Salman Shaikh, the director of the Brookings Doha Center and fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, did not open a bottle of champagne when he first learned that President Barack Obama accepted the political compromise that would allow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to stay in his Damascus palace. Shaikh has been working extensively to facilitate national dialogue among Syrian constituencies and key figures. The Pakistani-born former UN official and British citizen is a policy adviser on regional and international involvement in the Syrian crisis. He served as special assistant to the UN special coordinator to the Middle East peace process, and political adviser to the UN secretary-general’s personal representative for Lebanon during the 2006 war. Shaikh also worked as director for policy and research in the Office of Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, consort of the former emir of Qatar.
In a telephone interview with Al-Monitor, he seemed to agree with Ambassador Nassif Hitti's observation on Oct. 7 that the chemical weapons crisis “is encouraging the regime to become more intransigent.”
"We are working on bringing all the different communities together," Shaikh told me, “but the regime catches up with most of those people, so we have to find another way with much more legitimacy and credibility. We are running also workshops. The last workshop we ran took place in Paris for several days, in which we brought together a defected officer from the Alawite side, Muslim Brotherhood members, Christians, Kurds and Druze. For the Alawites, the bottom-line interest was about security; for the others it was about land or property rights, governance, road map, and federalism. [During the workshop] we started to see in a very short period of time a snapshot of what is possible. But this national dialogue must be done in a much more structured way and it needs much more regional and international support, which could include the Russians, the moderate Arab states, the United States and Europe.”
Are all these communities willing also to collaborate to isolate the insurgent elements?
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