Advantage Assad After Five Years of War in Syria
After five years of war and a quarter-million dead, President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies now have the upper hand in Syria, and they’re seeking to drive home a growing battlefield advantage rather than negotiate.
In the past week, the United Nations has tried to get peace talks under way in Geneva, and European leaders met in London to seek ways to halt a refugee influx that’s creating political havoc across the continent. But those events looked like sideshows to the action unfolding in northern Syria, where Assad’s forces -- backed by pro-Iranian fighters and Russian planes -- are moving closer to winning the most decisive victory of the war by recapturing Aleppo.
Gains by Assad and his allies in the past month have squeezed overland supply lines to Turkey that may represent the last bulwark against defeat for the rebels in northern Syria. Tens of thousands of refugees have already fled toward Turkey, which is hosting German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday to discuss the crisis. To the west, another opposition stronghold in Idlib is also under threat from government forces.
Russian air power is “allowing Assad forces to advance against previously formidable foes,” said Jennifer Cafarella, Syria analyst at the Washington-based Institute for Study of War. “The regime has achieved a decisive advantage in Aleppo.”
That doesn’t mean the war is over, or even likely to end anytime soon. Syria has already witnessed sieges that lasted years. Also, Islamic State still holds swaths of eastern Syria, and may gain new recruits from rebels losing ground further west. But the conflict is narrowing toward a contest between Assad and the jihadists: opposition groups labeled as more moderate, backed by Western powers and their Middle Eastern allies, face being squeezed out.
‘Not the End’
“This is not the end of the war, but could be the beginning of the end, with Assad, Russia, Hezbollah and Iran as the biggest winners,” said Patrick Megahan, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research group in Washington. “Many of the more radical groups will likely continue to fight even if the opposition loses much of its territory.”
Assad, who was on the verge of defeat in mid-2015 before Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped in with military support, has wrested back the initiative. His army last week broke a three-year siege of two villages north of Aleppo. The city is almost encircled, apart from a narrow stretch of contested territory, according to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Russian jets, meanwhile, are pounding Idlib, where the al-Qaeda linked Nusra Front is the strongest opposition group, the SOHR says.
Credit Bloomberg
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