Two thirds of Syria is now in Syrian Rebel hands. And worse than that oil wells are controlled in Northern Syria by Al Qaeda linked groups like ISIL and ISIS (ISIS might have changed it's name to ISIL?). So, the election today really means nothing to Syria other than to the one third of Syria Assad still controls. Assad has had to make deals with Al Qaeda and ISIL and to pay them to fight other Syrian Rebels to have anything left at all land wise today at all. So, it's a mess and only getting worse by the moment.
In some ways you could call the two thirds of Syria not under his control an Islamic Jihadi State sort of like what Somalia became for some time after the 1990s.
Sep 11, 2013 - As the threat of an imminent U.S. attack on Syria dims, supporters and officials in the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad are quietly ...
Jul 19, 2012 - The killing of three top figures at the heart of Syria's defence establishment shows President Bashar al-Assad is losing control, the White House ...
Dec 13, 2012 - Syria's most powerful ally, Russia, said for the first time Thursday that President Bashar Assad is losing control of his country and the rebels ...
Syrian President Bashar Assad during a meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran on Aug. 19, 2009
As the threat of an imminent U.S. attack on Syria dims, supporters and officials in the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad
are quietly worrying about another potential crisis, one that hits even
closer to home. Speculation in Damascus that the chemical-weapons
attack against the rebel-held suburbs of Damascus on Aug. 21 may have
been initiated by rogue elements within the Syrian armed forces raises
fears about Assad’s overall grip on the forces fighting under him. One
regime official tells TIME that what bothers him most about the
long-term prognosis for Syrian stability is not the collapse of the
regime, but the rise of Assad’s militias, commonly referred to as shabiha.
Says the official: “After this crisis, there will be a 1,000 more
crises — the militia leaders. Two years ago they went from nobody to
somebody with guns and power. How can we tell these shabiha to go back to being a nobody again?”
Assad’s grip on the constellation of foreign and domestic militias
fighting in his name is growing ever more tenuous, says the official,
who spoke to TIME while visiting Beirut on condition of anonymity. The
longer the war goes on, the more difficult it will be for Assad to
control his own paramilitary forces, making a political solution even
more difficult to achieve and setting the stage for an even nastier
civil war should he fall.
It’s a dilemma that dogs the aftermath of any militia-waged war, from
the Balkans to Afghanistan. If the men who lead armed groups on either
side of the conflict refuse to give up power in the wake of a political
resolution Syria could be torn apart by militias fighting over their
hard-won territories, much like Afghanistan in the early 1990s before a
widespread backlash against the warlords led to the rise of the Taliban.
Western governments rightly fear the rising power of antiregime
militias — some of which have ties to al-Qaeda — and are taking
tentative steps to rein them in. But there has been remarkably little
discussion about the future of Assad’s militias. “Assad is saying, let
me win [the civil war] first, then I will deal with them,” says the
official, who estimates that the militias number in the hundreds. “But I
don’t see how. They could last for decades.”
Aaron Lund, a Swedish analyst who has covered Syria extensively and is now focusing his research
on nonstate actors for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point,
points out that while the Syrian military is still strong enough to
defend Damascus and protect key bases, Assad has become increasingly
reliant on both local and foreign fighting groups, like Lebanon-based
Hizballah, to recapture lost territory and maintain government control
in contested areas. “Their support has improved Assad’s staying power in
many areas, but it also underlines the regime’s gradual loss of
sovereignty and cohesion. If the war drags on long enough, the Assad
regime is likely to devolve into a decentralized patchwork of sectarian
and client militias, only superficially resembling Syria’s pre-2011
dictatorship,” he wrote in a blog post about his research.
The prevalence of the term shabiha to describe regime thugs
gives the mistaken impression that they are all similarly aligned and
loyal to the government. That is not always the case. Most of the
proregime militias around the country are regionally based and funded by
local businessmen or religious leaders eager to curry favor with the
government and shore up their own protection networks. Like the word mafia, which is a close usage equivalent in English, shabiha
has its origins in the loose-knit smuggling and organized-crime
networks of Latakia province, the coastal enclave where Assad’s Alawite
sect dominates. These days, shabiha are just as likely to be
Sunni, Kurdish or even Eastern Orthodox Christian as Alawite, says Lund.
Some gangs have been organized into Popular Committees, a kind of armed
neighborhood watch with independent leadership and few centralized
directives other than to defend the regime in whatever way they deem
necessary. In many cases this means setting up roadblocks, taking
bribes, charging protection money, looting the homes and businesses of
suspected rebels and otherwise raising funds to cover their costs by
dint of their weapons. “When these gangs can’t get financing from the
government they start extorting the local communities,” says Lund. That
enables them to keep fighting, but it also means they are less beholden
to Assad. “The government has more important things to do than put a
stop to it.”
According to a Syrian businessman close to the regime, Assad is aware
of the growing threat of Syria’s militias and has struggled,
inadequately, to contain it. Assad’s father, former President Hafez
Assad, was similarly plagued by the predations of Latakia’s shabiha gangs
throughout the 1980s and ’90s, and only managed to quash their strength
near the end of his reign, in 2000. Bashar Assad’s success in keeping
them reined in when he inherited the presidency from his father is now
being undone, says the businessman who spoke to TIME on condition of
anonymity. “[Assad] is telling his friends, ‘I managed to contain these
groups for over 10 years. Now that they are unleashed, I can’t stop
them.”
Assad’s reliance on Hizballah, particularly in the decisive victory
over the strategic district of Qusayr in June, is equally fraught, says
Lund. “Hizballah doesn’t answer to Syria, but to Iran. He has
surrendered to a foreign militia where he is supposed to be sovereign.”
Earlier this year Assad announced the formation of the National
Defense Army in Damascus, organizing the disparate Popular Committees
into a cohesive organization that is armed, trained and salaried by the
government. “This means they can be accountable,” says the businessman,
“but only as long as the regime keeps paying them. If it stops, where is
their loyalty then?” Loyalty is only part of the problem. As the
militias’ depredations on the civilian population become more widespread
and rule of law weaker, support for Assad, even in regime strongholds,
could begin to waver. “The Assad regime’s selling point is that it can
protect the country from anarchy and establish order, even if it is
oppressive. If the regime seems to be decaying, it can’t make that sale
anymore,” says Lund.
Middle Eastern despots such as Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali,
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah
Saleh have argued that their authoritarianism was necessary to combat
the spread of transnational terrorist groups like al-Qaeda into their
respective countries’ opposition. Syria’s Assad is no different. He
recently claimed in an interview with French Newspaper Le Figaro
the rebels fighting his regime are “80% to 90% … al-Qaeda,” and warned
of catastrophic consequences should the fractious and undisciplined
opposition militias have their way with Syria. But it could turn out
that the next Syrian crisis is one of Assad’s own making.
Aryn Baker is the Middle East Bureau Chief for TIME, covering
politics, society, culture, religion, the arts and the military in the
greater Middle East, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. She currently
resides in Beirut, Lebanon.
Though here in the west we may want to celibrate that 2/3 of Syria is out of the control of Assad, we wouldn't want to celibrate because most of the people holding this territory are beheading every day everyone that doesn't exactly agree with their extreme views. Assad can't deal with them either and likely only will be able to keep under his control the 1/3 that he has, if that.
The problem is that no one wants to go in their with missiles or drones which either Russia, the U.S. , NATO or someone else is going to have to do eventually to get rid of an Al Qaeda type of government in the 2/3 of northern Syria.
The other problem we already have seen in France when an Al Qaeda type of soldier went home to France from Syria and already killed a bunch of people there.
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