ISTANBUL – Turkey believes Damascus is now portraying the Syrian crisis as a Sunni-Shi'ite conflict to mask President Bashar Al-Assad's loss of political authority, according to a senior adviser to Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. This “neo-sectarian” approach aims to rally Syrian Shi'ites to Assad's side and explain away opposition to him by majority Sunni states in the region, Ibrahim Kalin told Reuters. But Syria's Sunnis and Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ism to which Assad belongs, are not fixed blocs and Turkey does not see the crisis in sectarian terms, Kalin said at a weekend conference of Muslim and Christian religious leaders from the Middle East. “The Assad regime, because it has lost its political legitimacy, is now trying to present this as a sectarian conflict,” he said. “They claim that those who oppose the Assad regime do so because they are Sunnis and they hate Shi'ites. “The good news is that the vast majority of the Sunnis and Shi'ites don't buy this argument and realise these are political decisions, not a sectarian conflict.” Kalin described as “neo-sectarianism” the growing emphasis on religious identities across the Middle East, but said these trends – while real – were still mostly secondary to the political struggles driving events in the region. Syrian society is a religious and ethnic mosaic with multiple fault lines. The Alawites who comprise the bulk of the ruling establishment make up 12 percent of the population, while Sunnis, the backbone of the opposition, account for 75 percent. There are also Christian (10 percent), Kurdish (8 percent) and Druze (less than 3 percent) minorities. Christians have stayed mostly neutral in the fighting, Fearing an Islamist victory if Assad goes. Syrian Kurds have used Assad's weakness to take control of some northern areas of the country. In Ankara's analysis, Shi'ite Iran's staunch support for Assad is partly due to sectarian solidarity, but based more on flawed political assumptions. “Iran considers Syria to be a sphere of influence and part of a front against Israeli occupation in the region,” Kalin said. “Their calculation is that, if the Assad regime is toppled, the new regime in Syria would not hold its ground against Israeli policies, which is simply wrong.” The newly elected governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have proven to be very concerned about the Palestinian cause, and they now express their opposition to Israeli occupation of Arab land with full democratic credentials, he said. – Reuters
