Matter changes form, but never disappears. The Armenian -Azerbaijani Conflict

An important idea in ancient Greek philosophy was the principle of mass conservation. This millennium-old knowledge of the ancient Greeks spat in my head when I was thinking about the regional threats in Iran, Syria, and the Gulf. Each of us learned in school about the principle. Described by many others, a famous scholar, Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī put it that way around the 13th century AD:

A body of matter cannot disappear completely. It only changes its form, condition, composition, color, and other properties and turns into a different complex or elementary matter”.^[8]

A morbid example of this would be the journalist Khashoggi, then living in exile in the US, who went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 to pick up papers for his wedding and never came out. But where is the connection between Iran, al-Tusi, and Syria? Other than al-Tusi was Persian himself, it is that simple: 100 years after the creation of the artificial lands in the Middle-East by the British-French Sykes-Picot Agreement,[1] the victory over ISIS just seemed to end one of the darkest periods in human history in December 2017. The focus of conflict is still glowing in other places. Like cancer and the metastases[2].

We remember how through the “spillover effect” from Syria, the Civil Wars in Iraq and Syria were deeply intertwined, and how the elimination of national borders has created a multinational war-theater. The Iraqi Civil War escalated in January 2014 from the Iraqi insurgency. After U.S. troops left the destabilized country in 2011, armed conflicts with the central government and between sectarian groups emerged.

Although I am trying to avoid to quote the president turned French investment banker Emmanuel Macron, according to him Turkey has deployed Syrian militias in the disputed Caucasus territory in Nagorno-Karabakh, supporting Azerbaijan in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Should Syrian jihadists appear in the conflict, the region could become an Islamist nest. As Ford[3] aptly put it in his closing remarks about “The Syrian Civil War “

Forestalling recruitment by extremist elements among dispirited refugee communities will be a related challenge as well.

Exactly that happened and is happening now. According to a report by the German news agency dpa, the financial incentive for mostly Turkmen fighters in Nagorno-Karabakh is about $1500-2000. These fighters, like the Sultan Murad Brigade, which lost fifty members in the fights, are backed by Turkey.  We are not talking about single cases but several thousand, according to the sources up to 2,000 fighters (!). The Guardian[4] is writing about three- and six-month contracts with a monthly salary of 700-1000 British pounds.

Whoever thought the Syrian conflict would be over, should think about the old the principle of mass conservation and al-Tusi just in a modified form:

Conflict changes form, but never disappears.

[1] Scott Anderson, “The Disintegration of the Iraqi State Has Its Roots in World War I”, Smithsonian, June 19, 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/disintegration-iraqi-state-has-its-roots-world-war-i-180951793/#KXgsrOWpUKhdzTCJ.99

[2] Interestingly, at around the same time, the imposed Treaty of Trianon was signed, which created many successor states, of which only Hungary exists today in the same form. The country that was pinned by the treaty. 100 years later in Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state also culminated in bloodshed across national boundaries.

[3] Ford, Robert S. “The Syrian Civil War: A New Stage, but Is It the Final One?” Policy Paper 2019-8. Middle East Institute, Apr. 2019. www.mei.edu.

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/28/syrian-rebel-fighters-prepare-to-deploy-to-azerbaijan-in-sign-of-turkeys-ambition