Street demonstrations to bring an end to the Assad family’s 42-year rule over Syria have turned into a bloody conflict, now in its 15th month, between one of the Middle East’s best-equipped fighting forces and a growing insurgency of protesters and militia largely comprised of government soldiers who defected in support of the armed rebellion. How much longer this conflict – and President Bashar al-Assad as its apparent cause - will last is a question pondered by many today, but not easily answered.
The success of the rebels’ guerilla tactics against Assad’s larger and more formidable military and security forces have surprised many experts. Observers following by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other rebel militias have discovered new leadership among these disparate fighting units. Given the situation on the ground, they wonder not only who will win, but how long the conflict will last.
“If you look at the battlefield, Bashar [al-Assad] is not president of all of Syria anymore, because he has lost control of so much of Syria, even his own suburbs,” said Ken Katzman, a Middle East Affairs specialist with the , in an interview this week with
“Even without foreign intervention, these rebels are making significant progress,” said Katzman. He cautioned, however, that he does not believe that FSA units are “about to march on the presidential palace.”
The rebels’ success is not assured, but even if they did win, some say Syria would suffer a power vacuum and be entrenched in internal strife for years to come.
“Any expectation of a short-term outcome, for example, an escalation with Turkey or the Assad regime being somehow magically whisked away through force or a political outcome doesn’t change the reality of the underlying social, economic political and communal pressures…” said of the ,
A diplomatic solution to Syria’s crisis may be remote. It remains to be seen if Assad, who has all but ignored a six-point peace plan put forward by joint U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, will honor his to end the violence less than three weeks before the mandate of 300 U.N. monitors in Syria is set to expire. Even Russia agreeing recently in Geneva to an toward the formation of a “transition government” in which Assad would play a role offers no end to the fighting as Syrian opposition leaders have unanimously rejected the agreement.
The first 15 months of the conflict, according to some sources, have resulted in more than – mostly civilians. Thousands more have been detained and tortured, according to a released July 3. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports an average of a 100 killings in Syria per day.
Military offensives on both sides are changing the strategic landscape of Syria daily. The government’s heavy weapons have destroyed rebel-held neighborhoods in at least a half dozen cities with rebel forces fading into the countryside only to return and attempting to reclaim positions lost.
, author of ”,” a report released in mid-June by the , writes that the Assad regime “retains the capacity to clear whatever it chooses through the use of overwhelming firepower” but did little in the first year of the conflict to try to capture and hold several urban rebel strongholds. In major engagements over the past few weeks, Assad’s security forces have retaken three urban centers – Idlib, Homs and Zabadani – and established large military garrisons for their defense. However, Holliday added that the regime does not have the forces necessary to pursue rebel divisions that now prosper in the countryside.
“Neither side has the strength to defeat the other,” Holliday writes.
Holliday’s report provides a graphic look at the positions of rebel forces listing political and military structures of the opposition inside Syria, as well as the names of leaders and battalion strengths of military councils in Homs, Hama, Deraa and Idlib. A map identifies enclaves in rural areas within striking distance of all major cities along the Route M5 corridor that links all major inland population centers along a western corridor from Lebanon to Turkey, including Damascus, the capital, and the major commercial city of Aleppo.
Nerguizian said the Holliday report “is accurate to the point that you have an Assad regime which has largely failed in implementing a security response over the early months of 2012.” The regime tried to retake the rebel-held rural areas around Aleppo and Idlib, but “those have been largely unsuccessful efforts so far,” he said.