The people's movement called the “Arab Spring” began in 2011 in Tunisia, a marginal state in the Arab region, and soon spread to Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria. The result was the fall of regimes loyal to the “axis of Arab moderation”, led by Saudi Arabia, in contrast to the “axis of resistance” led by Iran that extended its influence into some Arab countries, Iraq in particular. Qatar was the backbone supporting these “revolutions” — at least with its media tools and its bias towards political Islamic movements reaching power. In spite of internal tensions in these movements in each country, external agendas — linked to influence, interests and roles in the Middle East — remain the main factors that have brought the national state and Arab society into its current state of chaos, violence and failure relative to the goals of freedom and social justice. Some thought that Syria would be immune to internal mobility but that was misjudged due to external changes initiated by US military intervention to topple a sovereign regime in Iraq in 2003. Consequent to this toppling, the national Iraqi army was dissolved and Iraqi territory was left loose to jihadist organisations. Wesley Clark, a retired general of the United States Army, said that the US administration would work to overthrow a group of countries' regimes in the Middle East, Syria one of them. Starting mid-2000 until 2011, Turkey and Qatar began to move towards the polarisation of Damascus. As the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan adopted a policy of openness towards Syria and the Palestinian cause. Turkey played the role of mediator in the peace process between Syria and Israel, yet it did not work out. But most importantly, in 2010, Turkey managed to convince President Bashar Al-Assad to accept that the Muslim Brotherhood engage in political activity in Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood exercised a policy of piety towards the Syrian regime by praising its national positions in the Gaza War in 2009 despite being for the overthrow of the Syrian regime since 2005. Qatar, meanwhile, supported Hizbullah via Al-Jazeera after the July 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon and financially reconstructed the war-ravaged country, where Qatari flags and banners with the words “Thank you, Qatar” were spread in South Lebanon. However, Turkish and Qatari politics were revealed in Syria in 2011 when the position of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, coincided with the principles and objectives of political Islam with no consideration to the fundamental national cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Hamas movement left Syria to Qatar where it found strong support there, with Qatar's goals summarised in the following: - In 2009, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani — a member of the ruling Qatari royal family and emir of Qatar from 1995 to 2013 — presented to President Bashar Al-Assad a Qatari offer to establish a Qatari gas pipeline that passes through Syrian territory into the Mediterranean to be exported to Europe. But the Syrian president rejected the offer, preferring to maintain his strategic alliances with Russia and Iran. Paradoxically, Russia and Iran are natural gas exporters, where Iran is working on a similar pipeline to Europe known as the Islamic Pipeline, which in turn is linked to the Russian gas pipeline. — Americans believed that political Islam could be a substitute for Arab regimes, adopting Turkey as a model of moderate political Islam, and Qatar as an Arab lever for funding, training, and pressure for supposed “change”. Qatar has played a major media role since 2001 in broadcasting Al-Qaeda beliefs, turning terrorism into jihad to match with what its leader, Osama bin Laden, considered corrupt Islamic regimes and foreign (ie, US) presence in Islamic lands as one of the reasons for the loss of Palestine and the plundering of Arab wealth. The “Arab Spring” came in the context of dispersing among new generations the belief that religion is capable of solving the crises of unemployment, underdevelopment and tyranny, which created a globalised environment for jihadi organisations overcrossing the national state. In this vein, Qatar has continued to support the Arab Spring with the support of political Islam in Egypt, the National Coalition for Revolutionary Forces and the Syrian Opposition, and the removal of Syria's seat in the Arab League despite the fact that the opposition is illegitimate in being unelected. Changes in American policy began to appear with the criticism of former president Barack Obama of Erdogan as a tyrant and dictator, but US policy changed in practice only when President Trump came to the office. President Trump has reinstated his traditional predecessors' policy towards Iran as a threat to Gulf security and the movements of political Islam, including the Muslim Brotherhood, as terrorism. When Gulf and Egyptian actions towards Qatar began, the US president declared that Qatar supports terrorism. Russia, at best, has been muted in its response, seeing its security concerns from the vantage point of the Ukraine. Qatar was isolated, and the military battle began in Raqqa, the stronghold of the Islamic State organisation. Saudi Arabia's move towards Russia and Turkey was contained in the Astana talks. Despite Iran and Turkey's support for Qatar and its political system, its dreams of an Islamic Middle East are no longer a reality. The first failure was the toppling of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. Now, he geopolitical and economic costs of the Syrian war are the same as those that would bring it to an end. The question remains whether the conflict has moved to the Gulf. The writer is a researcher in political and strategic affairs.
