The Arab order continues to retreat

Fighting flared up in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, in the last days, and ordinary people got caught in the fierce fighting between heavily armed opposition and government forces. 

Despite agreements signed by the two fighting sides, the Yemeni capital has been overrun by the invading force of Ansarullah (Houthis), the Yemeni government has resigned with its authority virtually vanishing, and some officials’ residences in the city were forcefully ransacked.

Many city residents chose to flee their homes for safety. 

Thus one more spectacular Arab state failure and a new wave of Arab refugees caused by internal wars. 

At about the same time, as many as 130,000 Syrian Kurds crossed the Syrian border into Turkey as Islamic State (IS) forces were advancing into their region, taking control of 60 Kurdish villages on their way to the town of Kobane (also known as Ain Al Arab), the third largest Syrian Kurdish town in the Aleppo region. 

Against the chilling reality of what befell the Syrian population in the last three-and-a-half years, this figure sounds modest. In addition to huge numbers of internally displaced Syrians (6.5 million so far, according to UN estimates), there are no less than three million registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq. 

Others managed to leave the entire region, making their way to European and other countries.

The human flow out of Syria continues in all directions. In the last two decades, a huge portion of the Arab people had become refugees, mostly living in severe humanitarian conditions and unbearable hardships. 

In the last three decades, in addition to this latest plight of the Yemenis, large numbers of Iraqis, Libyans, Lebanese and Syrians were forced to leave their homes under severe conflict conditions in search of safety, either within their countries’ borders or into the unknown.

Successive waves of Iraqis, and other foreign residents of Iraq, started to depart the country from the early 1990s, with the first large upsurge occurring during and after the first war on Iraq, in 1990-1991, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990.

Jordan at the time had to cope with and provide basic needs for more than one million newcomers in a matter of weeks.

The second huge wave of Iraqi refugees happened during the second American-led attack on Iraq in 2003, allegedly to destroy Iraq’s non-existing arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. 

Most Iraqi refugees escaped in the direction of Jordan; some still do.

At some point, the number of Iraqis who crossed and settled in Jordan for extended periods, some until this day, again exceeded the one-million figure.

This summer, hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis were forced out of their hometowns and villages, a third wave, following the sudden invasion of northeast Iraq by IS forces, which advanced and took control of the entire province of Nineveh, including Mosul, its historic capital, last June.

The large Iraqi army in that region offered no resistance. It actually abandoned its arms and positions and disintegrated in a matter of hours.

As ethnic and religious communities in those areas were subjected to brutal practices, including threats of death if they did not convert to Islam, confiscation of property and belongings, compulsory deportation, taking women captives as sex slaves, and subjecting men to torture and humiliating abuse if they did not adopt the IS ideology, large numbers left everything behind and ran for safety in any available direction. 

When other communities in the Kurdish province were subjected to even harsher measures — starvation and barbaric siege — they also took to the nearest border. Tens of thousands of stranded civilian victims were being helped by foreign forces that rushed to drop food from the air or to airlift some in dire need.

The war to dislodge IS from Iraq and Syria, and to totally annihilate it, is yet to come. The coalition of about 40 countries the US has managed to assemble to combat this lethal terrorist force may need, according to American estimates, about three years to accomplish its mission.

It is hard to imagine how many more people will have to abandon their homes and join the refugee population in both Syria and Iraq as a result of the approaching war.

Neither would it be possible at this stage to anticipate the scale of the refugee tragedy in countries such as Libya and Yemen, where chaos is steadily escalating, with no sign of hope at the end of a long and dark tunnel.

Fighting in Yemen is by no means unusual. But for the war to move right inside the capital and the apparent government force failure to defend the city is astounding. It is difficult to predict the scale or the end of that war.

What destiny awaits the Arab world? 

In the last seven decades Arab countries have been either host or source of refugees, or both.

In 1947, 800,000 Palestinians were made to flee their historic homeland to make room for the Zionist invaders of the land. They sought refuge in Arab countries: Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Jordan, Gaza and Egypt, Iraq and many other countries worldwide.

The inhabitants of the southern part of Lebanon had to leave the entire region many times in the last four decades, fleeing north for safety in the face of repeated Israeli wars and massive indiscriminate destruction of Lebanese southern towns and villages.

The Golan Heights Syrians had to leave for good since the 1967 war, which resulted in an occupation of the area by Israel that continues till this day. 

That is to say nothing about other countries like Sudan and Somalia, where situations are even more catastrophic.

These brief highlights of a depressing and worsening Arab reality can only lead to one conclusion: the Arab official order is declining, and declining fast.

Some Arab states are repeatedly failing to perform their most vital duties or leaving vast space for sucking chaos and violence.

Where is this frightening reality going to take us?

The hope that the “Arab Spring” was the long awaited Arab awakening — a dawn for a better Arab future of democratisation, enlightenment and progress — vanished too soon.

It will be unfair, though, to deduce that the Arab Spring is the cause of all the current trouble. It is not.

Let us hope it was a genuine popular move for real and genuine reform that was overwhelmed by heaps of reform-resisting factors and entrenched frustrations that were suddenly and simultaneously unleashed.

Let us hope that when the steam is all out, some wisdom will take over and start to put things in order.

This is a very bad period, but will hopefully pass. The question is how long will it be until all the steam is out, and at what price for the Arab world and the Arab people?