Is the Gulf Failing Syria's Refugees?

The images of Syrian refugees flooding the eastern periphery of Europe have captivated Western observers, as the warmer summer months have made otherwise rugged terrain and frigid waters easier to traverse, leading to a summertime surge of humanity -- tens of thousands in recent weeks -- throughout much of the continent.

While the waves of refugees into Europe pose a serious geopolitical crisis for the continent, the situation in the Middle East is arguably even more dire. The Washington Post's Liz Sly explains:

"At least 1 out of every 4 people living in Lebanon is a Syrian refu­gee. Most of them are Sunni Muslims, and their presence risks upsetting the country's delicate sectarian balance, just as the arrival of 100,000 Sunni Palestinian refugees after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 skewed the Muslim-Christian balance -- eventually triggering the tensions that plunged Lebanon into civil war."

Millions of Syrians have sought sanctuary from their most immediate neighbors, as countries such as Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon have absorbed approximately 4 million refugees altogether, reports Sly.

The crisis is even more acute within Syria's own borders, where more than 7 million people are believed to have been internally displaced by the now four-year-long civil war between the Assad government and various rebel and Islamist factions. Lebanon and Turkey -- states already plagued by their own varieties of sectarianism and instability -- have begun, over the course of the last year, to impose various restrictions on Syrian refugees.

Noticeably unphased by the refugee crisis, however, have been the six wealthy Gulf governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. And as other Mideast nations teem with the victims of Syria's war, some observers have been quick to wag their finger at the Gulf's failure to welcome and resettle the displaced.

"The Gulf States have emerged as the nerve centres of Arab diplomacy, culture, media production, commerce and tourism," writes Arab affairs commentator Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi. "But with great power comes great responsibility. The Gulf must realise that now is the time to change their policy regarding accepting refugees from the Syria crisis. It is the moral, ethical and responsible step to take."

Critics have rightly chastised the Gulf states for their failure to provide an equitable amount of aid to Syrian refugees. This dereliction is only compounded when one considers what exactly the Gulf states have been spending their money on. But such criticism does lack some proper context. Firstly, there is a reason why most Syrian refugees have bypassed the Gulf, opting instead to head west.

"None of these countries are signatories of the United Nations' 1951 Refugee Convention, which defines what a refugee is and lays out their rights, as well as the obligations of states to safeguard them," writes Ishaan Tharoor. "For a Syrian to enter these countries, they would have to apply for a visa, which, in the current circumstances, is rarely granted."

Gulf nations, moreover, already run massive welfare states, and the decline in global oil prices has forced several of these countries to reassess and downsize capital spending and energy subsidies. The rigidity and undemocratic composition of these governments doesn't help, and inclines them to maintain ethnic and tribal balance within their own borders in order to retain authority.

Perhaps a far more noble gesture by the Gulf's emirs and monarchs would be to use their considerable regional leverage to help bring about a peaceful end to the carnage in Syria, which will only continue to fuel and foment the already alarming refugee problem.

Around the Region

"They are going like refugees." The refugee crisis has apparently been a boon for someone, though: ISIS. In a chilling report, an Islamic State operative tells BuzzFeed News how the jihadist organization is using mass migration to move its terrorists into Europe:

"The operative, a Syrian in his thirties with a close-cropped black beard, said ISIS is sending covert fighters to Europe -- as did two smugglers who said they have helped. He smuggles them from Turkey in small groups, he said, hidden in cargo ships filled with hundreds of refugees. He said the fighters intend to fulfill ISIS's threat to stage attacks in the West. He views this as retaliation for U.S.-led airstrikes against the group that began in Iraq last summer and Syria last fall. ‘If someone attacks me,' he said, speaking with BuzzFeed News on condition of anonymity, ‘then for sure I will attack them back.'"

Can Ankara keep it going? Another knock-on effect from the war in Syria has been the rapid deterioration of the detente between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Turkey has pounded the Kurdish rebel force with air strikes in recent weeks, and this week even deployed ground forces to Iraq for the first time in two years.

The once promising rapprochement between Turkey and its Kurdish enemies is just one of the many victims of regional instability, but Al-Monitor's Kadri Gursel doubts that this latest conflict signals a return to the bad old "1990 years":

"[T]he center of the conflict that began in July is not the mountains, but in cities and towns of the predominantly Kurdish southeast. These are urban areas where the Kurdish parties received the highest number of votes and where their core activism is widespread. It has become impossible to distinguish between the Kurdish movement in cities and the majority of Kurds living there. This is why it has become appropriate to say ‘Kurdish war' for the latest spate of clashes.

"It won't be realistic to think that the scorched-earth policy of the 1990s, which was designed to forcibly evacuate rural areas to deny PKK those resources, can now be repeated in urban areas."

Ramadi fight going nowhere. Meanwhile, the campaign to reclaim the western Iraqi city of Ramadi from the clutches of the Islamic State appears to be flailing, reports Loveday Morris:

"Three months after the city's fall to the Sunni extremist group, Iraqi forces­ have not yet surrounded the city 80 miles west of Baghdad, commanders say, the first stated aim of the counter­offensive.

"The stuttering pace of the operation is likely to dent the image of the United States in Iraq, even as it spends $1.6 billion on training and equipping Iraqi forces."

A Shia split? According to a report in the Saudi-owned Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, a dispute is brewing between the two Shiite spiritual centers of Qom and Najaf over Iranian meddling in Iraqi affairs. The disagreement, the paper reports, has centered around the role of mysterious Quds force commander Qassem Soleimani:

"[Grand Ayatollah] Sistani's growing frustration over Soleimani's role in Iraqi politics represents growing differences between the clerical establishments in Iraq's Najaf and Iran's Qom, the world's top two Shiite seminaries.

Asharq Alawsat's source said Sistani has started to realize that Iran's intervention in Iraqi politics on behalf of Maliki ‘has begun to affect [Najaf's] historic role.'"

The plutonium puzzlement. Are critics of the nuclear agreement with Iran overlooking one of the deal's major concessions? The New York Times' William Broad talks to some experts about plutonium:

"As a fuel for weapons, plutonium packs a far greater punch than uranium, and in bulk can be easier and cheaper to produce. Which is why some nuclear experts voice incomprehension at what they see as a lopsided focus on uranium in evaluations of the deal reached with Iran -- under which Tehran would forsake the production of plutonium.

"‘It was an incredibly big breakthrough,' said Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor and former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb. ‘But nobody seems to care.""

How many U.S. troops were killed by Iranian IEDs? One-hundred and ninety-six, claims the Pentagon. Defense One has more on a story that will undoubtedly stir some controversy.

Where your Nutella comes from. And finally, Dominique Soguel reports on the use of child labor on Turkey's profitable hazelnut farms, from which most of the world's hazelnut is produced.

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