Dr. Nader Hashemi:

Those are good questions. On the Syrian refugee question, one my big concerns is that the conflict in Syria does not look like it is going to end any time soon and there is already a great number of refugees. There are 3 million Syrians who have been formally registered by the UN as refugees, and another 6 million to 7 million who have been internally displaced. Those are, unfortunately, ideal recruiting grounds for groups such as ISIS who can appeal to these refugees who have no chance of going home, no jobs, no future, to come and join them.

The region was deeply destabilised in 1948 as a result of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the spread of the Palestinian refugee problem, which is ongoing. It has created a lot of instability in neighbouring countries. In Jordan, there was a major civil war in 1970 and its population is majority Palestinian refugees. It has had a long-standing problem with negotiating its Jordanian-Palestinian identity. The big fear is that Syrian refugees are going to play an equally destabilising role. The difference is that now we have ISIS, which can recruit people. In the case of the Palestinian refugees we did not have a radical Islamo-fascist group that could recruit people. It is a cause for concern that unless the crisis in Syria is solved in some way where these refugees can start to go home, we will start seeing ripple effects, spill-over and unpredictable consequences that do not bode well for the stability of the region. Given the globalised world in which we live, all of us in the international community are going to feel the destabilising effects of this conflict in one way or another. This is another reason Syria demands our attention. In many ways it is central to solving the problems of instability in the region. The Chairman just alluded to one small aspect of it that has the potential to be very catastrophic.

With respect to Iran and its role in Syria, I am a strong critic of Iran's foreign policy towards Syria, largely because Iran has arguably been the biggest backer of the Assad regime. The footprints of the Islamic Republic of Iran are all over the atrocities of the Assad regime. The statements from the Iranian leadership suggest that Syria is the equivalent of Iran's 37th province, in other words, that it is more important than the oil-producing regions of Iran. Iran is deeply embedded with the Assad regime and has stated in many different ways, directly and indirectly, that it is willing to back Assad to the end.

Iran's geostrategic view of the region is based on its rivalry with Saudi Arabia. The big fear is that if a pro-Iranian regime in Damascus falls, it is going to upset the balance of power in the region to the benefit of Saudi Arabia and its allies. The other concern that Iran has for Syria is that Syria is the conduit to Iran's major ally in the region, Hezbollah. It does not want to see the Damascus regime fall, so I cannot see Iran playing a particularly positive role on the Syrian question because it has been so deeply embedded by backing the Assad regime.

There is a connection with the nuclear question which is one reason President Obama has been reluctant to go after Assad and get more deeply involved in talking about a political solution with Syria, in my opinion. He knows that will have negative consequences for the US-Iran nuclear negotiations, which are at a very sensitive point right now. There is a lot of evidence suggesting that one reason Obama backed off and turned the conflict over to the Russians last September, having threatened to hit Assad after he used sarin gas on his own people, was that at the time, as we now know, Iran and the US were in secret negotiations over the nuclear issue in Oman. There are statements by Iranian leaders to the effect that, had there been a military strike against Syria, Iran would have pulled out of those negotiations and the interim Geneva agreement would not have been produced. These issues are in many ways intertwined and overlapping, but at least in the short term I do not see Iran playing a positive role. Rhetorically, Iran has said that it supports self-determination for the people of Syria and free and fair elections, but it also very openly supported the fraudulent election that Bashar Assad held in June, which was a fake election. Iran's official rhetoric on supporting the legitimate voices and grievances of the Syrian people is not matched by its military behaviour, or by its support for sham political processes that we have seen take place in Syria. I view it as a very negative player in the Syrian context.

Having said that, Iran is a regional player and has to be part of any stabilisation plan for the broader Middle East. If we can get to a nuclear accord with Iran, that will be an important step forward. It might open the door to solving other regional issues. The Saudi-Iran rivalry was mentioned before. That has exacerbated and raised the political temperature in Syria to new levels, but the fundamental roots of the Syrian crisis go back three and a half years, to a pro-democracy uprising in the context of the Arab Spring, with which Saudi Arabia and Iran were not involved. All that was involved was citizens protesting against a political tyranny. As the conflict spread and became militarised, that allowed for regional countries to get involved, supporting different sides and complicating what had been a very difficult problem to begin with.