Opinion

A sham cease-fire

More than 2 million Muslims marked the Feast of Sacrifice in Mecca yesterday by throwing stones at Satan. The stones were virtual, as was their target, called rajim (the stoned one) in the Koran.

Yet the mammoth simulation in Mecca was not the only parody of reality in the Muslim world. A few hundred miles to the north, Syria offered its own exercise in “as if” with a cease-fire to coincide with the Feast of the Sacrifice.

Brokered by Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, the cease-fire existed mainly in official announcements from the United Nations in New York, the State Department in Washington and the headquarters of the Arab League in Cairo with some news reports thrown in for good measure.

Reality on the ground was different.

Messages from sources in various parts of the war-torn country indicated almost no letup in the fighting.

In Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city and the scene of the biggest recent battles, forces loyal to the despot Bashar al-Assad continued mortar attacks on neighborhoods in the old city while trying to bring in new units by land to regain control of the Salaheddin district.

Rebel forces, meanwhile, managed to move into the Kurdish neighborhood of Al-Ashrafiyah and the Christian neighborhood of Al-Seryani.

There was intense fighting in Al-Amourin in the central province of Hama and Joussyah near the city of Homs, where anti-Assad forces plan to establish their provisional government. In the capital, Damascus, there was fighting in Basatin al-Mezza and the suburb of Douma, an opposition stronghold.

That this was no real cease-fire was implicit in its very conception. Neither side in the conflict signed anything. Nor did anyone spell out any terms for the four-day halt to hostilities. With no outside power cited as guarantor, it was not clear who would decide on violations and what sanctions might await the violators. There is no mechanism to impose, observe or verify this simulacrum of a cease-fire.

Brahimi is an actor in a parody of reality.

He is supposed to be on a peace mission on behalf of parties that cannot agree on what end to the civil war should look like. As for the grandiloquent label of “mission,” suffice it to say that the resources at the disposal of the hapless Brahimi consist of a secretary and a single do-it-all diplomatic assistant.

What Brahimi has aplenty is masters: the United Nations, the Arab League and the Friends of Syria club, not to mention an ad hoc group set up by Egypt. Brahimi’s masters all talk of peace, but some, notably Russia, continue replenishing Assad’s arsenal with money from others, notably Iran.

At the other end of the spectrum, tihadists from a dozen Arab states are pouring into Syria to earn either nusra (victory) or shiahada (martyrdom). The very organ that appointed Brahimi, the UN Security Council, derails all meaningful action to end the Syrian civil war.

Different parties use Brahimi’s illusory cease-fire for their own purposes. Assad is using it to ship in fresh troops to Aleppo and Homs, cities that he has all but lost. The Obama administration is using this diplomatic “as if” to pretend that “something positive” is afoot, while Russia claims that its successive vetoes in New York are bringing peace to Syria. Worse still, Iran’s brazen President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasts that his government was behind “the end to bloodshed” in Syria.

Normally, a cease-fire is used to exchange prisoners, take the wounded to hospital and bring humanitarian aid to the population caught in the conflict. None of those things is happening in Syria, if only because no one even discusssed them.

For a year and a half, the so-called international community has been setting itself lower and lower objectives on Syria and consistently failing to achieve them.

Fake diplomacy has produced a fake cease-fire. Sadly, as far as the international community is concerned, everything around Syria is fake. Only the dying is real.