Washington: The former US envoy for Syria has said that it was likely that President Bashar Al Assad of Syria would remain in power for the “medium term” and that a year from now the country would still be under the control of competing factions.

“It is hard to imagine that [Al] Assad is going in the short term, and even in the medium term, to lose control of the area between Aleppo south to Damascus and then over to the coast,” said the diplomat, Robert S. Ford.

“He will control that area — geographically it is maybe a fourth of the country,” Ford added. “But the other three-quarters will be under the control of different armed elements or contested among different armed elements.”

Ford served as the US ambassador to Syria and as the senior diplomat working with the Syrian opposition. He retired from the State Department last month and his speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on Thursday was one of the first since he left government.

Ford’s assessment was starkly different from one the Obama administration presented as recently as last year, when it insisted that Al Assad’s days were numbered and that he was losing a battle of attrition with the moderate opposition.

Ford said there were three reasons Assad has been able to hang on to power. First, Ford said, the Syrian opposition had been unable to assure the Alawite minority that it would not be threatened by Al Assad’s overthrow. “First and foremost,” Ford said, the Syrian opposition “has been very unsuccessful at explaining an agenda that would not threaten the communities that are the pillars of support for the regime, first and foremost the Alawite community.” Al Assad himself is an Alawite.

Another factor that has helped Al Assad’s prospects was “Iranian and Russian financing and huge amounts of arms coming from both Russia and Iran.” Tehran’s decision to encourage Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, and Iraqi Shiite fighters to join the fray has also provided the Syrian government with badly needed manpower, Ford said.

The third factor, Ford said, was that the Al Assad government had a “certain unity and coherence, which is lacking on the opposition side.”

Ford appeared to hold out little hope that diplomacy could resolve the crisis anytime soon. The Syrian government, he said, was not interested in negotiating the establishment of a transitional administration that could govern the country if Al Assad yielded power. Nor, he added, had the United States had any serious negotiations over the Syria crisis with Tehran.

“We have not had a serious discussion with the Iranians ever, to my knowledge,” he said.

Ford was cautious in describing military options to increase the pressure on the Al Assad government to negotiate a political settlement, adding that the “the president has never taken that completely off the table.”

Asked what he thought Syria might look like a year from now, he said it would probably be “more and more cantonized” and a “patchwork” controlled by competing factions.

“I wish I could say, ‘Oh, I think we will have a solution by then,’ but I don’t see anything quick on the horizon,” he said. “I see no sign that the regional backers of the regime or the regional backers of the opposition are prepared to stand down.”

Ford is not the only current or former official to acknowledge Al Assad’s improved military position. In February, the top US intelligence official told Congress that Al Assad’s hold on power was strengthened after he agreed to get rid of his chemical weapons arsenal and the White House shelved plans for a cruise missile attack.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to recognise Assad’s tenacity on the battlefield in remarks to group of university students.

“Whether they win, don’t win, they can’t regain legitimacy,” said Kerry, who argued that the Syrian leader would face armed opposition as long as he sought to hold power.