have been changing hands several times, with protesters and the Free Syrian Army reinfiltrating them immediately after the army had departed. The regime is clearly overstretched and struggling to contain such a widely geographically distributed and increasingly militarized unrest, as shown by the recent reports of unrest creeping in towards the centers of Damascus and Aleppo. More critically for the regime, the challenge of defending the country's energy infrastructure over vast expanses of such a big country seems to be overwhelming the Syrian army, with attacks on oil and gas pipelines escalating.

Much was made of Syria's sectarian configuration, which is indeed one of the most challenging in the region. The steady stream of reports about sectarian killings in Homs suggests mounting tensions and troubles for the future. Yet, even if stripped of all its minorities down to the bare Sunni heartland, the post-Assad Syria is still very likely to be resistant to any notion of unity and stability.

As a poor man's revolt, the uprising in Syria, which by all accounts remains predominantly Sunni, is often blessed with the involvement of the most backward and conservative sections of the society. The Syrian opposition abroad may be represented by the finest intellectuals and members of all Syria's minorities. However, a Voice of America reporter, recently allowed into one of the opposition's strongholds in the area of Damascus-Douma, couldn't help noticing how the place was teeming with fully veiled women.

Many parts of the Syrian periphery are severely impoverished and many are heavily tribal. The tribes in Deir ez-Zor are officially allowed to carry arms as a counterweight to the Kurdish population in the North. Tribes in Deraa and other provinces are also quickly becoming militarized.

The potential for internal conflicts over the country's limited resources remains enormous. The same Deir ez-Zor, for example, is Syria's poorest province. Yet Deir ez-Zor accounts for 70% of Syria's oil production. Once the regime falls, the tribes in the province should be expected to demand their share of the oil revenues, either sending the rest of the country to beg the Saudis for a bailout, or starting a new "periphery against center" conflict.

None of this is to say that the survival of Bashar Assad's regime is necessarily in the interests of the West, Syria's neighbors and even the Syrians themselves. If only because it's not obvious that Syria in its current configuration can survive at all. However, while the Western media can keep cheering on the Arab Spring and the triumph of liberal democracy in the Middle East until it's blue in the face, the basic fact remains that this march to freedom in many parts of the region looks more like a modern species of a classic Malthusian collapse. Syria's immunity to the Arab Spring was a short-lived notion. However, those who think that a better future beckons for the Middle East had better hope that by the time that future arrives Syria will be still hanging around.