The Return of The Ottomans? Syria's Collapse And The Coming Pogroms

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Squaring The Circle In Syria For Two Centuries.

Trump could have been damning Erdogan with faint praise, saying he should claim credit for removing Assad from power in Syria. Or maybe he sincerely believes in his regional leadership. He could be that stupid.

Trump also made some ahistorical comments about Turkey’s ambitions for Syrian territory, claiming they’ve been trying for 2000 years to seize it. I don’t know where Trump gets his history lessons, but the gist of his point is true. The neo-Ottoman clique surrounding Erdogan want to reclaim Syrian provinces. They didn’t fight against Assad for democratic or humanitarian reasons. 

Installing a former Al Qaeda terrorist in Damascus doesn’t serve the interests of the Syrian people. Assad, for all his faults, practiced religious moderation and his regime was tolerant of diverse faiths.

The forces of the new Jihadist regime have already committed numerous massacres and I anticipate further military aggression against the Druze, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, moderate Sunnis, Ezidis, and other minorities in the near future. Anyone who is not armed will be slaughtered.

II.

An excerpt from, “Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East” by Jonathan Parry, Princeton University Press, 2022, Pg. 174 – 177:

In the spring of 1839, Sultan Mahmud ordered an attack on Mehmet Ali’s forces in Syria. The sultan’s army was badly defeated at Nizip; his fleet defected; he died. The Ottoman regime seemed about to collapse. The following year, the European powers, apart from France, united to support the removal of Mehmet Ali from Syria; this was achieved by the end of 1840. This eighteen-month saga was a great European diplomatic crisis, and there is no need to revisit here its twists and turns, several of which concerned the continental balance of power. 

. . .Palmerston’s main anxiety about Mehmet Ali’s ambitions was that the weaker the Ottoman regime became, the more reliant it would be on the protection of Russia. Conversely, removing the armies from the contested border, and allowing taxes to be spent on developing local economies instead, would facilitate stability, commerce, and prosperity. More broadly, Palmerston’s vision was for the Ottoman Empire to become a stronger fiscal-military regime, relying for security on a smaller, cheaper, but more efficient European-trained army.

. . .Palmerston’s hope for propping up the Ottoman Empire was hardly controversial in itself. In 1839, he expected the European powers to agree on a solution to the crisis caused by the battle of Nizip; they very nearly did. 

. . .Meanwhile, the embassy’s defence of Ottoman rule in Syria led to a vehement clash with the British navy, led by Charles Napier, channelling the spirit of Sidney Smith against Ottoman governing morals, on behalf of the mountaineers and, in effect, Mehmet Ali. By the end of 1840, therefore, three conflicting Western visions for Syria had emerged: that of the embassy, that of local British navy and army officers, and that of predominantly continental and Catholic pressure groups. The resulting disagreements meant that neither stability nor European disengagement was likely there any time soon.