Several days after the United Nations ended its observer mission in the country in failure, the killing in Syria continues unabated - 200 dead Wednesday, 100 Thursday, over 20,000 in total since last year (at least 18,000, according to conservative UN estimates). Though the Syrian army boasts achievements such as the capture of three predominantly Christian neighborhoods in the main commercial hub Aleppo on Thursday, clashes both there and in the capital Damascus - two key battlegrounds - continue for over a month now.
By all accounts, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in serious trouble - confirmation of this is found, among other places, in a statement by his vice-prime minister who suggested on Tuesday that the regime would be willing to discuss Assad's resignation. The Syrian president is facing extreme pressure on all fronts - even his closest international allies such as Russia and Iran have hinted that they could reconcile themselves to his downfall under certain conditions.
Yet Assad's rule is not quite over yet, and his current overtures toward the exit are unlikely to prove more than tricks designed to win time. Meanwhile, he seems hell-bent on exporting the conflict to his neighbors - if not Israel for now, which is known to have little patience for such adventures, then at least Lebanon and Turkey - in hopes of demonstrating to his enemies just how much trouble he is capable of stirring.
It would appear that he was inspired to do this in part by studying the downfall of Libya's former dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who put up a tough fight inside his country but failed to take any of it to his enemies' territory, thus greatly reducing his chances of survival. Both Lebanon and Turkey serve as key bases for resupply of the Syrian rebels.
In any case, clashes between Sunni Muslims and Alawites - members of the same religious sect to which Assad belongs - in the Lebanese city of Tripoli claimed at least 13 dead and 100 wounded this week, and so far the Lebanese army has been unable to impose a ceasefire. In separate incidents last week, around 50 Syrians were kidnapped in Lebanon by Shi'ite clans whose members had in turn been abducted in Syria by elements of the Free Syrian Army.
The situation in Lebanon has been particularly tense since a prominent Lebanese politician and ally of Assad, Michel Samaha (a former minister of information), was arrested with explosives and charged with plotting to destabilize the country earlier this month. According to a number of authoritative reports, the evidence against him is substantial.
It seems that, as a pro-Western member of the Lebanese parliament who barely escaped an assassination attempt recently told The New York Times, "Assad is trying to say to the world, when Syria is destabilized, the region will be, too ... It's him asking: Are you capable of handling this regional chaos? And if you're not, protect my regime."
Over to Syria's north, Turkey is also pointing a finger at both Damascus and its patron, Tehran, for a bombing near a police station in the city of Gaziantep on Monday which killed nine and wounded over 60 [1]. A convoluted intrigue is emerging around the Kurdish issue between Syrians, Turks, Iraqis, and Iranians (incidentally the four regional countries with significant Kurdish populations). A recent discussion on the blog of the prominent Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, Joshua Landis, captures the complexities of this issue.
The Syrian regime has long been a patron of the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which has waged a violent low-intensity campaign against Turkey for decades). Recently, it has let the PYD, a Kurdish organization that is closely related to the PKK, take over a number of Syrian cities in the north. As Landis put it, "Assad's Kurdish strategy appears to be to help the PKK to take control of the Kurdish regions of Syria in the North East. His aim is to hurt both the Free Syrian Army and Turkey, which are leading the opposition against him. In general, his strategy is to weaken the Sunni Arabs of Syria." [2]
Iran is helping Assad; Turkey, on the other hand, has been trying to leverage its relationship with Iraq's Kurds and to set up a parallel Kurdish organization in Syria, the Kurdish National Council (KNC), in order to rally the anti-Assad elements among the Kurds and to neutralize the PKK in the country. It has not been very successful: the KNC remains fairly disorganized and marginalized, much like the Syrian opposition as a whole.
The role of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in this set-up is the least clear of all, and he could prove to be the wild card. Maliki, a Shi'ite, is engaged in power struggles with both Sunni Arab groups and with Massoud Barzani, the president of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. He is widely perceived as a close ally of Iran and of Assad, but whether he sees eye-to-eye with them on the Kurdish issue is uncertain.
In an exchange published on the Syria Comment blog, an anonymous "Iraq intelligence specialist" challenges Landis' analysis:
I was reading your post on Syrian Kurdistan and noted that you judged that the regional Shia will probably support Syrian Kurdish aspirations. I think this will not be the case for the Iraqi Shia parties. ... [I[f Barzani and the KRG were able to jump Iraq's borders and become part of a broader regional Kurdish alliance, it would be a disaster for the Malikiyoun. So Baghdad is going to have to walk a very fine line where Syria's Kurds are concerned: they can't denounce Bashar's strategy of giving the PYD control of Kurdish areas, but neither can they countenance an autonomous, free-floating Syrian Kurdistan that could someday join up with Barzanistan ...Landis responds, essentially, that this is a legitimate concern for Maliki, but that the Iraqi prime minister may not be as worried about the Kurds in the long term as he is about the Sunni Arabs in his country. In the short term, moreover, a PKK domination of the Syrian Kurdish arena could hurt Barzani's strategic relationship with Turkey:
If he [Maliki] can hurt Barzani by forcing him to link up with the PKK, he will ruin Barzani's delicate understanding with the Turks. Should the PKK come out the winner in Eastern Syria, rather than the more moderate KNC, Barzani will be forced into a very difficult and embarrassing position. He will have to chose between his fellow Kurds in Syria, led by the PKK , and Turkey. For this reason, I suspect that Prime Minister Maliki will devilishly refuse to stand in the way of the PKK in Syrian Kurdistan in order to scuttle Iraqi Kurdistan's pro-Turkish gambit and saddle Barzani with a "terrorist" partner. [3]The Kurdish issue is a major thorn in the Turkish side, and if Landis is right about Maliki's calculations, with his help Assad could unravel years of Ankara's efforts to court the Iraqi Kurds. Besides, other minorities in Turkey, such as Turkish Alawites and Alevis (another off-shoot of Shi'ite Islam), are reportedly sympathetic toward Assad and could cause trouble if Ankara decides to intervene more forcefully in its southern neighbor.
All this comes amid a new round of saber-rattling by the United States, whose President Barack Obama issued a harsh warning to Assad that any use - or even moving around - of chemical weapons would cross a "red line" and would prompt an American intervention in Syria. According to several reports, the Pentagon's preparations for such a scenario have reached advanced stages, with "small teams of special operations troops" on stand-by.
This rhetoric has echoes of former US president George W Bush's campaign against Iraq in 2003 (which was initially billed as an operation against weapons of mass destruction), as Russia and China were quick to point out. Russia, in particular, publicly assured Obama that Assad had no intention of using his chemical stockpiles, and used the occasion also to preach against repeating the Libyan scenario of last year. In the course of the debates, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly likened the UN resolution which authorized the international campaign against former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to "medieval calls for crusades".
However, despite their unwavering public support for Assad - or perhaps precisely because of it - the Russians are clearly nervous. This is evidenced, for example, by reports in the Russian press that Russian military personnel in the naval base near the Syrian city of Tartus is prepared for imminent evacuation. (Tartus is the only Russian naval base on the Mediterranean and a major reason for Russia's support for Assad.)
Moreover, Putin's reference to the crusades can be seen as a belated attempt to woo Sunni Muslim sensitivities, which have started to turn against Russia due to the Kremlin's support of the Syrian regime.
Most importantly, despite Assad's military ability to hold out for now, his long-term prospects if facing a hostile majority of the Syrian population are bleak. Without financial injections from his foreign friends - some of whom, such as the Iranians, are feeling the pressure of international sanctions themselves - Assad could hardly keep the Syrian economy afloat for more than a few months.
Militarily, too, the situation is far from great for his regime. After a Syrian fighter plane was shot down by the rebels last week - Damascus claims it crashed due to a technical malfunction - even Syrian aircraft have reportedly started to undertake evasive maneuvers when approaching rebel targets. (The American-based intelligence analysis organization Stratfor speculates that this may be the reason for a Syrian incursion into Iraqi air space on Thursday.)
On the ground, meanwhile, large swathes of the countryside are in rebel hands, and the Syrian army faces significant challenges when trying to move even armored forces around (as evidenced also by the increased reliance on air power).
Not to mention that the damage to Assad's inner circle sustained by the July 18 bombing in Damascus was apparently greater than initially acknowledged, and may take longer to repair than anticipated.
Recent reports claim, for example, that the president's infamous brother, Maher Assad, commander of the feared Fourth Division of the Syrian army, was incapacitated or even killed in the attack. (Incidentally, I had reported on an attempt to poison high-ranking officials and speculated on these pages that a major decapitation attack might happen some time before it did. See Syrian violence invites foreign intervention, Asia Times Online, June 12, 2012).
While there has been no confirmation of Maher's condition, other reports note his and his troops' absence from key battle grounds such as Aleppo.[4]
Given this and the growing international momentum against him - specifically the American threats in the last days - it makes sense for Assad to swallow his pride and offer to discuss his resignation in order to win time. If he can start negotiating, he would be able to regroup, rehabilitate his forces, and wait for regional dynamics to turn against his enemies. Many analysts have described Lebanon, which endured a long civil war in the 1970s and 80s, as a tinderbox waiting for a match, and even Turkey, which has enjoyed relative overall stability in the last decades, is far from safe.
Given the lawlessness that has taken hold in much of Syria and the increasing presence among the rebels of foreign jihadists ranging from Afghanis to Libyans to Iraqis to Chechen rebels (to name a few nationalities), hardly anyone in the neighborhood is safe. Even more distant countries such as Russia are looking on nervously.
It is highly doubtful whether Assad's tricks can save his rule in the long run. For now, however, despite the regime weakening by the day, there is hardly an end in sight for the bloodshed - and even should he depart, bloody conflict in the country will not necessarily end.
Asia Times
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