REVOLUTIONS IN THE ISLAM – Conflictos Modernos

THE IDEOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE ISLAM. 2nd Part.

THE SECOND TRANSFORMATION

FIRST HALF VIII CENTURY TO BEGINNING XII CENTURY

The salafist Ideology.

Salafism, from «salaf«, predecessor or ancestor, is the other ideological school of the Islam. As salaf, the Muslims call Mohammed and his disciples: the first four caliphs and the next two generations. The expansion of the Islam in the 7th century assumes to the purity of his faith. Since this brought them the Allah’s favor and support.

Since then, whenever the Moslem societies are sufering an economic, political or social crisis, prominent figures will arise that will praise a return to the Islam of the Salaf. Ibn Hanbal, in the 9th century, gives a literal interpretation of the Islam, based in recovering the ancestors and in the condemnation to the ideological innovations. Ibn Taymiyya resorted equally to her in the 14th century, when the Middle East was suffering the Mongolians invasions. These would be the initiators of this current or school.

The Imam, Ahmad Bin Hanbal - Alchemiya — ***IMAM AHMED IBN HANBAL***

The salafist currents are renaissance movements of the Islam, through the return to the original faith, that of the «pious predecessors«. They reject everything that identify as «human interpretations after the revelation of the Prophet«. They are radical reformists movements, which condemn the practices of the «popular Islam« (accused of being superstitions) and great part of the ideological Moslem thought, considered as carrier of «innovations». That is to say, «creations of the human reason«, that move away from the divine message. The salafists reject in turn the influence of the Western civilization, particularly the democracy, the relativism and the laity, that «corrupt the Moslem faith«.

Was Ibn Taymiyyah the spiritual father of jihadists? - Teller Report — ***IBN TAYMIYYA***

The salafists become emancipated of the tradition founded by the 3 sunnis canonical schools. And they invent another Islam, which they affirm is founded on the Coran and the Sunna. Also they seek to imitate Mohammed in all the acts of the daily life, included the way of eating or dressing.

The wahhabism or the salafism at the political Power.

The modern salafists begin with the preaching of the Arabic ulema Mohamed Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703-1792). Who thought that the decline of the Moslem countries opposite to the West, ensues from the oblivion of the original message of the Islam. Ibn Abdul Wahhab preaches the literal and puritanical reading of the Islam, following the Hanbalist and Ibn Taymiyya traditions. Searching for «the correct way of acting in the teachings of the pious predecessors». His sermons were not well received and was expelled from his natal locality, in the Nejd region. He went to Diriyah’s city and there formed an alliance with the sheikh Mohamed ibn Saud, founder of Saud’s House. Ibn Saud promulgated the idea of the «wahhabí» Islam as the official way of practising the Islam in the country. For his part, al-Wahhab gave the religious legitimacy to Ibn Saud in his conquest of Arabia.

muhammad-bin-abdul-wahab – Vridar — ***Ulema Mohamed Ibn Abdul Wahhab***

Finally, in 1902, the emir Abdul Aziz ibn Saud reconquered Riyadh. In 1924 occupied Mecca and Medina and in 1932, all the Saudi Arabia. This was giving them the control on the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to the Muslim Sacred Places and the opportunity to preach the wahhabism to the pilgrims from all the countries. But, the wahhabism was a minor current of the Islam until 1938, when the oil reserves were discovered in the zone. The immense incomes from this new wealth gave a great impetus to his ideological expansion for the world.

The imans near to the Saudi regime, reject the jihadist way, that tries to impose a Moslem regime by means of the violent and revolutionary action. On having considered it to be condemned to the failure. One of his great figures, from the 60s up to his death in 1999, the sheikh Mohamed Nasiruddin al-Alabani, was declaring that «nowadays, it forms part of the good politic, to leave the politic». For al-Albani it was necessary to follow a strategy of purification of the education: on one hand, to regenerate the faith, purifying it of ideological «innovations», that remove it from his origins; and to educate the Muslims in this regenerated faith, in order that they leave his religious «corrupt» practices.

Pin on Y Chromosome — ***Sheikh Mohamed Nasiruddin al-Alabani***

The «Jihadist salafism» or Qutbism.

This current of the school makes the Jihad one of his activity centers. The jihadism seek to accelerate the liberation of the Moslem countries of any foreign occupation. It is based on Sayyid Qutb’s ideas, a theoretic and revolutionary born within the Moslem Brothers. He was sure that the Western Society was sick with individualism and ungodliness. And the Moslem countries would suffer the same thing, if they were influenced by West. And affirmed that the actual Moslem regimes were apostates, on having applied lay laws, instead of the Sharia.

sayyid-qutb | tarnmoor — ***Sayyid Qutb***

Qutb‘s thought was one of the principal influences in the sects Muslims’ Society or Excommunnication (takfir) and Hegira (migration), arisen in 1969 in the bosom of the Moslem Brothers in Egypt, and in al-Qaeda, and his leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama Ben Laden. Sayyid Qutb, was detained, judged and executed at August 29, 1966, for planning the murder of the president Nasser. After his death, the Muslims Brothers evolved towards organization and fight forms inside the existing political system.

The actual salafist jihadism is born in the 80s, during the Afghanistan’s war against the Soviet occupation. The salafists jihadists arrived from Saudi Arabia met the Moslem Brothers. It drove them to adopt the political speech of the Moslem Brothers and to restoring in it the salafistst preaching of Sayyid Qutb.

Epilogue.

The practice praised by the salafistas introduced a strong ingredient of instability and of violence, still physical, between the Muslims and, therefore, between their ideological schools. That was depending and was a function of the antagonistic contradictions (insoluble in a pacific synthesis) that in every historical stage were generating and appearing in the Umma or in located parts of her and in the borders with the hostile peoples. The practical result was that the armed way became consubstantial and intermittently, in the mean of defense and spread of the Faith for many Muslims.

And though only a minimal percentage supports her nowadays and still they are less those who apply it, this conduct, as the red of the blood, turns out to be showy before all the men. That by extension and ignorance, attribute it to the totality of the Moslem community or Umma.

In addition, the sword is an enemy of the pen and of the abstract or scientific ideas. Or, at least, it fades and suffocates them. Though Mohammed already warned it in a hadis: «The ink of the pens is sometimes more useful for the Umma that the blood of the martyrs». At about the 5th century of the Hegira, our 11th century, the ideologists, in a political decision, closed the door to the ichtihad. And the methodological Islamic approach altered. From then, it was imitated, it was repeating itself, it was abused with the compendiums. There got lost the curiosity, the scientific personal effort, the flexibility, the intercommunication of studies and results. And, finally, since it could not be less, this ideological crystallization, moved also to the Moslem arts and sciences, that started a long declining.

This way, this second Transformation of the Islam remained largely frustrated and faded. By the new outcrop of the «minor Yihad», which constituted the first Transformation of the Islam. And that turned out to be completed and profitable with the incredible extension of the Islam in the known world in something more that one century. This reappearance of the first Transformation of the Islam, which was the use of the force for the extension and the implantation of a monotheistic religion, would turn into a complex, multiple, repetitive and violent action throughout the following centuries. Creating effusions of blood and spreading stertors of childbirth for different and numerous countries. On having searched with a new birth of the first Transformation of the Islam, the solution of the inevitable crises (for being vicissitudes of the personal and colectives lives) of the Muslims with the unfaithfuls or their chiies separated brothers…

Creating a permanent civil war, with a rosary of truces, within Islam, within the Umma, between Shiites and Sunnis.

THE IDEOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE ISLAM.

THE SECOND TRANSFORMATION

FIRST HALF VIII CENTURY TO BEGINNING XII CENTURY

General Introduction.

After a belligerent and expansive beginning, the Islam had established inside long and distant borders. That included extensive territories, placed in three known continents, in his parts more out-standing active and fundamental.

It was already time to realize a reflection and an internal doctrinal debate. That was interpreting and adapting towards the future, the whole Islamic revelation. That then was contained in the Koran, the hadises of the Prophet (his verifiable facts and sayings) and the behavior of the salaf or predecessors of the Islam, the primitive and pious Muslims. It is the work of ideological organization of the Islam and the believers’ community. And it shapes a second Transformation in the Islam.

There arise soon the Islamic schools, the cores of ideological work and his social projection. That vertebran around groups of believers and experts, who were living in the principal environments of dar al-Islam. These schools commenced and elaborated in a beginning the criteria and ideas that his neighbouring thinkers were mantaining. In an epoch of difficult communications. They were representing and assembling the expressions and the experiences of the Muslims of diverse origins and races. To that were added the contributions of Moslem eminent travelers, who traveled the ideological centers of the Islam from al-Andalus up to Baghdad.

All this was rethought, consulted, debated and decided by the members of the school, his collaborators and some out-standing thinkers of the country or the region. This way, they were creating different teaching corps by his different origins, to illuminate and direct the ideology and the actions of the Umma. And to project, with major or minor intention and result, towards the future, always changeablly and unknown, an ideological instrument that guarantees and allows an adaptative and rigorous evolution of the Islam.

In this mental and spiritual emergence, happened only one century after the death of Mohammed, concentrating all their human energies, the Muslims also devoted themselves to translate to the Arab all the knowledge of the epoch (VIIth and VIIIth century). This way, they founded libraries and submitted to the study of the universal knowledge and to apprehend it (from “aprehendere”, to grasp). Raising this way his humanities and sciences to a position of total preponderance, which they would preserve for 350 years, up to the 12th century.

A fundamental reason of this cultural bloom of the Islam was his multinational, global character. Already we saw that, once established the incorporations of countries and regions to dar al-Islam, existed initially a broad tolerance over the lives of the new subjects. This way, the cultural Islamic community took up, incorporated and synthesized in his specific task, the contributions of all kinds of cultures and races. And this also derived in the respect and the material support that the Muslims offered to this humanist culture that they created.

In addition, from the emergence of the 3 principal ideological sunnis schools, gathered strength the principle of the personal reflection effort, the ichtihad, in the Islam. The ichtihad allowed the development of the Arabic civilization, so much as for the civil aspects (sciences, trade, literature, art), as for the enrichment of his ideology (it is the base for lawyers like al-Chafii). The ichtihad was a source of brilliancy, creativity, enrichment, progress and peace in the way of the personal and collective effort towards Allah (this is the authentic core and the reason of the Islam). When already the Umma had spread and enormously multiplied all over the known world.

Certainly, this really religious, mystical effort, is called the Major Yihad (in Allah’s way). Unlike to the purely military one, which is only a minor Yihad, to follow this way… All this exuberant ideological development constituted the second Transformation of the Islam.

Origin, need and transmission of the Islamic Tradition.

The histories orally transmitted of «the customs and sayings» (the Sunna) of Mohammed, transformed soon in writings. That were, in turn, objects of great summaries. Each story or written comment is called the hadith or hadis. The term also is used to refer to the generality of them. The length of the hadises is very variable, according to the topic of the writing. More interesting and definer for us is his intelligent internal structure. This characterizes them and gives faith of their verisimilitude. In each hadis is usually first exposed the «transmission chain» up to its writing or the checking of her, from his oral origin, with the figure of the «transmitter«. Nowadays, we would call this the historical traceability. They are of first importance as «transmitters» of the hadises, Aixa or A’, isa, the second and preferred wife the Prophet, and Ali, his cousin and son-in-law. Then, there comes the content of the story or the comment, called the «matn«.

A’,ISA

The Koran in the chapter 4, verse 59, guarantees and grants a special power of decision and of explanation to the Prophet or Envoy of God and to the sovereigns, successors or Moslem caliphs, who are those who hold the authority in the Umma. This would explain and justify the need of a qualified interpretation, foreseen by Allah, for the practical application of the Koran along the geography and the history of the peoples. With Mohammed acting as interpreter, as exceptional and privileged «intermediary» of Allah.

THE SEAL OF ALI, THE FOURTH CALIPH OF THE ISLAM

There exist hundreds of thousands of hadises that have come up to us. And between them numerous contradictions appear. In addition, the total text is excessive for have commented or saying and lived or realized by Mohammed. Even using for it all his life. From almost the beginning, the own exegetas and apologists of the Islam saw this. The hadises were in the risk of turning into a chain of myths, tribal embellished stories and realities more or less preserved from a vaporous and insecure Tradition of the Prophet. And soon was established a critique system of the «isinad» or transmission. To guarantee in strict sense the quality of the content or «matn» of the hadises, as written Tradition.

The sunni ideological schools.

Abu Hanafi, an Iranian died in Kufa, city at the south of Baghdad, in 767, established the hanafi school. This school is outlined in the rigor in the selection of Mohammed’s hadises. And she accepts the employment of the istihsan or personal approval, as criterion for the social conduct. It is extended in Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangla Desh and the turkishmens territories of Central Asia (ex-soviet republics). The hanafism was the official Moslem doctrine of the Ottoman Empire.

IMAM ABU HANAFI

The maliki school was founded by Malik ben Anas, who died in Medina in 795. The doctrine turned into the rite of the Muslims of the West and North of Africa. She regarded that was following the Moslem practice of Medina. And that was the most authentic, for being that the so called city of the Prophet and of the first four caliphs, the Rashidun. In his version, Malik applied the criterion of the usefulness, when sure texts did not exist, to defend the reason, the religion, the persons, the families and the goods.

IMAM MALIK BEN ANAS

The most opened and flexible school, the chafii, founded by the Palestinian al-Chafii, died in Cairo on 820 at the age of 53 years, opened an encouraging door for the pacific evolution of the Islam. This current accepts the «consensus of the sages of the Umma» and the analogical reasoning or qiijas, as correct inspired routes for the adjustment of the Islam to all the times and places. Departing from his original «rural, illiterate, poor and medieval origin and surrounded of hostiles and barbarism«.

It worth indicating that, having jointly and in the essence of his thoughts the Koran and the tradition of the Prophet, the three ideological schools had a strong common ideology. This way, it was always admissible, especially in the origins, that the Muslims were changing its school of thought.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN AFTER THE ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND SYRIA…?

Introduction.

After the annihilation of the guerrilla supporting bases of the Islamic State (the dispersion and the loss of the will of defense, not the physical disappearance) in Iraq, and soon in Syria, the political social panorama that the Southwest of Asia presents is distressing, curled and gloomy.

The possible «allies» of the global or regional powers, who exist in the geopolitical pandemonium of the Southwest of Asia are complicated and tangled internally and are very needed from «helps» for his recovery and for his maintenance during a lot time. They are empty, burdensome, parasitic and without substance «allies».

AGUSTÍN DE FOXA.

Here we might paraphrase the Spanish ambassador Agustín de Foxá, count of Foxá, when, in certain occasion, during the World War II, he was present at an invitation in Rome. During it, the count Ciano, son-in-law of the Duce and Italian Secretary of State, with the evil intention of treading and to laugh of the Spanish, asked him: «Certainly, Foxá, when does Spain think to join, finally, the international fight against the Bolshevism, that are sustaining the powers of the Axis?» Don Agustín answered him: «Count Ciano, do you believe that the Reich can permit to have (to support) another ally?…» The following day, Foxá was indicated that he should leave Italy.

These possible unsuccessful «allies» allow to establish «military permanent bases» to a regional powers with ambitions of expansion (Iran, Russia). But, that do not serve them as “forward military bases” to spread out for any other country around. Also, they can be established in them «temporal bases» for the heavy fire support in their operations with his allies and for civilizing or training (United States). But that either do not have any operational transcedence out of their porous borders.

There is no here, in these teared countries, force, vigor and solidity as nations.

The national actors.

The irreconcilable contradictions, which were defining the relations of power and beliefs between the ethnias and the countries of the Southwest of Asia, before the last appearance of the salafists jihadists in the 90s, are not solved. And the resort to the armed total violence to annihilate the Islamic State, has inflamed some antagonistic differences. And it has encouraged the separatist zeals of some actors of this tragedy without equal: sunnis and Kurds Syrian and Iraqi. Arguing the social politic discrimination that suffer in both States, the war merits and the rights to have a national State, based on the sovereignty over a sufficient and defensible territory. Though that total violence has been applied in the coordinated actions of the national coalitions, more or less voluntary and integrated.

The regime alauí of al-Assad has broken his political and social bonds with his people. And has lost the legitimacy that the Moslem countries grant, as temporaral part of the Umma, to their despots and more or less absolute leaders. That arises from a balance of care, protection and well-being of the people by the part of the leaders, with the respect and the necessary support (effort, taxes, levies) that their subjects offer to them. Because he has crushed and destroyed his people with the indiscriminate heavy fire used in the combats in urban areas. That were crammed with innumerable civilians, terrified, reduced to the misery and ,often, without exit of the sieges of the populations. And that both the National Army of Syria and his foreign allies used systematicly as war weapon. To save own casualties and for the lack of own trained forces in the assault of populations: the real, alternative or fictitious rebels positions and the urban habitat that was covering them, were pulverized at the distant and medium combat ranges. The affected civilians and their properties were «collateral dameges», that were accepted without great sorrow, especially by the allied foreign forces.

The unsteady and elusive politics of the USA in the Southwest of Asia and concretely in Syria, created a «emptiness of power» real, in the way of support. That president Putin proposed to occupy. This time, the Russian autocrat waited, to assure him that the USA was not there, not even were waited. With his military intervention in Syria, Russia was seeking to justify a mediating and relevant role in the damned chessboard of the regional powers of the Southwest of Asia. Also that intervention was going to assure him an increased sponsorship over Syria, with the elevation to «permanent» his naval (in Tartus, Latakia, in the Oriental Mediterranean) and ground bases in the country. And neither the life, nor the possessions, nor the personal and familiar sufferings of the Syrians were mattering for him. If they were converting into an obstacle to his political military strategy in defense of al-Assad.

DOES HE LOVE HIM MORE THAN THE SYRIAN PEOPLE?

The Turks are trying to increase his protagonism and influence in this geopolitical area. Seeking to turn into a great regional power. To it take them the successive inconvenients raised by the European Union during many years to his by right incorporation in Europe. And, the government of Erdogan pushes them definitively. That plays his long-term advantages, by successive approximations, in short stakes, trying to turn the Ataturk’s republic to a radical Islam one. Without the military men, constitutional guarantors of her, get cross him and knock down him.

His renewed strategic preferences lead them to look for a long time to the East. Turkey, with almost 80 million inhabitants, can try to do a sunni moderating role towards the Republic of Iran. The great operational problem for Turkey is that it was the dominant power of the zone, until less than one century. The Ottoman Empire lasted from the 15th century to the beginning of the XXth. And the Turks are not ethnically Arabic and his culture is different.

HE GAVE DESTINATION AND PRIDE TO HIS PEOPLE, DEFEATED IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR. WHERE THE MISTAKES OF THE SULTANATE (CALIPHATE) TOOK HIM .

The Turkish Secretary of State, Ahmet Davutglu, declared categorically that «to intervene in the north of Syria is a natural right of Turkey». And Erdogan stressed that «those who attack Turkey, will feel his breath in their nape». The Turks will not allow that terrorist groups as al-Qaeda or the PKK (recognized as terrorist by the UNO) establish there. But, Turkey knows that the Kurdistan is long in Kms. And that his Kurdish rebels operate from the Iraqi Kurdistan, with safe bases in the Candil mounts. Where they have coverage in his south slopes and supplies from their Kurds inhabitants.

The Separated Conflicting Brothers.

Sigue planteado, si no se ha exacerbado más, el conflicto dentro del Islam entre chiíes y sunníes. Conflicto que es, en sí mismo, una aberración ideológica, una contradicción antagónica, desgarradora y esencial. Si ha habido una Revelación de Allah, destinada a todos los hombres, ésta debe ser clara y sencilla. Para que los hombres comunes y normales la entiendan y la acepten. Y esto fue más necesario tras la Hégira, en los inicios “iletrados, nómadas y pobres del siglo VII”. Porque Allah ama mucho al hombre común, ya que lo ha creado y crea en tan gran número.

The Koran, religious common source of the shiites and sunnis, is not highly revealing about the “internal armed disputes” within the believers’ universal community or Umma. In the epoch of the Prophet this problem was not contemplated. And if those had existed, on having joined with the external harassment that the Muslims were suffering, probably they were leading together to the dispersion and the disappearance of the faithful group. In the Sura (chapter) 49, aleya (verse) 9 is ordered: «When two believers’ nations are in war, try to reconcile them… The believers are your brothers (it is the maximum relation of consanguinity). Solve, so, the differences of your brothers and be afraid of God, so that He has piety of you.» And in 4, 33: «Oh, believers… do not kill between yourself … (or, do not kill yourself)». The beginning of the verse is directed against the greed and the illicit appropriation. And the Legislator could have extended it to the murder (death of the innocent) and its variants (as example, the suicide).

A fundamental problem for a sincere and stable approximation of the «sisters conflicting communities» constitute the concepts of the legitimate origin of the command, of the control and development of the «dogma and morality». And of the immense economic politician religious structures, alive and with their own interests, created by both expressions of the Islam, almost from his beginning.

Another serious origin of offenses and irreconcilable distancing, especially at national level, are the forms of violent fights between both beliefs. When they attack between themselves, they try to damage the utmost, coming up to the intimacy of the kinship. And this way the targets are looked in the mosques, markets, peregrinations, concentrations and in the frequent or in mass movements of the peoples. Places where there usually are members of the same family. It is the uncontrolled violence and taken to her unnecessary, immodest, insanity and paradoxical (do not they practice the same religion?) social limits. Between the clans and tribes, only ethnically speaking, this wave of murders, outrages and hurts in the goods, always generates an “intergenerational chain” of “unavoidable vindications” for the assaults, the reprisals and the «blood offenses» suffered. This essential and indestructible Gordian knot, for what it seems, only can be cut by the sword of the generosity, the altruism (looking not what we «lack», but looking forward in communion and construction) and the pardon, which should be more attainable between a confession brothers.

ALI KHAMENEI CALLED HIM: «LIVING MARTYR» OF THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION.

At the eastern end of the Southwest of Asia is the shiite theocracy of the ayatollahs. These, when want important and rapid results against his neighbors, use commands or units of the Republican Guard. That can train, equip and support his allies of Syria and Iraq. And that are capable of fighting at the near and of assault ranges, as a specially trained light infantry. The Republican Guard is overlapped in the regime, forming the unconditional and effective military wing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, acting like the modern «Immortal of the Shas of Persia». The shiite regime is taken root in a complex of councils, boards and assemblies, designed, created and organized to assure, keep and perpetuate his oligarch social religious functioning. But the regime is unable to develop modern and economically a country with the resources and the demographic exuberance of the Iranians. Iran is better galvanized, as almost all the absolute dictatorships, opposite to the exterior problems. That for the daily, patient and effective work of the political, social and economic development of a country. That demands an environment of peace and serenity that the social tensions alienate.

Iran is a Great Shiite Island placed in an enormous Sunni Ocean. That embraces her, from the west to the east, through all her south, from Turkey to Pakistan, passing for Afghanistan, Arabia, Jordan, Palestine. Her «islands and adjacent capes» are The Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Bahrain; having more strength in Iraq and The Lebanon. The results of the so called «Arabic spring» have not been favorable to the shiites, which are kept immersed in the sunni «hostile ocean«. The «big seas» tributaries of that Ocean are Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as principal protagonists and representatives of the sunnis. The former offers his strength and his demography and the later uses his economic exuberant capacity, to support and to extend the reason of the sunnis throughout.

And the loss of the regime of the al-Assad in Syria not only will reduce to Iran a convenience ally, that not of religion. Since the Syrian alauis are really, «the heresy inside the heresy (shiite)», according to the sunnis. But it will obstruct very much all the logistics of the immense and strategic support to Hizbullah and to Hamas, in the Gaza strip. That is the form of expression of Iran of a «belligerency by third parties interposed», opposite to the West and his allies in the geostrategic zone. This is confirmed by the recent indefinite operational entry in the Syrian civil war of Hizbullah’s regular militias and Afghan fatimies voluntaries in favor of the government. Seeking to recover the progressive social wear of Assad’s regime, with military victories.

Epilogue.

The swords will continue in high place. The Islamic State is a contagious and serious infection, which concerned an intricate and up to explosive situation, of a geopolitical region with too much interests and problems for resolving. The difficult and slightly grateful Asia of the Southwest. As we have described previously.

Egypt will be a sunni powerfully competitor of Turkey and of his pretensions. And Saudi Arabia and the countries of the great Arabic plateau will support it. Iran will have kept the countries with shii influence, that already existed. And by the horizon appears Trump and his direction changes. That are more fearsome for unpredictable that for rapid. Putin will remain boxed in the region, in a ruined and socially defeated country. He has embraced lately to Turkey; already it will not serve him for nothing.