Syria and the diplomacy game

Syria has become a broken toy no one wants to get their hands on. Truth be told, the situation has escalated and it is way more complicated now. What used to be black or white has now dozens of shades of gray in between. The Balkanization of the conflict has derived in a war with dozens of splinter cells with targets too different between themselves.

There is no more a homogeneous opposition. Some groups want to oust Assad. Others just want to defend their neighborhoods. The Kurds are happy taking care of their own business watching the rest killing themselves. And then there are the ones looking for a Yihad. For those ones, the -theoretically- socialist and laic regime of Assad is as good as a target as anything else.

That is why steps are given carefully. Slow and shy attempts on all sides. Take for example Russia, who started championing Assad. Now they are rather looking for a golden retirement for him and his family in a third country.

We have as well the Arab states of the Gulf. They are between a rock and a hard place. On one hand they would love nothing more than getting rid of Iran’s friend in the region. On the other hand, they are frightened a revolution like that could caught them at home.

In a similar place is Israel, whose is irritated by Assad but fears who could come after him. They have the bad experience of Egypt, where Mubarak was a manageable leader that didn’t give them too many problems. Things have changed with Morsi, if only on the public arena.

Photo: Facebook group

The last one to risk a move has been the USA, announcing they will help directly the Syrian opposition. With a clear red line: no weapons or training. Just medicines and food to avoid future problems.

The Americans don’t want another Afghanistan or Libya. In the former they helped the Taliban; in the later they helped the Gadaffi opposition. Both groups turned their backs on America, one of them in a war still going on, the other one with the attack on Bengazhi’s embassy and Mali.

The Syrian opposition however thinks that all that about food and medicines is good intentions but nothing more. A video uploaded to Facebook shows how much they esteem the help provided by Washington.

However, the lack of a pipeline of weapons from the West isn’t stopping Syrians of getting armed. Recently some images of what looks like Chinese surface-to-air missiles appeared online. How they got there is a mystery. But even without sponsors, Syrians have demonstrated a high dose of imagination. One of them is a Playstation-controlled tank they created out of scrap pieces. That is bringing the game of Libya to a whole new level.

France and the UK have been trying to solve that. They are the top supporters of lifting an EU-embargo on Syria. They are even considering going freelance and arm the rebels themselves, even if that means defying the European Union.

Several Gulf states, however, keep funding and arming rebel groups. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are among them. This, again, could turn counterproductive in the end for the Americans. Without a direct control on the arms pipeline, those weapons could end up in the hands of groups that aren’t so worrying for those Muslim states, like al-Nusra. And this would be the same problem all over again, only that way closer to strategic allies like Israel.