SLATE COUMN: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has played a weak hand so well for so long that it seems foolhardy to bet against him. Even as he’s lost control over a significant portion of his territory and presided over the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century, he’s kept his core supporters in line and remains in office years after most Mideast watchers thought he only had months left in power. He called Barack Obama’s bluff by using chemical weapons and managed to avoid intervention by giving them up. By either directly or tacitly fostering the rise of ISIS, he’s taken international attention off his own violence to the point that the U.S. seemed on the verge, just a few months ago, of admitting he would stay in power. All the while, he’s continued to terrorize the people of Syria with barrel bombs and chemical weapons.
But for the first time in a long time, recent developments seem not so great for Assad. This week, rebel groups are pushing into the Sahl al-Ghab plain in northwest Syria, an area that, as Reuters puts it, is “crucial to the defense of the coastal mountains that are the heartland of Assad’s Alawite sect.” This follows fighting in May in which government forces lost most of northwestern Idlib province to fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra. Assad admitted on Sunday that his military is short on manpower and will have to pull back from some strategically important areas.
It’s also bad news for Assad that Turkey and the United tates now seem to be on the same page when it comes to Syria. While the U.S. has been primarily focused on ISIS in Iraq, with the training of anti-Assad rebels in Syria relegated to the backburner, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has remained committed to Assad’s ouster. The agreement between the two governments reached last week is primarily focused on ISIS, but it also includes a plan to create a 60-mile-long “safe zone” across the Turkey-Syria border for “relatively moderate” rebels—meaning those who are not affiliated with ISIS and at least not openly affiliated with al-Qaida— and displaced Syrian civilians. This comes very close to the “no-fly zone” Turkey has advocated for years, though the U.S. is reluctant to call it that. Whatever it’s called, it’s bad news for the Syrian military—the only fighting force in the country with an air force… (more)
EDITOR: We should be careful about why we wish.
