IRAQ - Sex, Shopping & 'Death Of Assad Regime'.

A lengthy report by Asia Times Online (ATO) published on Nov. 17 tells of Syrian volunteers moving to Iraq not for the Neo-Salafi jihad but for having sex with women. It tells of other stories and begins with this: When and if President Bashar al-Assad  and his Ba'thist regime collapse, "chances are it won't be because of a US invasion, or even a small contingent of special ops forces fomenting chaos" at the centre of Syrian power. "Rather, sex, shopping and expensive real estate is likely to be the principal culprits. In a recent edition of the semi-official Syria-Today, the following ad was placed right next to the text of an address by Assad: Emaar Properties, a Dubai-based joint stock development company, unveiled plans for two major Damascus real estate development projects on Oct. 17. The two developments, 'Eighth Gate' and 'Damascus Hills', will be the city's first fully planned communities and are together valued at US$3.9 billion. They will be constructed in the countryside near Damascus and will comprise residential, commercial and real estate compounds. The projects are a joint venture between Emaar and the Syrian-based Invest Group Overseas, an offshore investment and property development company owned by a group of Syrian expatriate investors".

Against Emaar's drive to "build a global property-related brand", the Ba'th Party's "Unity, Freedom, Socialism" does not stand much of a chance. The best Assad can offer his people, as he explained in a March 5 speech, is "the protection of national and pan-Arab interests through adherence to our identity, independence, loyalty to our principles and beliefs...[while] dealing realistically with emergent challenges and developments". But while Assad offers to "protect our political and social stability", Emaar offers luxury, service and profits. ATO added: "We don't need to guess who will win here, especially when the price for Assad's stability is an authoritarian regime, an economy in a shambles - near negative growth, key industries losing more than a quarter of their income in the past year alone - and increasing political and economic ostracization".

ATO said: "what is saddest about the inter-section of Assad's speech and Emaar's newest project is that they suggest...the ostensible reasons behind the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri - to preserve Syria's massive racketeering operation in Lebanon (without which an otherwise destitute Syrian government would have a hard time functioning) - were seriously misplaced. More than one commentator has described the contest between Assad and Hariri as one between an old-style mafia family and a savvier and increasingly globalized former associate (and now competitor). Viewed this way, the belief that getting rid of Hariri would help the Assad 'family' preserve the status quo is betrayed by the presence of Emaar, which reveals that the old order is already slipping away, one Damascene hillside at a time. As important, it's Syria's 'brotherly' Arabs, not the Americans and French imperialists, who are leading the way...few Syrians will be able to afford the luxury living of Damascus Hill in the foreseeable future, regardless of who's living in the presidential palace".

ATO quoted a returning young Syrian volunteer as saying: "My friends and I went to fight in Iraq because we thought we would find lots of sex there. People said that sex and prostitution were available in streets because of the poverty and disorder. We wanted to exploit that situation". Sadly for the largely Sunni sex-jihadis, ATO said, there was not much sex to be had in Iraq, "largely because prostitutes, like most women, have been driven from the public space they used to occupy by the violence of the insurgency.

If they were Shi'ite, they might have been able to avail themselves of the innumerable Iranian-run "temporary marriage" hotels which have sprung up in Baghdad and the cities of the south. But while many young Syrian volunteers returned home disappointed, others stayed and were hired by Neo-Salafi groups - and ATO added: "here the 72 virgins available to newly martyred jihadis is a particularly useful hiring incentive; although a few have actually married Iraqi women, thereby solving the problem that led them to Iraq in the first place. Most, it seems, have not been that lucky. And if the majority who left Syria (at least partly) for sex come back with little else beyond increased religious enthusiasm, to an economy that shows little signs of offering them prospects for a better future - politically, economically, or sexually - the tenuous balance between the Syrian regime and its people will be increasingly threatened. Along with sex and real estate, shopping - or the lack of it - constitutes the third major problem facing the Assad regime".

ATO said: "while the largely Sunni economic elite increasingly desires market reforms and political liberalisation, the Alawite military does not. What we are likely to see in Syria in the near future, particularly with the growing impact of the Mehlis investigation into the killing of Hariri on the country's political dynamics, is the exacerbation of cleavages within Syria's 'military-merchant complex' which were manageable as long as Lebanon remained under Syrian control, but which will be increasingly out in the open in the near future".