The din of battle

The UN reckons that 70,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, have died. The true figure is probably far higher: thousands have gone missing or have been locked up. In the past few weeks an average of 5,000 people have fled every day. The UN’s High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) says the number now exceeds 860,000, but many more have left uncounted. The number displaced within the country is higher still. More than 4m Syrians now lack fuel, electricity, a telephone line and food.

A hardened and increasingly sectarian underclass on each side—disenfranchised mainly Sunni rebels and the regime’s mainly poor Alawites—is bearing the brunt of the battle. Middle-class Syrians and secular activists are leaving in droves. A lawyer in Tal Abyad, a border village north-east of Aleppo, Syria’s second city, bemoans the fact that armed rebels have displaced the civilians who sought to administer his town and the area around it. Yet the hundreds of rebel groups, despite their efforts to co-ordinate, have failed to jell into a coherent army with a chain of command. Each of them wants to stake out its own patch. Opposition groups seem keener to court their financial backers than to lighten the burden of local civilians.

Sometimes the rebels turn on each other and fight. Islamist groups have clashed with the Kurdish militias that control the north-east of the country, where most of Syria’s Kurds live. Syria will be harder to put together again after the war ends.

Mr Assad and his family, conscious of their minority status in a mainly Sunni country and thus determined to keep Syria broadly secular, insist that the rebels are Islamist extremists, as dangerous to the West as they are to the Arab world. In fact, few of the protesters who started the uprising two years ago were very devout. Alawite defectors are still helped to flee the army. The rebels have mostly left Christians alone. Nor have they slaughtered Alawites, despite the massacres carried out by Mr Assad’s thugs against Sunni villages around Homs. Salafism, the strict version of Islam that has gained ground elsewhere in the Arab world, never found fertile ground in Syria.

But this is changing, too. Western intelligence sources say that jihadists are now arriving in Syria by the busload. Jabhat al-Nusra, the most devout Syrian battalion, which shares al-Qaeda’s worldview, is getting stronger. In December an armed group trashed a Shia prayer house in Zarzour, a town in Idleb. Though many Syrians reject the jihadists the war is becoming religious.

The war has made many Syrians more sectarian in outlook. Alawites have been drafted into the regime’s security forces and militia. “We see that Alawites are stuck,” says Abu Adnan, a rebel fighter in Latakia province, “because Bashar is trying to tie all of their fates to his.”

Both middle-class Syrians and religious minorities are increasingly worried by the way even moderate opposition groups talk of an “Islamic state” to replace Mr Assad’s regime. “We’re bringing back the rule of the Sunnis,” proclaims a fighter in Aleppo’s Tawhid battalion. “We’re the majority, so it’s only fair.” Alawites have reason to be afraid. It is hard to imagine them moving back to mixed cities such as Homs.

Many Syrians have for years looked to mildly Islamist Turkey as an example. “But they aren’t an Islamic state,” grumbles a rebel fighter. “We want something stronger.”

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14