FIBUA or, ‘fighting in built-up areas’ is not new to Sri Lankans, especially, to tho se who have lived or fought in the well urbanised Jaffna Peninsula during the past decades of our internal war. Those of us watching foreign TV news of the on-going fighting in northern Syria and in western Iraq –especially, in the cities of Mosul and Alleppo – should be reminded that our own country also underwent similar agonies.
While the differences of the politics of the situations in West Asia and in Sri Lanka are significant, the immediate similarities of the actual fighting on the ground may revive the traumas of those Sri Lankans who have either experienced the battles in Jaffna and Chavakachcheri or, seen the devastated aftermath. The buildings which provided homes and then sheltered people.
The larger politics is substantially different between West Asia now and Sri Lanka’s recent war. Whatever the stock propaganda of successive Sinhala-led governments of ‘isolated terrorism’ or ‘terrorism supported by India and the international community’, a comparison of the current wars in West Asia with our recent one shows that if ever there were conflicts that fitted that stock propaganda description they are what is going on in Syria and Iraq.
Iraq was a relatively stable state-society, even as it was authoritarian and well armed by one of the world’s two rival super powers at the time – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or Soviet Union in short form. Indeed Iraq was secular and, along with Syria, a most socially developed Arab nation. Syria, too, was similar: stable, socially developed, but authoritarian and backed by the USSR.
Indeed, while Moscow ensured that Iraq remained well armed – at least to hold its own against the slightly larger and better motivated forces of neighbour Iran, Syria actually hosted Soviet naval and air reconnaissance bases since the early 1970s.
These military alliances paralleled similar alliances between the United States and Turkey, Jordan, Iran under the Shah and, Pakistan in the now defunct Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) in the US Cold War strategy of encircling the USSR. The US’ encirclement comprised NATO to the west, CENTO in west Asia, the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) which grouped most of the current ASEAN states which at that time were authoritarian regimes backed by Washington. The encirclement of the USSR was completed by US military pacts with Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, all of which are still functional.
While CENTO ended in the 1990s following political change in Iran, the western powers have attempted to substitute that with a new US-supported in Iraq – this being one of the many un-stated motives of the Western invasion of Iraq. However, the lack of forward planning resulted in the western powers having to helplessly watch, as the slightly majority Shia Muslim population of Iraq overwhelmingly voted for a Shia-led government which, to date, remains close friends with Iran the world’s sole Shia-dominant state.
In fact, with the severe disruption of the once stable polities of Iraq and Syria, Iran has become one of the most stable societies in West Asia and, given the ending of western sanctions, may soon become one of the more socially progressive ones as well.
Syria, which, like Iraq, was also ruled by a secular Arab Ba’athist Socialist movement – and still is – became one of the most secularised and modernist Arab nations, until its destruction in the recent civil war. Getting closer to the USSR in the early seventies, Syria has hosted a Soviet naval facility in the port of Tartus on its Mediterranean coast and, since the start of the civil war, has hosted a Russian airbase in the airport of Latakia, not far from Tartus.
Meanwhile, given the suppressed interests of Sunni Muslims in both Iraq and Syria, quite independent of Western interests, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, unhappy with the growing power of Shia Iran, have covertly supported various rebel groups in both unstable countries and it is this covert support that saw the emergence of extremist Sunni Islamist insurgencies. These groups give themselves different names such as the Al Nusra Front and Islamic State and thrive in the power vacuum resulting from the weakening of Baghdad and Damascus.
Just as much as the invasion of Iraq was partly motivated by the interest of the Western powers to re-assert their presence in the Persian Gulf, it is probable that the flood of military assistance from the West to the Syrian rebel groups is also motivated by Western hopes that Russia’s ally in Damascus will fall and the sole Russian military presence in the Mediterranean Sea will end.
At present, however, given the West’s reluctance to ‘put boots on the ground’ after the bad experience in Iraq, Moscow has convincingly up-staged Washington with its expanding presence in its already established bases in Syria.
Hence, it will be clear to the reader that, unlike Sri Lanka, both the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts have been subjected to massive direct interference by major regional powers as well as global powers.
The Tamil separatist struggle has, by contrast, always been ‘home-grown’ even if, at some stages, India briefly hosted guerrilla bases, and the West lent some ideological support in international fora. India subsequently made amends for its early facilitation of secessionist insurgency by later sending the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) which ended up fighting the secessionist militants while also enabling Colombo to concentrate its forces in southern Sri Lanka to defeat the second JVP insurgency.
Today, Western-backed Iraqi government forces have just begun fighting their way into IS-held Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Meanwhile, Russian-backed Syrian government forces are beginning to mop up the remnants of the Western-backed rebel groups that were holding on to the eastern corner of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city and home to much of its Sunni population. Both battlefronts are cases of modified FIBUA. The ‘modification’ is that, in both Mosul and eastern Aleppo, the occupying forces are relatively lightly armed guerrilla forces resisting conventional state military forces which are backed by heavy artillery, armoured units and air power – as well as satellite surveillance. In these immediate facts on the ground, there is some similarity with the battles in the Jaffna Peninsula.
Interestingly, while the insurgents holding on to Jaffna (and, later the Vanni) were the kin of the resident civilian populations, it is a similar situation in Aleppo where the civilians do not want to leave their fighting sons and daughters behind. In Mosul, however, the occupying forces are outsiders of the IS which comprises mostly a vast mix of local and foreign vagabonds with little more than the wild inspiration of a pseudo-religion.
Yet, in both cases, the intense fighting traps civilians in the very cities that are also their home and shelter.