IS there some hope to be entertained that the tragedy in Syria will be brought to an end either by the efforts of the international community or by some miraculous meeting of minds within Syria?

The newly elected president of the Syrian National Council, Ahmed Jarba, has said in an interview in New York that he would be willing to participate in the much-heralded and much-postponed Geneva II that the Russians and Americans have agreed to convene. Previously the opposition’s position was that they would not attend such a conference until they had been supplied weaponry and had used it to recover the ground they had lost to the Bashar forces after Hezbollah had sent in its troops to reinforce Bashar’s army and militia. This could therefore be considered a positive development. However, this is not going to happen soon. Secretary Kerry had said sometime ago that because of Europe’s proclivity for shutting down in August the meeting could not be convened earlier than September.

As to the results from the conference, Jarba was not optimistic about the prospects for success. The reason for his pessimism was clear. He said that the war could come to an end if the conference resulted in the formation of a transitional government but Assad’s staying on in such a transitional government was not acceptable nor was he prepared to offer Assad and his family safe passage out of Syria. In other words, the expectation, belied by the situation on the ground is that the regime would send a delegation that would negotiate only the terms of surrender and offer up Assad for the same accountability to which Mubarak had been subjected in Egypt.

In the meanwhile, the situation in Syria is deteriorating by the day. Last month, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that by their conservative count, some 93,000 people had been killed since the insurgency began in March 2011. Now the figure has clearly crossed the 100,000 mark.

Syrians have been fleeing their country at the rate of 6,000 a day. In Jordan alone there are now 550,000 Syrian refugees. The UNHCR chief, AntÓnio Guterres, says that his organisation has registered some 1.8 million Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries. It is almost certain that counting unregistered refugees the total number will exceed 3m.

Within Syria, the UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that some 4.5m have been displaced. By the UNHCR’s estimate, some 6.8m refugees abroad or within Syria need “urgent help” and the organisation would require more than $3 billion for the rest of this year to provide such assistance.

The state of Syria’s war-wracked economy is parlous. Its foreign exchange reserves have fallen from $18bn to around $3bn. The Syrian pound, which had an exchange rate of 47 to the US dollar, has now fallen to 330. Western economists say that with inflation running at almost 90pc, Syria has joined the rare band of countries suffering hyperinflation comparable to what the Germans experienced in the 1920s.

Perhaps most ominously from the perspective of an eventual recovery there has been a massive brain drain from Syria. A Middle East expert at the London School of Economics maintains that “the entire professional class has basically migrated” and opines that without their return reconstruction and even reconciliation will not be possible.

Assad’s current military advances after a series of setbacks are owed to the assistance provided by the battle-hardened Shia militia, the Hezbollah, and by the soldiers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard from Iran. One must note that in the eyes of the orthodox Shias — and this means the clergy in Iran and Iraq and the Hezbollah — the Alawites are not true Shias and many would even term them heretics. Thus, the presence of Iranian and Hezbollah fighters in Syria is ostensibly motivated by the desire to protect the Shia shrines in Syria that extremist Sunnis have been accused of seeking to destroy and has nothing to do with perpetuating the minority Alawite regime.

The truth is that support for Assad is grounded entirely in “reasons of state”. Syria is Iran’s only Arab ally and is the conduit for Iran’s support for the Hezbollah. This is also why Hezbollah is committed to Assad’s survival despite the problems this creates for it within Lebanon. But in the eyes of the world the situation has now become a battle between the Shias and Sunnis.

Other international support, notably that offered by Russia and to a more limited extent by China, is prompted not merely by a desire to defend the norms of inter-state conduct but also by apprehensions about what an Islamist regime in Syria may mean in terms of the spread of pernicious influences to the Muslim minorities in these two countries. This concern is shared in slightly different terms in western Europe where it is feared that volunteers from the Muslim communities now joining the Syrian opposition will return home bringing with them the fundamentalist ideology of the Islamist forces that seem to have become the vanguard of the rebellion.

The impact in Iraq and Lebanon as I will explain in a subsequent column has been enormous. The Gulf countries too — particularly those with a substantial Shia minority — have now to contend with what this resurgence of the Shia-Sunni divide means.

For the Muslim world this exacerbation of the sectarian divide is perhaps of greater importance than the theoretical secular-Islamist divide that has caused such havoc in Egypt. For Pakistan, where a sectarian divide was allowed to come into being and which now has become our principal internal security problem, the Syrian situation and its prolongation is particularly dangerous even if reports of the Taliban having sent their forces to Syria are exaggerated or even totally false.

It would be prudent for the government’s ministry of religious affairs to be in touch with leaders of both sects in Pakistan to seek their assistance in trying to insulate Pakistan, to the extent possible, from the after-effects of Syria.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Opinion

Editorial

‘Source of terror’
Updated 29 Mar, 2024

‘Source of terror’

It is clear that going after militant groups inside Afghanistan unilaterally presents its own set of difficulties.
Chipping in
29 Mar, 2024

Chipping in

FEDERAL infrastructure development schemes are located in the provinces. Most such projects — for instance,...
Toxic emitters
29 Mar, 2024

Toxic emitters

IT is concerning to note that dozens of industries have been violating environmental laws in and around Islamabad....
Judiciary’s SOS
Updated 28 Mar, 2024

Judiciary’s SOS

The ball is now in CJP Isa’s court, and he will feel pressure to take action.
Data protection
28 Mar, 2024

Data protection

WHAT do we want? Data protection laws. When do we want them? Immediately. Without delay, if we are to prevent ...
Selling humans
28 Mar, 2024

Selling humans

HUMAN traders feed off economic distress; they peddle promises of a better life to the impoverished who, mired in...