Frederic Volpi: Turkey key to ending international stand-off with Damascus

Published on Sunday 5 February 2012 00:00

A UN RESOLUTION is unlikely to persuade president Bashar al-Assad to step aside. It may increase the pressure on him to take a different course of action – a more reformist course, perhaps – but it will not increase the pressure on him to do something significant or decisive in the short-term.

However, that does not mean that it then becomes likely that there will be a war in Syria, and that we will go down the path of a Libyan-type intervention.

The UK and other European countries that were involved in the Libyan conflict do not have the military and financial capacity to sustain another conflict of this type. They need a period of time to replenish their military hardware and equipment and boost their military budget in order to afford another military intervention. It looks simply too difficult and too expensive at this time.

The US, meanwhile, will not be very keen to go it alone. America was reluctant in the Libyan situation, and will be even more so now.

You also have to remember that, in Libya, there were periods before the intervention when it looked like the opposition was gaining the upper hand in the fight against the Gaddafi regime. This is not the case in Syria. The Damascus government still very much has the upper hand, while the opposition in Syria is quite weak and disorganised.

Making a regional comparison, Syria has more in common with Yemen, where you have had an ongoing confrontation between the opposition and the regime for many, many months, before some kind of resolution of the conflict, which involved the exile of president Ali Abdullah Saleh and some transition of power.

I suspect Syria may go down the same path as Yemen, and explore these possibilities, but nothing dramatic is going to happen in the short term. First we will have many more months of bloody confrontation between the opposition and the Syrian regime.

However, this does not mean we should rule out any type of military intervention altogether. Turkey’s role in the region is crucial.

The Arab League and the Gulf countries in particular have been talking of intervention, and the only military power in the region that can do something militarily is Turkey. If this continues in the longer term, and if the United Nations Security Council continues to be unable to do anything effective, it could be that Turkey becomes the key actor in the Syrian conflict. The Turks are unlikely to do anything tomorrow but, in the longer term, it is a realistic possibility that they may well do.

There have been recent reports of massacres and shelling, not only in the Syrian city of Homs but in some of the Turkish border towns.

Some sort of Turkish intervention or indeed more direct Turkish support for the opposition, could be an important factor in the Syrian conflict if the other international bodies do not get their act together.

Whatever happens, however, it is likely that much more blood will be spilt before there is a resolution for the Syrian people.

• Dr Frederic Volpi is director of the Institute of Middle East and Central Asia Studies at the University of St Andrews.