誰缺席了打擊ISIS的鬥爭 A chasm at the heart of the Syrian crisis
There is a big Sunni hole at the heart of international efforts to find a way out of Syria’s civil war and turn the tide against the Sunni jihadis of Isis and their menacing power-base in Syria and Iraq. From the UN Security Council in New York to the Syria forum convened by the US and Russia in Vienna, the architecture that diplomats are struggling to erect looks as riddled as a Swiss cheese.
在各國爲尋找解決敘利亞內戰的方式、打擊“伊拉克和黎凡特伊斯蘭國”(ISIS)遜尼派聖戰組織及其在敘利亞和伊拉克的險惡權力基礎的努力中，存在一個較大的漏洞——遜尼派。從位於紐約的聯合國安理會(UN Security Council)到美國和俄羅斯牽頭在維也納舉行的敘利亞會談，外交官們苦苦建立的架構看起來就像瑞士奶酪一樣千瘡百孔。
Last month, after the Isis attack on Paris but also after five years of fighting that has razed vast swaths of Syria, the Security Council issued a unanimous call to arms against Isis. With France on a war footing, the US and Russia ostensibly putting aside their differences from Ukraine to the Middle East, and even Britain extending its modest role in the anti-Isis fight in Iraq into Syria, it seemed as if the lead external actors in the region were starting to coalesce. The Vienna diplomatic summit, with the presence of Iran, which kept Bashar al-Assad’s regime alive until Russian reinforcements arrived in Syria in September, agreed unanimously on a tentative transition out of the Syrian conflict. Is there substance to any of this?
上月，在ISIS襲擊了巴黎、5年內戰將敘利亞大片領土夷爲平地之後，聯合國安理會一致同意軍事打擊ISIS。鑑於法國準備大幹一場、美國和俄羅斯至少在表面上擱置了他們在從烏克蘭到中東等問題上的分歧、就連英國也將其打擊伊拉克境內ISIS的有限努力擴大至敘利亞，看上去該地區的領先外部勢力正開始聯合起來。在維也納外交峯會上，各方商定了結束敘利亞衝突的暫定過渡方案。在這次峯會上，伊朗也在場，在9月份俄羅斯增援敘利亞之前，正是伊朗支撐着巴沙爾阿薩德(Bashar al-Assad)的政權。這些進展有什麼實質性意義嗎？
The US and Russia, the two main powers embroiled in Syria, remain on opposite sides. President Barack Obama leads a coalition against Isis backed, at least in theory, by Sunni Arab states and Turkey. President Vladimir Putin has put himself at the head of the Iran-backed Shia axis, whose main goal is to prop up the Assad regime, which came perilously close to being toppled by mainstream rebels over the summer. Yet they are both trapped in a dynamic that is conspiring to eliminate any centre ground — widening that already large Sunni hole.
捲入敘利亞問題的兩大主要勢力——美國和俄羅斯，仍然處於對立面。美國總統巴拉克攠巴馬(Barack Obama)領導着一個打擊ISIS的聯盟，至少在理論上得到遜尼派阿拉伯國家和土耳其的支持。俄羅斯總統弗拉基米爾渠京(Vladimir Putin)將自己置於由伊朗支持的什葉派軸心的領導位置，這個軸心的主要目標是力挺阿薩德政權（今年夏天該政權差點被主流反政府武裝推翻）。不過，美俄所處的格局不利於任何中間地帶存在，這將擴大本來已經很大的遜尼派漏洞。
Mr Putin, who says Russia now spearheads the struggle against Isis that Mr Obama had bungled, has concentrated most of his fire on non-Isis, Sunni rebels, variously backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. That is destroying the alternative to Isis that Russia and the US are purportedly trying to identify. By bolstering a minority regime built around Mr Assad’s quasi-Shia Alawite community, Moscow is fanning the sectarian flames consuming and partitioning the Levant.
普京稱，俄羅斯如今領導着之前被奧巴馬搞得一團糟的打擊ISIS的鬥爭。俄羅斯將絕大部分火力對準各個非ISIS的遜尼派反政府武裝，這些叛軍分別得到美國、沙特阿拉伯、土耳其和卡塔爾的撐腰。普京這麼做恰恰摧毀了俄美據稱正在物色的替代ISIS的勢力。爲了支撐以阿薩德的阿拉維派（Alawite，什葉派分支）爲中堅力量的少數派政權，俄羅斯正在煽起吞噬和割裂黎凡特的宗派主義戰火。
Mr Obama inherited the debris of President George W Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, which replaced a Sunni tyranny with ruinously sectarian Shia leaders and shattered Iraq into pieces — giving the Isis death cult its start in life.
奧巴馬接下了前總統喬治圠布什(George W Bush) 2003年入侵伊拉克留下的爛攤子。那場戰爭以毀滅性的宗派主義什葉派領導人取代了一個遜尼派暴政，使伊拉克四分五裂——爲ISIS死亡邪教提供了滋生的條件。
Yet the Bush mix of recklessness and fecklessness in Iraq resurfaces in Mr Obama’s lethal ambivalence towards Syria. His defenders say he was right to stay out of an intractable, shape-changing conflict. But that is not what he did. He called for the downfall of the Assads but then held back from giving the mainly Sunni rebels the means to achieve it — adding to the sense of dispossession of the Iraqi Sunni minority the feeling of betrayal among Syria’s Sunni majority.
然而，奧巴馬在敘利亞問題上致命的舉棋不定，與當年小布什在伊拉克的輕率徒勞之舉在根本上如出一轍。奧巴馬的擁護者稱，面對一場錯綜複雜且不斷演變的衝突，他置身事外是正確的。但這並不是他所做的。他曾呼籲推翻阿薩德政權，隨後卻不向主要由遜尼派組成的反政府武裝提供實現這一點的手段。換句話說，不僅在伊拉克占人口少數的遜尼派覺得被剝奪權力，在敘利亞占人口多數的遜尼派也感覺遭到背叛。
The US-led coalition’s position on the ground against Isis relies essentially on Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Syrian Kurdish militia, effective forces that will nevertheless fight only for their own territory. The Pentagon’s attempt to rebrand the Syrian Kurd fighters as a Syrian Arab coalition — with the addition of Sunni tribal fighters and Assyrian Christian militia — merely spotlights the Sunni Arab hole.
以美國爲首的聯盟在第一線打擊ISIS的作戰基本上依賴於伊拉克庫爾德自由戰士和敘利亞庫爾德民兵組織，兩者都是很有戰鬥力的武裝力量，但只願意保衛自己的地盤。五角大樓試圖將敘利亞庫爾德戰士整編爲一個敘利亞阿拉伯聯盟——外加遜尼派部落戰士和亞述基督教民兵組織——恰恰凸顯了遜尼派阿拉伯的漏洞。
The US and its allies are right that, if the Assads stay in place, there is little chance of enlisting mainstream Sunni sentiment against Isis. But, as things stand, Russia and Iran are not wrong in saying there is as yet no plausible alternative to fill a new vacuum if the Assads go. Ba’athist Syria was built as a security state almost impossible to disentangle from the Assad clan, with Alawites as its praetorian guard.
美國及其盟友的說法是對的：如果阿薩德繼續在位，就沒什麼希望爭取到主流遜尼派支持打擊ISIS。但是，從當前形勢看，俄羅斯和伊朗也沒錯：如果阿薩德倒臺，暫時沒有可信的替代選擇。有阿拉維派作爲阿薩德家族的禁衛軍，阿拉伯復興社會黨(Ba'athist)掌控的敘利亞被打造成了一個集權國家，幾乎無法與阿薩德家族撇清關係。
The lack of mainstream Sunni leadership is a blight across the region, which offers instead varieties of Sunni supremacism. Isis, a hybrid of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Ba’athist officers from Saddam Hussein’s army, disbanded by the US after 2003, is obviously the most virulent. But the big Sunni powers — Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt — are diluted flavours of this poison to which they claim to be the antidote.
缺少主流遜尼派的領導成爲整個地區的禍根，相反，這裏產生了各式各樣的遜尼派至上主義。ISIS——由伊拉克基地組織(al-Qaeda)和薩達姆侯賽因(Saddam Hussein)的軍隊（2003年後被美國解散）的復興黨軍官組成的混合體——顯然是毒性最強的。但是，較大的遜尼派勢力——沙特阿拉伯、土耳其和埃及——都是這種毒藥稀釋後的版本，而非它們所號稱的解藥。
Saudi Arabia, Washington’s main Sunni Arab ally, has told both the US and Russia its overriding concern is the march of Shia Iranian influence across the Arab world. Its sectarian Wahhabi strain of Sunni Islam competes with Isis as to which is the more effective hammer of the Shia. Turkey under the increasingly autocratic presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has seen its presumption of leading a neo-Ottoman Sunni revival boil down to a revived war with its Kurdish minority. Neither power is carrying the fight to Isis.
美國主要的遜尼派阿拉伯盟友沙特阿拉伯已向美國和俄羅斯表明，它的首要顧慮是什葉派的伊朗在整個阿拉伯世界影響力不斷擴大。在誰是打擊什葉派的最強有力的大錘的問題上，沙特的遜尼派分支、宗派主義的瓦哈比教派和ISIS相互競爭。由日益威權的總統雷傑普吠伊普埃爾多安(Recep Tayyip Erdogan)主政的土耳其，把領導新奧斯曼主義遜尼派復興的關鍵視爲與該國庫爾德少數派重啓戰爭。這兩個大國都沒有積極打擊ISIS。
Egypt, after the 2013 coup against an elected Islamist government, has turned back towards a police state. Its presumption to being the Arab world’s intellectual powerhouse has to be measured against the fact that Al-Azhar, its millennium-old centre of Sunni learning, only this year excised from its curriculum early Islamic teaching on slavery, taxes due from non-Muslims, apostasy and jihad — the stock-in-trade of Isis.
在2013年的政變推翻了民選的伊斯蘭主義政府後，埃及再次淪爲極權國家。該國號稱是阿拉伯世界的知識強國，但事實是，其遜尼派千年學府愛資哈爾大學(Al-Azhar University)今年才從教學大綱中清除了早期伊斯蘭教義中的糟粕，包括奴隸制、向非穆斯林徵稅、叛教和聖戰，這些正是ISIS的慣用手段。
The Middle East desperately needs a Sunni counter-narrative that takes on board the rights of minorities as well as individuals. Only that will challenge the presumption of Shia Iran and the Isis brand of millenarian Sunni supremacism — and start reassembling a disintegrating region into some sort of liveable shape.
中東迫切需要一種遜尼派的“反敘述”，顧及少數派以及個人的權利。只有那種意識形態才能挑戰什葉派伊朗和ISIS標榜的遜尼派至上主義——使這個分崩離析的地區再度開始成爲適宜居住的地方。
