Farid Ghadry, President of the Reform Party of Syria, has this opinion piece in today’s Washington Times.

The article provides a useful look at some of this history of Syrian-Iranian relations. Oddly, though, Ghadry terms those relations ‘recent’. By 1984, when I arrived in Damascus on assignment, those relations were already quite close, and dangerous. Portions of downtown Damascus were known as Iranian districts. Bars and nightclubs in those areas had been shut down in the light of the new Iranian religious conservatism. Hotels catering to the Iranian trade—and only Iranian—shuttered their own bars and suddenly had Qurans at the bedside tables.

Damascus has several historic sites important to the Shi’a, including the Sayyeda Zeinab Shrine, tomb of the daughter of Ali the fourth Caliph, to which tens of thousands of Iranians come every year. The leadership of the ruling Syrian Ba’ath Party are Shi’ite themselves, members of the heterodox Alawi sect. Some question whether the Alawis are Muslim, but they declare themselves so.

In the 1980s, the USG was concerned about the close Iranian-Syrian relationship. It saw the pilgrimage of Iranians being used to cover smuggling of drugs and weapons and the movement of armed fighters into the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, even then a major site for Hezbollah training camps.

The Saudi-Syria rift
Farid Ghadry

Never in the modern history of relations between Syria and Saudi Arabia have both countries experienced this level of improper public display exploiting the annoyance both have of each other’s policies. The harshest attack was published few days ago on al-Arabiya Web site (Saudi-owned) in which an unnamed Saudi official castigated the Syrian leadership and in particular Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Shara’a who, two days earlier, had his own cacophonous words berate the Saudis.

It all started when Syria was accused of killing Rafiq Hariri, a Lebanese-Saudi businessman close to the Saudi royal family, which sparked international outrage and led 1.5 million Lebanese to fashion the Cedar Revolution to confront Syria’s presence in Lebanon, and, with the help of the West, to drive Syria out of the country by passing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559. Late in 2005, it looked as if the Assad regime in Syria was on the brink of collapse.

Then in early January 2006, and after a much-publicized visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Syria, President Bashir Assad slowly recovered. The Ahmadinejad visit was historic because it exposed the ethnic bearing Syria chose to adopt vs. the Arab bearing it boasted through its membership in the Arab League. As a country run by the Alawite minority split from the Muslim Shi’ite sect, Syria, through its rapprochement with Iran, sealed its fate against its majority Sunni Arab neighbors and opened an ethnic divide that looks like where the Middle East is headed.

…To stoke the fire further, in August 2006, a combative Mr. Assad, on the heels of Hezbollah’s presumed declaration of victory in its war with Israel, denounced Saudi and Egyptian leaders by referring to them as “half-men.” The derogatory comment was viewed by Saudi and Egyptian leadership as a vitriolic attack against two majority Sunni countries. To this day, this speech still resonates in Saudi ears and they have never forgiven Mr. Assad for his insults. Furthermore, the Saudis cannot feel vindicated unless Mr. Assad, who never personally apologized for uttering the infamous words (he usually sends his foreign minister to mend his gaffes), submits to their will by distancing himself from Iran, a policy which was frantically conceived to replace the regime-change echoes being heard at the time in Washington’s corridors of power.

The Arab countries finally realized the futility of that policy and have since been toying with the idea of regime change for Syria to the point that an adviser to Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal proposed it in a TV interview following the latest public outbursts. This growing political tension between both countries is bound to complicate matters even further for all the other Arab League members and split them along lines of ethnic loyalties. In recent memory, Arab countries have always flaunted their unity through Pan-Arabism and nationalism.
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