WORLD_ SYRIA_ Syria edges towards partition

GULF NEWS

Syria edges towards partition

Al Assad has been losing ground recently to rebels in the south and north and Daesh in the east

Published: 03:39 June 25, 2015 Gulf News
By David Garner, Financial Times

On a visit to Syria early this month, Major General Qassem Sulaimani, commander of the Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s external strike force, promised a surprise. “The world will be surprised by what we and the Syrian military leadership are preparing for in coming days,” he said enigmatically.

While the meaning of this runic bravado has still to be revealed, it is well known what Gen Sulaimani does for a living. He is the man who, along with the Iran-backed Lebanese paramilitaries of Hezbollah, two years ago constructed a nationwide militia network that all but saved the embattled minority regime of Bashar Al Assad, when it looked vulnerable to mainly Sunni rebels. This is a formula he is repeating with Shiite militia in Iraq to insulate Baghdad from Daesh.

But in recent months, Al Assad forces have started losing ground again - to Daesh in central and eastern Syria, and to a rival Islamist alliance in the north and mainstream Sunni rebels in the south. Syrian Kurdish fighters, meanwhile, have inflicted a string of defeats on Daesh to strengthen their grip on the northeast of the country. What is left of the Syrian army, severely depleted after four years of civil war, looks to be pulling back to defensive lines - reinforced by the IRGC and Hezbollah.

The regime still holds Damascus, but the capital could soon be threatened from the south, where rebels are poised to capture Daraa on the border with Jordan. They have already taken a neighbouring military base while the government has reportedly evacuated its administration from the city - which is what it did before the northern city of Idlib fell in March. Another rebel group, furthermore, maintains a strong position in the eastern reaches of Damascus.

North of the capital, Hezbollah has been fighting for six weeks to clear rebels out of the Qalamoun mountains that bestride the Lebanese border with Syria, not just to protect Lebanon but to secure the road from Damascus through Homs to the northwest coast and the mountainous heartland of the Alawite sect to which Al Assad belongs.

There, the main change in recent weeks is the arrival in the coastal city of Latakia of IRGC and Hezbollah forces, according to knowledgeable Arab sources. These combined reinforcements already number 3,000, they say, with another, more mixed militia force of about 1,500 north of Latakia. Tehran, they add, is organising an ongoing air bridge into the enclave. If this is Gen Sulaimani’s surprise then - given the Al Assad regime’s chronic manpower shortage - it was sort of anticipated. Already, by early May, well-placed Arab and European sources were reporting significant inflows of IRGC and Hezbollah fighters. As Mr Assad’s rump state shrinks further, his near total dependence on Iran and its auxiliaries has never been clearer. What seems to be hardening, though, is the pattern of de facto partition emerging in Syria - just as it is in Iraq.

The Iraqi state was shattered after the US-led occupation gave way to increasingly sectarian leaders from the Shiite majority who alienated already largely self-governing Kurds and the Sunni minority pushed aside with the toppling of Saddam Hussain.

But the Al Assad regime played a part in this too. It funnelled Sunni extremists into Iraq after the US invasion of 2003 - using the same routes they now use back into Syria. From the beginning of what began as a civic uprising against tyranny in 2011, Damascus has been peddling the plaintive story that it was up against Al Qaida. From the outset, too, the regime has used sectarian scare tactics to hold its thinning ranks together. That Syria then became a magnet for extremists was a self-fulfilling prophecy brought about by the Al Assad regime’s recourse to sectarianism and savagery. An estimated 250,000 have been killed on both sides, and tens of thousands more have died subject to starvation or denied access to medical care. Half the population has been displaced and vast swaths of cities such as Homs and Aleppo have been razed. As Syria fragments, could this suffering be nearing its end?

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