The War for Syria: Regional and International Dimensions of the Syrian Uprising.

• Author: Akgul, Musa

The War for Syria: Regional and International Dimensions of the Syrian Uprising

Edited by Raymond Hinnebusch and Adham Saouli

Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020, 326 pages, [pounds sterling]31,49, ISBN: 9780429201967 (ebk)

The civil war in Syria, now ongoing for 10 years, does not appear to be ending soon given the continuing conflicts among the domestic and global actors involved. The War for Syria: Regional and International Dimensions of the Syrian Uprising (2020), a follow-up to The Syrian Uprising: Domestic Origins and Early Trajectory (2018), focuses on external factors, as its name suggests. Accordingly, regional power conflicts and global actors are scrutinized in terms of how the latter affected both the emergence of the conflict environment in Syria and the evolution of the war in their favor.

This book consists of 18 chapters, proving how complicated even only the external dimension of the Syria conflict is. The first chapter covers the basic dynamics of the regional system that formed the struggle for power over Syria. Then, competitive external intervention is discussed, as a consequence of which various regional and international alignments caused the escalation of violence and a stalemate. In this chapter, Hinnebusch openly declares, "Turkey opened its borders to a flow of ISIS recruits into Syria while allowing oil to be imported from ISIS-controlled oil fields" (p. 10). Yet, even the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the CIA asked Turkey's pardon regarding the 2014 allegation of oil trade between Ankara and ISIS. (1) Such an acknowledged expert cannot know about the border between Turkey and Syria exceeding 900 kilometers, EU countries and the U.S. not sharing intelligence with Turkey, the need to capture ISIS militants, terrorist attacks in Turkey carried out by ISIS at the time, and operations by Turkey against ISIS, which all demonstrate the bias of the author on the matter rather than the truth, or the matter being politicized.

Chapters 2-4 are about the 'states system' on an international and regional level. These chapters dwell on how the Syrian conflict was driven by global and regional powers; they show the instrumentalization of sectarianism by these powers to outrival others. Thus, the first three chapters cover the systemic impact, that of the regional order, on the Syrian conflict. However, these chapters mainly treat the Syrian conflict both as an internal struggle and an international proxy...