In his book The Struggle for Syria: A Study in Post-War Arab Politics, 1945-1958, Patrick Seale reminds us of the pivotal importance and attractiveness of Syria’s geostrategic location in the competition for power expansion and influence-building in the Middle East. Today, the situation is much more complex. Civil war is looming in the absence of the possibility of peaceful, smooth, orderly change. The Annan mission is supposed to help the Arab League and the United Nations contain and settle the conflict. But the latter is pitting an Arab-Turkish-Western axis against an Iranian-Russian-Chinese one, with different degrees of involvement, commitment and agendas for members of each axis.

Many factors tend to enlarge the crisis area, making the conduct of crisis diplomacy more difficult.

First, the strong revival of primordial identities: Ethnic, religious, sectarian identities that had been weakened or marginalized for years now threaten the fabric of already-vulnerable mosaic societies. This vulnerability is basically due to the failure of the national reconstruction process in post-independence states, as well as the strong wave of political Islamization in Middle Eastern societies. This wave is particularly strong in the Mashreq, which is rich in its diversity.  

Second, the geopolitics of Islamism via the emergence of revolutionary Iran, the politics of post- invasion Iraq, and the sectarianization of Islamism. These schisms are exacerbated by the fear of reviving old wounds and the clash of religious legitimacies and political agendas. This revival has created an axis of tension and confrontation along the Sunni-Shia line, and made for the emergence of the Karbala paradigm. The confrontation between the two sectarian tectonic plates, a necessary tool to understand a great part of the dynamics of regional politics, threatens the internal stability of many countries and plays a key role in the game of power in the region.