The Decay of the Syrian Regime is Much Worse Than You Think

This is long but comprehensive... I think Assad is living in a bubble in Damascus and has zero control over the country. This is an unmitigated disaster.

In a recent interview conducted by Aaron David Miller for Foreign Policy, Robert Malley, one of the president’s most trusted advisors on the Middle East, once again enumerated the competing priorities of U.S. Syria policy: the need to balance humanitarian concerns with the desire to “preserve state institutions” and avoid a power vacuum so that the country does not slide into total anarchy.

Over the past three years in particular, this line of argument has not only been a mainstay those supporting a carefully calibrated, limited U.S. Syria policy in line with the current administration but also by a number of commentators writing both implicitly and explicitly in defense of Damascus. In two revisionist articles published recently at War on the Rocks, an author writing under a pseudonym presents the Assad regime as ruthless, but at least secular, pluralistic and most importantly — as the final basion of civic, central authority in a tumultuous Middle East.

Whereas the indefatigable Emile Hokayem already formulated an eloquent response regarding sectarian dynamics in the Levant, there is an equally important question raised in the piece warrants answering: What’s really left of the Syrian central state?

State of Denial

Following the swift collapse of its forces in the Battle for Idlib last year, President Bashar al-Assad had given a much publicized speech admitting the regime’s armed forces were suffering tremendous manpower shortages and would have to withdraw from certain fronts.

Newspapers had been reporting for many months before of desperate conscription and recruitment efforts around the country. By late July, Assad appeared to crumble under the cumulative weight of years of slow attrition and defection, triggering a combined Russian and Iranian intervention seeking to reverse the regime’s fortunes. By February of this year, analysts inside as well as outside government agreed — they had largely succeeded in their attempt.

Having spent years researching and tracking the regime’s armed forces, I disagree. As far as attempts of estimating regime strengths go, observers suffer from analytical shortcomings. They overemphasize absolute number of soldiers fielded as well as square miles of territory held (less black, more red — less ISIL, more Syria Arab Army!) in favor of softer measures of government reach and control, from economic and governance issues to qualitative differentiation of forces.

As the regime deteriorates, so does its force structure. Yet, if our state-building adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan taught us anything, it was not to fall for the formal trappings of weak state institutions and to ignore color-coded maps informed by faulty metrics. At its heart, a civil war is almost always a dispute over the basic premises of communal life and the institutions that structure it. As such, internal government dynamics are at least as important as battlefield successes and the movement of frontlines.

So unless Syria is soon going to run out of fighting-age males, small arms, or pick-up trucks, we better start paying attention to structural dynamics underpinning a conflict that has now raged for more than five years.

Indeed, after five years of war, the regime’s force structure today is not entirely different from that of opposition militias. While much better supplied by the Syria Arab Army’s still-standing logistics skeleton, the government’s fighting force today consists of a dizzying array of hyper-local militias aligned with various factions, domestic and foreign sponsors, and local warlords.

Aymenn al-Tamimi’s profiles of loyalist militias provide some insight into their diverse backgrounds. Among these groups, only a handful are still capable of anything close to offensive action Much more so than sectarian or demographic limitations, this fragmentation is the direct result of the interaction between national and local economic and governance pressures.

As the once totalitarian Syrian central state atrophies, its constituent parts — be they sectarian, rentierist, or simple brutes — have gained a stunning degree of political and economic independence from Damascus.

Contrary to what others have claimed, Assad’s regime has not struck some grand bargain with a large section the Syria’s urban Sunni population. Instead, he has elevated to power the most brutish elements of the country and doubled down on the sectarian, tribal, and thuggish inclinations of its base.

Today, where briefing maps now show solid red across Syria’s western governorates, they ought to distinguish dozens and perhaps even hundreds of small fiefdoms only nominally loyal to Assad. Indeed, in much of the country, loyalist security forces function like a grand racketeering scheme: simultaneously a cause and consequence of state collapse at the local level.

Crime and Punishment: The Tiger Forces in Hama

Those following the Syrian Civil War closely will be familiar with two mobile formations responsible for most of the regime’s heavy lifting. They are the so-called “Tiger Forces” and the “Desert Hawks” (tracking regime militias has really become an exercise in taxonomy — mostly birds and big cats), currently operating in Aleppo and Latakia respectively.

These units function as a kind of armed fire brigade: rushing across the country, putting out local conflagrations and rebel offensives, while on occasion leading their own offensives. In those cases, and much like the opposition, they assemble a curious collection of local warlords, regime remnants, and foreign support into temporary alliances and operations rooms.

As an introduction to the Tiger Forces, we can turn to Robert Fisk’s fawning account of his “audience with […] Bashar al-Assad’s favorite soldier,” Suheil Hassan, who leads the Tiger Forces. Hassan is an officer of the regime’s feared Air Force Intelligence Directorate.

Besides leading what is said to be the government’s most elite fighting force, he is also thought to be one of the architects of Assad’s scorched earth and barrel-bombing campaign. Hassan enjoys almost cult-like popularity among regime supporters.

The real story of the Tiger Forces is far less glamourous, yet far more instructive to those trying to understand the regime. During the early days of the uprising against Assad, Hassan coordinated the suppression of protests in Hama, an effort that relied on a collection of ordinary thugs, air force officers, and area tribal leaders.

His effectiveness was found in his ability to rally local support rather than depending on the already crumbling state institutions. In due time, this early network of enforcers would evolve into the so-called Tiger Forces. While the unit has since developed a more stable core of permanent quasi-soldiers, Tiger loyalists today still hail from a vast web of militias, criminals, and smugglers stretching across Syria’s central and arguably most strategic province of Hama.

Many of his direct subordinates have become notorious throughout the country for brigandage, smuggling activity, and general lawlessness. Earlier this year, Ali Shelly, a powerful thug from the town of Tell Salhab who is directly responsible to Hassan, pushed his abuses to the point where the regime finally had him arrested and thrown in jail.

However, within days, Shelly was released and returned to the frontline.

Such incidents should be seen as more than mere bureaucratic infighting over corruption. According to interviews I’ve conducted, Hassan loyalist warlords are widely known to smuggle guns, people, and oil to ISIL and opposition territory, directly undermining the regime’s war effort. But the central government has little choice but to look on helplessly.

A report in my possession by the Syrian Arab Army’s provincial security council from last month details a recent instance where Shelly’s forces were caught with truckloads of smuggled weapons hidden underneath bags of wheat. They engaged in a prolonged gun-battle with state security forces. And they suffered no consequences. You might wonder why.

The answer is fairly simple: There is no force loyal to Damascus today that is strong enough bring these brigands in line. A few days later, five military intelligence soldiers were killed in an ambush laid against them on the Shelly gang’s turf in the southern al-Ghab plain. A number of state institutions have been desperately trying to contain the Tiger Forces. There have been persistent rumors that at least one of the multiple assassination attempts against Hassan himself originated in the Military Intelligence headquarters.

The Oil Factor

Besides some residual agriculture, trafficking in fuel, guns, and people has become the dominant form of economic activity throughout much of Syria. And loyalist militias are cashing in.

Armed groups purportedly under Assad’s banner have quickly learned to exploit bottlenecks in the local economy to emancipate themselves from Damascus’ tutelage — particularly when it comes to one of the most fungible of commodities: fuel. In another incident in Hama this summer, Syrian military forces discovered multiple tanker trucks of smuggled petroleum on their way to Islamic State territory.

Fearing retaliation from Talal Dakkak, instead of confiscating and distributing the looted goods as proscribed, the officers quickly handed over the fuel to the local air force intelligence directorate. At that point, according to a local source in Hama, it disappeared once again.

While never a petro state, the sale of oil had accounted for more than 25 percent of pre-war government revenue and was responsible for a significant portion of the country’s foreign exchange reserves. After years of war, the regime’s formal command economy, especially its hydrocarbon sector, has all but collapsed. This summer, Islamic State militants blew up the last major gas facility still operating in the country, exacerbating the already tenuous situation in the country.

Syria’s ever accelerating economic and fiscal tailspin has not only wiped out savings, diminished wages, and thus thrown millions into poverty, but also precipitated a dramatic currency collapse as I have seen from my own collection of black market exchange rates across Syria.

Whereas the effect of inflation on military recruitment has been widely documented, currency depreciation has other secondary effects: At current rates, imports of basic goods have become prohibitively expensive. Meanwhile, the government price controls and producer monopolies have driven local producers into idleness and raised the incentive for smugglers to traffic what few goods enter the country right back across the border.

The resulting price hikes, shortages, and rationing had a debilitating effect across the country, while making some men with the necessary know-how and muscle tremendously wealthy.

Consider for example the Desert Hawks, the regime’s second most important offensive formation and bitter rivals of the Tiger Forces.

This unit was founded by the brothers Mohamed and Aymen Jaber, who personify the rise of smugglers to power. The two had made their first big money as ordinary criminals in the Iraqi oil-for-food smuggling bonanza of the late 1990s and then prudently invested their newfound wealth into state-granted monopolies on the Syrian coast during Bashar’s first privatization wave. In August 2013, under pressure from outside sanctions and rebel advances, Assad signed a decree allowing private businessmen to raise their own militias in defense of their capital assets.

With the stroke of a pen, the regime thus armed its own kleptocrats. Over the next three years, the brothers would run oil convoys and money laundering operations through Iraq and Lebanon, protect oil facilities, and, in the process, build one of the regime’s most formidable fighting formations. While vowing loyalty to Damascus, they are, in practice, independent of Syria’s chain of command, financing, recruitment, and even procurement process.

The Hawks pay up to three times regular army wages, operate private training facilities, and produce their own fighting vehicles. This much independence can lead to friction on the battlefield. During the much publicized Palmyra offensive in March, tensions between the Hawks and other loyalists came to a head, after Jaber accused the Tiger Forces of deliberately firing onto one of his positions, killing nine and wounding two dozen more.

According to multiple sources, including since deleted social media accounts, the militiamen were said to have drawn their guns at Hassan’s men and threatened to depart. In the end, Damascus dispatched a high-ranking delegation to reconcile the warlords and bring the offensive back on track. The units have not shared a frontline since.

Siege economics

Rather than attempt to capture resource monopolies, certain armed groups have taken to making a profit by exploiting the suffering population directly. Consider the town of al-Tall, just north of the capital Damascus. Technically under a truce agreement with the regime, this small opposition community now houses hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people who have fled there from around the capital.

Despite guarantees by the government, local loyalist militias tasked with manning the checkpoints in the area have recently begun leveraging a tax of 100 Syrian Pounds per kilogram on all incoming food products. Even a conservative estimate would put the monthly revenue of such a levy into the millions of U.S. dollars. This is enough to feed and supply the thousands of fighters manning the cordon, as well as their families.

The watchdog group “Siege Watch” has put the number of civilians encircled by regime forces at an additional 850,000 across Syria. In these stricken areas, the cost of living has multiplied, with the difference syphoned off by those manning the bottlenecks.

Put differently, with Damascus nowhere near able to finance and feed the families of loyalist militiamen, the encircling and taxation of civilians has an economic necessity for the regime to keep many of its most important frontline troops supplied and happy.

This is not merely to illustrate the moral evil of the Syrian regime, but to drive home a more important point: With public wages barely enough to feed the conscripts themselves, Assad’s men have long begun feeding off the land and the civilian population.

Today, the larger part of loyalist fighting formations no longer rely on the regime for the majority of their income, equipment, or recruits. While strategically valuable to Assad, it is by no means certain that the regime is fully in control of upholding a number sieges, especially in rural Damascus, Homs, and the Qalamoun mountains.

A local source who moves regularly between Damascus and Ghouta by way of smuggling tunnels, told me of local rebel battalions run by Syrian Arab Army officers. As the country’s economy and governance institutions continue to falter, these “ghosts,” as Syrians colloquially refer to regime-aligned criminals, have come back to haunt those in power.

Despite what color-coded “control” maps show, Bashar al-Assad retains very little meaningful authority over much of the territory he is said to rule. As the war progresses, these dynamics will inevitably lead to divergence of interests among local fighters and the regime, as well as Damascus and its foreign backers.

The Cornered Regime

An incident that occurred in February of this year may serve as an example of what lies ahead. Engaged in heavy clashes with rebel forces near the town of Harbinafsah, militia leader Ahmed Ismail called on his fellow warlord in the neighboring town of Baarin for desperately needed reinforcements. Fadi Qaribish, head of the Baarins armed men, rudely refused the request. The following day, feeling betrayed and with a local ceasefire having taken effect, Ismail turned his guns against Qaribish.

Before long, he was joined by detachments from Hama’s air force intelligence, looking to support their preferred client and squash the insubordinate militant. But Qaribish successfully fought off the combined attack and subsequently established his own checkpoints along the roads in the area, cutting into Ismail’s smuggling routes to the rebel pocket. The regime has not dared bother Baarin since.

Apparently too weak to coerce and too broke to bribe those who fight under its banner, Assad has made efforts to tie his subordinates closer to his Damascus by political means instead. This April’s parliamentary “elections” further indicated the structural transformation of the regime from a centralized state to a loose hodgepodge of warlord.

A number of long-serving Ba’athist rubberstamp bureaucrats and local dignitaries, pillars of the regime’s traditional rentier system, lost their seats in favor of upstart smugglers, militia leaders, and tribal chiefs.

The old guard took note: After results were announced, the supplanted agents of the regime in Hama dispatched an urgent delegation to the capital to warn Assad’s inner circle of the character and disposition of the men they had chosen to elevate. But for lack of alternative, Assad needs to keep these men close by.

Some of these may prove more problematic than others. Assad’s kleptocratic maternal cousins, the brothers Makhlouf, have built a militia network of their own through their Al-Bustan Association, a private foundation, created before the war that funds both humanitarian relief efforts as well as armed groups. This spans the width and breadth of regime-held territory and is carefully kept outside of state control.

At the same time, the Ba’ath party’s earliest political nemesis, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), has reemerged on the scene and already made tremendous inroads among the country’s Orthodox Christian and Druze communities, recruiting for their own growing military wing. Considering the historical role the Makhlouf family played in the SSNP, many in Damascus have cause to worry about centrifugal forces tearing the regime apart even further.

Assad’s foreign sponsors are not much help either. Iran appears perfectly content with the muddled situation on the ground, having put great resources into developing its own client network across the country.

Russia meanwhile, the country arguably most concerned with regime stability, appears to be oblivious to the entire situation. Its officers and soldiers are regularly photographed fighting and fraternizing alongside a wide range of tribal and sectarian militias. In one instance, photos surfaced of Russian soldiers fighting alongside members of the so-called Mountain Battalion, a small Alawite outfit that had made headlines last year when they announced the first ever loyalist suicide squad.

Conclusions

Over the past three years, despite foreign military aid and support, the regime under Assad has continued to atrophy at an ever increasing pace. If these trends continue, the Syrian president will soon find himself little more than a primus inter pares, a symbolic common denominator around which a loose coalition of thieves and fiefdoms can rally.

Thus, with the slow decay of the once powerful state, military, and party establishment, the person of Bashar al-Assad himself has increasingly come to embody the last remaining pillar not of a state but of “the regime” and its brutal war against its own citizens.

The great majority of forces in Syria today, particularly among the regime’s minority supporters, fight an increasingly localized war for the protection of their particular communities. It is only through the continued existence of the regime — personified in Assad — that these defensive goals have been tied to an aggressive, national vision which we know to be unacceptable to a great majority of Syrians, disastrous to its supporters, and militarily unrealistic. While removing the tyrant may spark in-fighting among the surviving warlords, it would likely not mean a collapse of their forces and the slaughter of their villages. Latakia is being protected not by Assad’s largely imaginary “4th Corps” of the Syrian Arab Army, but by Mohamed Jaber and his merry men of the Desert Hawks. If indeed there is no strong bureaucratic and military class left that could salvage and revive the state and if loyalist militants have developed an increasing degree of self-reliance, then the situation is not as Western policymakers assume. Syria’s president has become not only perfectly expendable as guarantor of the state, but ought to be considered the last remaining obstacle to a peace process based on local ceasefires and return to displaced peoples to their home communities.

This makes those calls heard in Western capitals, as well as Moscow, that Syria’s state institutions must be preserved ring hollow. All this suffering — to preserve what precisely?

It is the fiction of a national regime upheld by Assad that drives the worst abuses of this war, that obliges Alawite kids from the coastal mountains and the plains of Hama to fight their own countrymen in distant corners of a country long fractured into smaller fiefdoms beyond the reach of the state. The United States should not be complicit in this pretension. The Syrian state is gone for good. At this point, a quick decapitation might be preferable to a drawn-out implosion.

When Syrians first rose up, they demanded not just the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, but of the “nizam.” Commonly translated as “regime”, it more closely means “system”. Humanitarian suffering, state failure and — yes — terrorism in Syria are not competing concerns that need to be balanced, but symptoms of a singular disease: The mis-rule of Bashar al-Assad and his clients, cronies, and the petty criminals it has elevated to power.



Tobias Schneider is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins SAIS and a freelance defense analyst focused on Middle Eastern militaries. He has spent years, both inside and outside the Levant, closely tracking dynamics among regime and loyalist forces and their allies in Syria.

 

Very informative, thanks.

One has to wonder why it was important to the US, to removed leaders and destabilize nations in the middle east, that took a long time to become stable, regardless of how that stability was achieved. Achieving some stability in an area of the world, with great sectarian division of islam, along with societies driven by the division of tribalism, was not an easy thing. And yet, being aware of this did not seem to inhibit the US from removing leaders, and destabilizing these nations, creating vacuums, and safe havens for our enemy, radical islamists. What we have done indeed looks like a tale told by a madman.

One wonders if it has anything to do with the neocons, in their New American Century, originating in a right wing neocon think tanks? These men had a list of nations to go after, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, with other nations included. Which is exactly what began under Bush Jr, who had several neocons in is administration. It did not seem to matter that some of these nations taken down were the only secular ruled nations in the middle east, muslim nations.

So who in the west, benefitted from taking out leaders, imploding the gov't and destabilizing the middle east? What was worth millions of deaths, and such great treasure of the US being expended by us in the middle east? What was the real reason for spending trillions on these wars, either with our direct involvement, or by us using proxies? It looks to be utter insanity, what we did, and continue to do, but only if you do not know, and understand the real reason. So what exactly is the real reason?

 

This is really pathetic.. Assad has fewer and fewer allies, little control. There doesn't seem to be much left in Syria than poor frightened families and bands of criminals and thugs.

 

I know that we set out for regime change very deliberately in invading Iraq and following that disaster, I think we learned a lesson. But it was too late to stop what our actions set in motion...

I do think that Libya and Egypt were beyond our control.. and Syria has always had military coups, sectarian strife and conflict.

 

Today, where briefing maps now show solid red across Syria’s western governorates, they ought to distinguish dozens and perhaps even hundreds of small fiefdoms only nominally loyal to Assad.

Indeed, in much of the country, loyalist security forces function like a grand racketeering scheme: simultaneously a cause and consequence of state collapse at the local level.

 

I forgot the link

http://warontherocks.com/2016/08/the-decay-of-the-syrian-regime-is-much-worse-than-you-think/

 

Every other week or month, we get to read some western propaganda about how Assad is on the brink of destruction.

 

The author, Tobias Schneider, is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins SAIS and a freelance defense analyst focused on Middle Eastern militaries. He has spent years, both inside and outside the Levant, closely tracking dynamics among regime and loyalist forces and their allies in Syria.

 

And, yet, he will be proven wrong, just like all the other "experts" who have been telling the world that Assad is on the brink of destruction for the past five years.

A year from now, when Assad is still the head of the Syrian government, you will probably be posting another one of these "expert" analyses telling us that Assad is about to lose.

 

Russia can't afford to keep this up. They are broke.

Putin Says Russia and U.S. Close to Breakthrough Deal on Syria

Vladimir Putin said Russia and the U.S. are close to striking a deal on fighting terrorists in Syria, potentially a major step toward ending a civil war that’s flooded Europe with refugees and helped give rise to Islamic State.



Putin Says Russia and U.S. Close to Breakthrough Deal on Syria

September 2, 2016 — 5:30 AM EDT

Updated on September 2, 2016 — 7:19 AM EDT

in Vladivostok, Russia, on Thursday, Sept. 1, 2016
Vladimir Putin said Russia and the U.S. are close to striking a deal on fighting terrorists in Syria, potentially a major step toward ending a civil war that’s flooded Europe with refugees and helped give rise to Islamic State.

“We’re gradually, gradually heading in the right direction,” the Russian president said in an interview Thursday in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok. “I don’t rule out that we’ll be able to agree on something in the near future and present our agreements to the international community.”

Putin, a dogged critic of U.S. foreign policy, had praise for Secretary of State John Kerry, whose “patience and determination’’ in pushing for an accord before President Barack Obama leaves office next year have made a deal possible. Russia and NATO member Turkey, a key backer of some rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, are also aligning their interests in the conflict, he said.

continued

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...a-and-u-s-close-to-breakthrough-deal-on-syria

 

Margot telling everyone that Assad is on the brink of destruction reminds me of litwin telling everyone that Russia invaded Ukraine.

Every other week, he would post a new thread about how Russia had invaded Ukraine.

According to litwin, Russia must have invaded Ukraine over a hundred times in one year.

And how long has Margot been telling us that Assad is about to lose? Dozens of times over the past five years?

I guess this time will be different?

 

There is no "Syrian government" anymore.

 

Assad is delusional.

The Syrian government has launched an offensive to get tourists to its "always beautiful" country in the midst of a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and laid waste to major cities.

The tourism board kicks off its campaign with a swanky video showing panoramic shots of beaches in Tartus, close to the protection of Russia's permanent naval base, and holidaymakers swimming and jet-skiing off Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

continued

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/s...oes-offensive-bid-attract-tourists-1542119416

[video]https://youtu.be/saXH4yQARqg[/video]

 

Of course there is. They're in control of most of Syria's western coast.



And they aren't going anywhere, despite your repeated insistence to the contrary.

Not as delusional as the people who keep telling us he is about to lose.

 

When FSA personnel arrest government fighters, they find that they are wearing the official uniform of the Syrian army but cannot speak Arabic.

They are Afghans, Pakistanis, Indians, Koreans and Iranians. This is not to mention those who came from Iraq and Lebanon as well as some Shi’ite militants from the Gulf.

- - - Updated - - -

When FSA personnel arrest government fighters, they find that they are wearing the official uniform of the Syrian army but cannot speak Arabic.

They are Afghans, Pakistanis, Indians, Koreans and Iranians. This is not to mention those who came from Iraq and Lebanon as well as some Shi’ite militants from the Gulf.

- - - Updated - - -

When FSA personnel arrest government fighters, they find that they are wearing the official uniform of the Syrian army but cannot speak Arabic.

They are Afghans, Pakistanis, Indians, Koreans and Iranians. This is not to mention those who came from Iraq and Lebanon as well as some Shi’ite militants from the Gulf.

- - - Updated - - -

When FSA personnel arrest government fighters, they find that they are wearing the official uniform of the Syrian army but cannot speak Arabic.

They are Afghans, Pakistanis, Indians, Koreans and Iranians. This is not to mention those who came from Iraq and Lebanon as well as some Shi’ite militants from the Gulf.

 

Regime change, Hillary style.

 

The US had nothing to do with the civil war in Syria.. Assad started shooting pro-democracy protesters and 10,000 Sunni conscripts in the Syrian Army defected.

 

Bwahahahaha! You are joking right? How about arming the rebels?

US arms shipment to Syrian rebels detailed

http://www.militarytimes.com/story/...say-if-us-troops-were-injured-syria/86229202/

This is regime change Hillary style baby!

 

Stop lying.

How does Saudi Arabia deal with pro-democracy protesters? Is there even such a thing as protesters in Saudi Arabia?

 

Margot, Hoosier is right, and you are partially right.

The U.S. did choose a side and dictated that Assad had to go. And, the U.S. did arm and train rebels. We know that the Saudis also had a hand in it. You are right that Assad starting shooting pro-democracy demonstrators, but we will never know what would have happened if the U.S. had just stated its neutrality with regard to this internal Syrian matter, and if the U.S. hadn't sided with, armed, or trained anyone. We will never know how many of those Sunni conscripts would have defected if it weren't for the support rendered to the rebels' cause by the U.S. The U.S. has amply demonstrated the power it possesses in recent years, and so I suspect that U.S. support emboldened those defectors and rebels.

Maybe things would have turned out as they are, but we will never know now. What bothers me is what I've said before .... Now, we own it.

But I am one American citizen who doesn't want to own it.

The article you posted was interesting. But what it tells me - what it confirms to me - is that I don't want to own it. My belief - and I've said this before - is that the future of that country is bleak. I could see this war continuing for a long, long, long time with or without Assad. I fear that as bad as it has been, the worst is yet to come. I think that is a realistic fear. I did not want, I do not want, and I will not want my country having anything to do with it. But what I want is not what has come to pass. We own it now, thanks to our morons in Washington. ... *shakes head sadly* Morons ....

My two cents ....

 

How can anyone know for sure if Assad did shoot protesters, or if it's just more propaganda by Washington's ministers of propaganda... like for instance the non existent hospitals that were bombed by Russia in Syria, or the false flag shooting at Maidan in Ukraine?

There is a recording of the President of Estonia telling Ashton that the bullets that killed the protesters at Maidan came from the same gun as the one that killed the police.

 

To Ethereal, yer probably right, Assad is a survivor. I will say this though. I regularly throw blasts and challenges at Margot but with due respect the author she quotes is quite accurate and tries to avoid partisan comments in his essays.

Ok I admit though, I respect Schneider so I am biased, I admit that.

Back to the debate or discussion, you must admit what ever side of the coin you are on, Assad is in a bubble and has been for years.

Bashir (Baby) Assad, the English trained eye surgeon turned dictator is surrounded by a clique of Alawite generals in a sea of hostility. He has survived by at one point playing up to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, then the US, now Russia and always from the get go Iran.

Bashir Assad like his father lost control of Syria years ago. Physically there are just too many mountains for a regular army to occupy. At best he can move his troops from a town to another town but he can't set up permanent supply lines pretty much the same problem as happens in Afghaniistan.

No one can win a war in Syria on the ground. Too many mountains. To many sects or interest groups each with a leader controlling his area of cliffs and mountains. You can occupy major cities but the towns and villages remain self ruled autonomous regimes.

Assad has always lived in a very small enclave in Damascus unable to travel his country and is widely despised for what is considered his
strange vampire like appearance, tiny head, long neck and fancy suits in a country of poor ill fitting clothes and starving people.

At best the Russians have delayed the inevitable, his death by propping him. Obama blew it in Syria and Putin moved in. Obama totally manhandled Putin's declarations of interest in Syria like he did Crimea.

Eventually Putin will sell Assad out. He only props him now because it s in Russia's interest to have a naval port in Syria.

My worry is Syria is creating millions of refugees which is creating serious negative economic consequences to Jordan and Turkey and Europe.

My worry is Syria could easily trigger a world war by accident.

 

Excellent post.

 

`
None of your opinions changes the fact that a) the US doesn't belong in Syria, b) the US being in Syria has protracted and enlarged this war which because of Obama's interference, is turning into a civilian massacre c) that the US and Saud have oil and gas business interests in deposing Assad and d) Obama and his allies created these refugees.

 

There used to be a pipeline from Ghawar to Sidon. It passed thru Syria and it cost a great deal of money. However it was always subject to sabotage.

Qatar and Saudi Arabia know that.. Minority governments are always unstable.