Wounded Syrian regime fights
back By Victor Kotsev
The regime of Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad may be mortally wounded, but its rule is
not yet over. This is the grim message reinforced
by armored columns rolling into the major cities,
and of relentless air and artillery strikes on the
capital Damascus and the commercial heart of the
country, the northern city Aleppo.
Assad
tried to stick to the narrative that national
unity could be salvaged by appointing three Sunni
Muslims, all of them his hardline supporters, to
fill in for the security chiefs who were
assassinated last week.
"The notorious
Rustum Ghazali, who ruled Lebanon with an iron
fist, is among them," the prominent Syria expert
at the University of Oklahoma, Joshua Landis,
wrote in his blog. "This is an effort to keep the
Sunni-Alawi alliance alive. Baathist rule has been
built on the Sunni-Alawi alliance, which has all
but collapsed since the
beginning of the
uprising. The defections of high level Sunnis
recently underscores that it is moribund."
The influential American-based
intelligence analysis organization Stratfor
concurs with the conclusion that despite all his
efforts, Assad's days are numbered. "We have
argued that so long as the military and security
apparatus remain intact and effective, the regime
could endure," Stratfor wrote in a recent
analysis. "Although they continue to function,
neither appears intact any longer; their control
of key areas such as Damascus and Aleppo is in
doubt, and the reliability of their personnel,
given defections, is no longer certain ... The
regime has not unraveled, but it is unraveling".
[1]
Nor does the option of Assad
retreating to some sort of an Alawite "rump state"
seem particularly viable. Some commentators have
suggested that such a state could center around
the Western port city of Latakia, a traditional
Alawite stronghold (to see a map of the Syrian
conflict, click here).
A recent report in Abu Dhabi's The National, for
example, argues that an accompanying process of
brutal identity-based cleansing may already have
started.
"Recent attacks, such as the
massacre on July 12 in the village of Tremseh,
appeared calculated to push Sunnis in western
Syria out of their traditional homes and east,
away from potential Alawite strongholds," the
newspaper writes. "The theory runs that the Assad
regime plans to push fearful Sunnis out of the
areas west of Homs and Hama, which both remain
Sunni-majority cities." [2]
However, the
long-term sustainability of such a state is almost
as questionable as the methods that may be
implemented to usher it in. As Joshua Landis
writes in a separate blog post,
Most importantly, an Alawite state
is indefensible. Alawite shabiha (thugs)
and brigades of special forces may fall back to
the Alawite Mountains when Damascus is lost. But
how long could they last? As soon as Syria's
Sunni militias unite, as presumably they will,
they would make hasty work of any remaining
Alawite resistance. Whoever owns Damascus and
the central state will own the rest of Syria in
short order. They will have the money, they will
have legitimacy, and they will have
international support. Syria could not survive
without the coast. More importantly, it would
not accept to do without the coast and the port
cities of Tartus and Latakia. All the coastal
cities remain majority Sunni to this day.
[3]
For now, nevertheless,
Assad seems to have shored up his security
apparatus, badly damaged after the urban offensive
of the rebels and the high-profile terror attack
in Damascus last week. According to most reports,
his forces have largely "secured" the capital
(where a large but unknown number of bodies have
piled up) and are preparing for a decisive
offensive in Aleppo. The use of both helicopters
and fixed-wing aircraft has picked up
significantly, and fighter planes are allegedly
employed heavily in the government
counter-offensive.
Comparisons with Libya
are unavoidable even when diplomats seek to
distance themselves from them. On Thursday, United
States Department of State spokeswoman Victoria
Nuland expressed concern during a press conference
that "we will see a massacre in Aleppo, and that's
what the regime appears to be lining up for".
She rejected references to the situation
in the Libyan city of Benghazi just prior to the
aerial campaign against former Libyan leader
Muammar al-Gaddafi, saying that "There are a vast
number of differences," yet her words suggested
that the differences pertain more to Assad's
military strength and foreign backers, as well as
to the lack of unity among the opposition, than to
the American desire for action. [4]
There
are signs of a new initiative to unite the Syrian
rebels. It is spearheaded by General Manaf Tlass,
dubbed "Syria's most prominent defector," who
abandoned Assad several weeks ago. Tlass is the
scion of a prominent Sunni Muslim family in Syria
which until recently was a key pillar of support
for the regime. His hands, however, are clean in
the current bloodshed, and despite lingering
suspicions against him on the part of the
opposition, he is seen as its potential leader -
perhaps even somebody who could step in for Assad
under a hypothetical internationally-backed deal.
"I will try to help as much as I can to
unite all the honorable people inside and outside
Syria to put together a roadmap to get us out of
this crisis, whether there is a role for me or
not," Tlass told the newspaper Asharq Alawsat on
Thursday during a visit in Saudi Arabia. His
itinerary also reportedly includes Turkey,
suggesting that he is trying to secure the backing
of the Syrian opposition's key regional sponsors.
In any case, however, neither rebel unity
nor a foreign intervention in Syria appear to be
imminent, whereas the decline in rebel momentum
could mirror the failed opposition offensive in
the city of Homs earlier this year, when
speculations that Assad was finished proved
similarly premature.
Meanwhile, the Syrian
regime seems to be implementing a lesson or two of
its own from the Libyan case. Whether or not it
was involved in any of the recent terror attacks
in Bulgaria and elsewhere - Gaddafi also had
threatened Europe with terror - Assad appears
ready to take the fight into his enemies'
territory, for example by allowing greater Kurdish
autonomy in Syria as a way of destabilizing
Turkey.
In the last days, the Syrian army
reportedly withdrew from at least six Kurdish
towns, where a coalition of Kurdish (mostly
political) forces took over. The Syrian Kurds are
split among themselves, and have allegedly vowed
to stay neutral in the civil war, but at least
some of them are allied with Assad and the
Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) which is
responsible for much of the terror activity in
Turkey. The situation in which the PKK would have
a base to operate freely in Syria is unpalatable
to the Turkish leaders, and mirrors Ankara's
treatment of Assad.
The Turkish attempts
in the last months to lure the Kurds by
cultivating a close relationship with Iraq's
Kurdish leadership may not work well in Syria,
where the regime has enjoyed a long relationship
with the PKK. As a Kurdish politician told the web
site Rudaw.net, "The areas where these Kurdish
factions have raised their flags are those Bashar
al-Assad gave to them." [5]
Reportedly,
Western attempts to oust Assad are running aground
also on account of deficient
intelligence-gathering operations. "Interviews
with US and foreign intelligence officials
revealed that the CIA has been unable to establish
a presence in Syria, in contrast with the agency's
prominent role gathering intelligence from inside
Egypt and Libya during revolts in those
countries," the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday.
"With no CIA operatives on the ground in Syria and
only a handful stationed at key border posts, the
agency has been heavily dependent on its
counterparts in Jordan and Turkey and on other
regional allies." [6]
If the report is
accurate, this would be a new illustration of the
saying that the US is playing poker in the Middle
East, while its enemies play chess.
It is
believed that Russia has the most extensive
intelligence network in Syria, greater even than
that of Iran. It would be the most likely culprit
for a palace coup - as one scenario has it - as
well as the best potential broker for a deal for
Assad's voluntary ouster. As a Russian diplomat
hinted last week, Russia may not be opposed to
such a deal. [7] It is important to pay close
attention to Russia's dealings with the Syrian
opposition, as well as with figures such as Manaf
Tlass.
However, even Russia would
presumably need broad support in order to help
usher in a political transition in Syria, and a
consensus seems unlikely in the immediate future.
On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov accused the US of "direct endorsement of
terrorism" [8] in the most recent episode in a
series of heated exchanges.
It appears,
therefore, that conditions are ripe for the Assad
regime to hang on to power for a while longer, and
for the violence to continue to escalate.
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