Juan Cole offers a little update on the situation -- it couldnt be grimmer -- in Syria at the end of 2014: The Syrian regime of al-Assad controls most of the countrys urban areas (stuffed to the seams with refugees); the more extreme Islamist groups, including the Islamic State and the al-Qaeda-allied Nusra Front, significant parts of the countryside. The moderate or secular Syrian rebels that the U.S. claims to be backing are essentially no more, which means that U.S. air raids are functionally supporting Assad (as are Hezbollah and Iran, as well as the Russians). Very strange combinations in one of the nightmares on the planet. Tom In the course of 2014, two major trends, long since visible in the Syrian civil war, were strengthened. First, the Baath regime of Bashar al-Assad continued to assert control over most urban areas along the trunk roads of the west of the country. Damascus, Homs, Hama, Latakia and part of Aleppo were all in government hands. The regime was able to fight off all attempts of the forces in the countryside to take these urban areas, expelling the rebels from Homs and fighting off an attack on Latakia. It had help in these campaigns from Lebanon’s Hizballah and help with strategy from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Some of these urban areas have swollen with refugee populations from the countryside, so that Hama, for instance, has doubled to about 2 million. It is about the size of Damascus. Homs is probably at least a million. If the regime also has a million people in Aleppo and 2.2 million Alawites in and around Latakia, I figure it has at least 10 million or so out of Syria’s in-country population of 20 million (there are 3 million expatriates). It has the urban half of the country. Second, secular and ‘moderate’ fundamentalist forces decisively lost out in the countryside to extremists, whether al-Qaeda (the Support Front or Jabhat al-Nusra) or Daesh (the Arabic acronym for what we call ISIS or ISIL). Al-Qaeda took territory to the west of Aleppo away from Free Syrian Army units. Daesh consolidated its hold on Raqqah Province and extended its sway into Iraq last June. The Saudi-backed Islamic Front, which hived off from the Free Syrian Army, became more Salafi and anti-democratic over time. There are no substantial credible secular or moderate military forces on the rebel side any more. This latter truth is a problem for the USA, which maintains a fiction that its 2014 bombing raids against Daesh and al-Qaeda do not help the regime but rather the moderate rebels. They help the regime. juancole/2014/12/baathist-riposte-regime.html
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 16:45:44 +0000
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