The devastating Syrian civil war entered its fourth year a few days ago with the death toll at 146,000 lives, according to a Syrian human rights body. At least one third of the dead have been civilians.

However, despite the duration of this war, there have been no serious indications regarding its end after efforts made in Geneva 1 and 2 conferences failed. The UN and Arab League envoy Lakhdar Al Brahimi has now started searching for new tools to aid his failing efforts.

I find it essential to examine this war and its implications, and to try to assess the reason behind its continuation, and the opposition’s failure in maintaining the strength it possessed when it first started. The Syrian regime has preserved its strength and unity while the opposition failed in uniting its ranks. In fact, it became more divided.

The revolution was transformed gradually from protests and demands regarding political, economic and social issues to a wide struggle with ethnic and sectarian fallouts. The regime’s allies demonstrated a significant commitment, as they embraced and defended it politically, diplomatically and militarily. This did not happen for the opposition, which was exposed to the pressures of the countries that provide aid in order to have a presence and role in the formulation of policy decisions.

The matter did not stop at this point as sponsoring countries started to be exposed to severe pressure from the US to ration assistance or place restrictions on their continuation.

Meanwhile, the West, led by the US is suffering from the problems that resulted due to its intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and has started considering seriously change in Syria, and the burden it will impose. This is especially as the Arab Spring offers more evidence that new regimes do not have ability to survive.

The Arab system has proven its inability in dealing with the Syrian issue with its consequences and repercussions at the human level in a remarkable way.

Compounding distrust of the West

International organisations, especially the UN Security Council, have failed to take appropriate and fair decisions for the Syrian people on the one hand, and failed to put the coordinated decisions taken by it into effect on the other hand.

The Council also failed to address the consequences of this war that destroyed many issues related to human rights. Another feature of this conflict was the influx of foreign fighters, as individuals and factions who fought both alongside the Syrian government and against it.

Some of these groups are classified as terrorist organisations who fought at the beginning with the Free Syrian Army, and later turned to combat it and impose its agenda on areas that had submitted to its authority.

This compounded the West’s distrust over the future of the conflict in Syria and badly hurt the tactical advantages of the opposition. Both sides haven’t been able to achieve distinct field accomplishments, which prompt them to inflate the value of triumphs of secondary importance to the media in the psychological war between the two parties.

The Syrian regime also took advantage of the circumstances of the fall of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, which continued to decline against the pressure of the street.

The regime preferred following the iron grip model adopted by the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, hence, the Syrian regime did not pay importance to the slogans of freedom and human rights, and took advantage of the presence of powerful allies regionally and internationally to the exact opposite of the isolation, which surrounded Gaddafi.

There is a growing conviction in the West that President Bashar Al Assad’s regime through its violent actions is sowing the seeds of its collapse. The military operations carried out by the regime are undermining the country and destroying the community bonds without achieving any success in eliminating the revolution.

Syrian cities have been reduced to rubble and ruins and the Syrian people have become refugees inside and outside the country.

The escalation of military operations has not given the regime a better chance to win, and it is not expected to do so, especially as the international situation continues to reject its existence as long as it does not change its methods.

There are many scenarios circulated by the media regarding the future of the ongoing war in Syria, along with the government model that may be applied after the war ends there.

The most realistic scenario is the one that predicts that the war will continue for many years to come and will deplete the capabilities of terrorist organisations and the Syrian people alike after Syria has been transformed to a field for settling regional accounts.

Resolving the Syrian issue in favour of the opposition redraws political and military balances in the region and eliminates the chances of success for some of the regional expansion projects, which some forces were keen to develop and adopt to support the Syrian regime and prevent its collapse

The Syrian issue is no longer an internal conflict nor does it represent a regional struggle, for it has been transformed into an international problem by major powers by arm-twisting tactics. This is especially true after Russia took over the Crimean peninsula and which may led the West and the US to justify retaliating strongly in another location — that location may well be Syria.

Dr Mohammad Akef Jamal is an Iraqi writer based in Dubai.