As Syrian regime forces seized the Khalidiya district of Homs, a remarkable photograph emerged of the beleaguered city. Its ashen buildings resemble Stalingrad, gutted and pocked. Its streets are flattened, grey smears of dust and rubble. Tellingly, there are no people in the picture — and that is how the regime wants it.
The district of Khalidiya, and Homs as a whole, matter less for their inhabitants, who have been liberally gassed and shelled, than for their location. Khalidiya connected the dwindling number of rebel-held districts through a warren of tunnels. Homs itself has the misfortune to stand between Damascus and Alawite-dominated loyalist enclaves on the coast. This is why Bashar Al Assad threw his best divisions and half of his special forces at the city in February last year, and allegedly sarin gas thereafter.
The gradual fall of Homs, coming on the heels of the seizure of Qusayr near the Lebanese border, speaks to both the strengths and limitations of the regime’s strategy: Concentrate elite troops on the axis from the capital to the coast, undertake sectarian cleansing there, dilute forces in the north and east, and employ local militias and foreign forces as auxiliaries. Al Assad is indeed winning where he is fighting. But he is fighting, meaningfully, only in a narrow strip of Syria.
Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, picked his words carefully last week, saying only that the Syrian president “will never rule all of Syria again” — tacit admission that Al Assad will not be budged from his core territory, even as the country crumbles at the edges. Reports of his impending victory are just as misleading as the anticipation, eight months ago, of a rebel sweep.
With ongoing support from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, his forces can eke out and hold victories in western bastions. But a nationwide counter-offensive that takes Syria back to the status quo is logistically and militarily implausible.
The rebels are unlikely to be dislodged from the north-west/south-east axis running from Aleppo, along the Euphrates, to the porous Iraqi border. If the diagnosis is stalemate, what of the prognosis? Depressingly, Syria and its combatants are breaking into pieces at every level, on both sides of the fight, and across the country.
On the rebel side, the fissures are widening. Earlier this month, for example, Al Qaida’s branch in Iraq assassinated a senior commander of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), resulting in fierce clashes between the groups in Aleppo. Frictions between the FSA and Al Qaida’s Syrian wing, Jabhat Al Nusra, are also growing. Jabhat Al Nusra is also locked in a dispute with Al Qaida’s Iraqi branch over an attempted merger.
And another fundamentalist group, Ahrar Al Sham, sits out these particular fights and grows ever stronger.
Confused yet? Consider, also, that these outfits pause from killing each other long enough jointly to battle Kurdish groups in the north who have no intention of giving up their new-found autonomy. Two weeks ago, Kurdish fighters violently expelled Islamist rebels from Ras Al Ain on the Turkish border. The bodies are piling up.
It is tempting to write this off as Life of Brian-esque fratricide between competing Judean fronts, but the long-term effect will be the development of micro-emirates that drift completely out of the orbit of any future national government and become springboards for criminality and terrorism. The influx of foreigners exacerbates this. About 5,000 Sunni fighters from 60 countries have joined the rebellion, making it the second-largest destination for foreign fighters in modern history. (In first place is Eighties Afghanistan, but Syria may soon beat those numbers.)
The implications for Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Israel — not to mention those foreign fighters’ countries of origin, including Britain — could be severe. What is less well understood is that the Syrian regime is also fragmenting. Hezbollah’s military prowess has been crucial to the regime’s recent successes. But less professional foreign volunteers have also entered the fray.
More than 10,000 Shiite fighters, many of them enthusiastic amateurs, have joined groups that purport to defend holy sites such as the Sayyida Zeinab shrine in Damascus against what they see as the Sunni rebels’ depredations. The shrine itself sits between the strategically crucial airport, lifeline to the regime, and Damascus’s centre.
These volunteers therefore serve as a bulwark against rebel advances into the capital. But would they, any more than the jihadists on the other side, respect the terms of any eventual ceasefire, as dim a prospect as that is? To what extent do they take orders from Al Assad’s regime, and to what extent from foreign backers such as Iran?
These factions will survive and fight long after Al Assad is gone, in part as local proxies in a broader contest for influence between Iran and the Saudi-led bloc of Gulf Arab states. Civil wars in this region have a nasty habit of dragging on. In 1991, few could have imagined that British aircraft would continuously fly sorties over Iraq for the next 12 years.
It would be foolish to rule out an American attack, bringing matters to a close, at some point, but this patchwork Syria, torn into fiefdoms, replete with international brigades on both sides, may come to represent the ‘new normal’ in the Levant for a long while yet.
— Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2013
Shashank Joshi is a Research Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.
