On March 14, the Qatari-owned Al-Quds al-Arabi daily carried the following lead editorial: “Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the Syrian revolution, which erupted on March 15, 2011 from the southern city of Daraa... On that occasion, we will witness a new Geneva negotiations session between the political opposition and the regime, preceded by the noticeable statements of US Secretary of State John Kerry, in which he described the Syrian government officials’ talk about President Bashar al-Assad being a “red line” as a provocation, and said that Russia and Iran must prove that the Syrian government will “respect” what is agreed on... What was also noticeable were the statements of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in which he said that the Turks were entrenching themselves on the Syrian side of the border, and that Turkey was starting to demand its sovereign right to create buffer zones on Syrian soil.

“He thus indicated that Russia was “the only country operating with an official invitation from the legitimate authorities in Damascus,” and that all the other states, including the members of Washington’s alliance, “are working there without legitimate grounds.” And he once again stressed the necessity to invite the Kurds (the Democratic Union Party, the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party branch in Syria) to join the negotiations. This was preceded by other Russian statements, surrounding the possibility of replacing the central state in Syria with a federal regime, a proposal which was approved by America later on and understood by the Syrians as a prelude for their country’s division, just like it happened in the 30s of last century when the French divided Syria into several states, with different flags and armies.

“The American-Russian support of the Kurdish Protection Units and the Democratic Union Party, along with the Turkish and French statements about Russia’s preparations to build an Alawi mini-state on the Syrian coast, reveal that these proposals and their possible outcomes cannot be neglected. Measuring the Syrian situation with a Russian ruler is not right, since Russia is a large country and a wide gathering of nations, federally divided between 22 republics with dozens of ethnicities and languages, whereas Syria is a country put together – after WWI – from its remaining sides, whose vital space is represented by Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon. And apart from the Kurdish language, its other ethnic languages do not enjoy a large demographic weight (Aramaic for example is only spoken in two villages). This is why the “federalism” intended for Syria might be closer to the Palestinian-Israeli situation than to the Russian one...

“Indeed, the Syrian “federal” state, Russia-style, will be closer to Israel, i.e. heavily armed and protected by a superpower that controls the army and defense apparatuses, as well as the “beneficial” Syria (the coast and the large cities), while the remaining areas will be subject to conflicts between two entities, which can be compared to Fatah (the political opposition) and Hamas (the military opposition). In the meantime, the regions controlled by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units will act as permanent tools for the complication of the situation, the pressuring of Turkey, and the weakening of whoever confronts the regime. But the question remains: Can Syria be divided in four?”