Syria is feeling the great strain of absorbing tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees:
Syria, the last Arab country welcoming large numbers of Iraqi refugees, is now all but closing the gates and leaving 40,000 Iraqis who flee their country each month with almost no place to go.
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Syria kept its doors open even after others, including Jordan and Egypt with 700,000 and 130,000 Iraqi refugees respectively, said they could take no more. But the strain on its small, state-controlled economy apparently has become too great.
Despite the administration’s line to the contrary, Syria truly does not gain anything by stoking the flames of war in its neighbor to the east. Certainly, lax border patrol most likely exists — the Syria-Iraq border is expansive. Syria also undoubtedly views its position on Iraq vis-a-vis the border issue as a sort of bargaining tactic, a way to force the United States into negotiations over other outstanding issues such as the status of the Golan Heights. However, even in the case of a concentrated effort to stop cross-border raids, Syria has little control over the chaos in Iraq. In fact, as this refugee crisis suggests, it is being harmed in numerous ways by the Iraqi civil war. Not only can the Syrian economy not support the massive influx of Iraqi refugees, the country is being filled with Iraqis that have a very good chance of becoming radicalized. It is the slow al-Qaedaification of Syria, the strengthening of radicalized Islamic ideology. To the ignorant it all seems as if this is a boon for Syria, a part of the overall plan. It most certainly is not.
Bashar al-Asad is a secular leader and an Alawite, a Shi’a offshoot considered heretical in most Islamic circles. Radicalized Islam and the ascendancy of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood would be incredibly dangerous to Asad’s rule. Simple inclusion of key Sunni members within the Syrian Ba’athist regime will not placate radicalized Iraqi Muslims nor their offspring in the decades to come. This is a wider problem for Syria, the region, and the world, and Bashar al-Asad is keenly aware of that. Once the Bush administration realizes again that Syrian and American interests intersect more often than they veer apart, as it realized shortly after 9/11, the safer the Middle East and the world will be.
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