String of losses in Syria leaves Assad regime increasingly precarious
One of the many reasons Assad is having problems is all the Russian military advisers are leaving. There might have been an agreement between Russia, Iran, the U.S. and European Union to exile Assad to Russia or Iran. So, if you live in Syria and are Christian, Shia or anything other than extremist Sunni it might be time to leave with your family now. However, there is also talk of all these same countries protecting the people of Assad's regime too. However, I would have to see that to actually believe it especially with ISIS ready to pounce on Assad's people and massacre them all.
In
Aleppo, a rebel alliance of primarily Islamist fighters is battling
both the regime and Isis, and recently announced a joint operations
command intending to take control of the entire city, while moving to
cut off regime supply lines in what was ...
The regime of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad,
is under mounting pressure on several fronts in the war, losing swaths
of territory to opposition fighters as well as Islamic State, with
strategic resources under its control coming under attack.
Assad’s defeats in Idlib, eastern Homs and Deraa in the south,
combined with renewed pressure in Aleppo and Deir el-Zour to the east
and the possible loss of gas fields to Isis, have left the regime in a
precarious position with little choice but to concentrate its forces in
its western strongholds, ceding much of the country to the opposition
and Isis.
Meanwhile the rebels, buoyed by a series of victories against Assad,
face new challenges in governing areas under their control as well as
aerial bombardment by the regime and assaults by Isis in an increasingly
complex battlefield.
“This is definitely the most strategically weak position the regime
has found itself in since early 2013, but it should not be entirely
overplayed yet,” said Charles Lister,
a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre thinktank and author of
the book Profiling the Islamic State. “What seems to be happening is a
redrawing of the power map in Syria, with the regime seemingly more
willing to cede territory outside of its most critically valuable
zones.”
The Southern Front, a coalition of mainstream, western-backed rebels,
seized a major military base, known as Brigade 52, in the province of
Deraa this week after a lightning six-hour offensive on the facility
which lies near a main road to Damascus and contains large caches of
ammunition and materiel.
The rebels also claimed to have shot down a regime MiG plane with anti-aircraft guns on Thursday.
The regime’s collapse in the strategic base in Deraa came after
similar rapid disintegrations elsewhere in the country. In the historic
city of Palmyra, east of Homs, regime forces fled after a week-long siege by Isis militants, leaving behind thousands of civilians and the city’s ancient ruins to the mercy of the terror group.
In late May, a coalition of rebel forces known as Jaish al-Fateh, which includes the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria,
Jabhat al-Nusra, conquered the last major regime stronghold in Idlib
province in the city of Ariha in just four hours, leaving nearly the
entire province in rebel hands.
Advertisement
In
Aleppo, a rebel alliance of primarily Islamist fighters is battling
both the regime and Isis, and recently announced a joint operations
command intending to take control of the entire city, while moving to
cut off regime supply lines in what was once Syria’s commercial capital.
The rebels had once appeared weak, losing 1,500 fighters in an
offensive last year that ejected Isis from the city.
But now the rebels will have to govern the large swaths of territory
seized from Assad, under the threat of relentless, punitive air strikes
on areas that the regime has lost.
The rebel advances came after well-publicised regime offensives in
Aleppo as well as in the south, which involved the Lebanese group
Hezbollah, faltered in the face of opposition resistance.
In a statement released on Wednesday, Jabhat al-Nusra also called for
the creation of a unified rebel army in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus,
to take on Assad’s loyalist forces. The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad
al-Jolani, said in a recent interview that they would soon set their
sights on the capital, seeing its fall as a mortal blow to the regime.
Analysts say the rapid defeats may be a sign that the regime is no
longer willing to hold territory outside its western strongholds and is
focusing instead on retrenching in the west, in a stretch of land that
includes its coastal Alawite heartland, Homs, Hama and Damascus,
straddling the Qalamoun mountain range on the border with Lebanon, where
Hezbollah holds sway.
The move is a reflection of the demographic reality at play in a civil war involving a minority-led regime.
“Even Aleppo city may prove extraneous to its strategic priorities in
the coming weeks and months,” said Lister. “The regime has undoubtedly
suffered some serious losses recently, but until those strategic areas
come genuinely under the threat, we’re a long way away from saying the
regime’s survival looks existentially threatened.”
Isis also threatens some key strategic resources, particularly gas
plants to the west of Palmyra, responsible for about half of the
country’s electricity generation. While the militant group already
controls the Arak and al-Hail gas fields near Palmyra, it has launched
attacks to the city’s west on the Shaer gas field, and is inching closer
to three other facilities in the area – Hayan, Jihar and Ebla.
The western fields produce roughly 350m cubic feet of gas a day, or half of its wartime national electricity generation.
“They would be really key to the power supply to Damascus,” said Robin Mills, an oil and gas expert and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre.
The loss of the gas plants would likely force Iran, which has been
supplying Assad with fuel oil and diesel during the war, to step up its
contribution, Mills said.
It would also allow Isis to deny access to
the power supply to the regime, as the militant group doesn’t have the
expertise and equipment necessary to pump the gas out and use it in
areas under its control. In addition, control of strategic areas in
eastern Homs opens the road for the organisation to attack the regime’s
western strongholds.
“This is more a case of denying the regime an important resource than of Isis gain,” said Yezid Sayegh,
an expert at the Carnegie Middle East Centre. “My assumption is that
Isis’s primary goal in targeting these areas is military and strategic:
it places Isis in a position to threaten the Damascus area, eastern
Ghoutah, eastern Qalamoun, and Soueida province, as well as potentially
pressure Homs.”
end quote from:
Syrian rebels seized most of a military airport in
regime-controlled Sweida province on Thursday and shot down a warplane
nearby, a spokesman told AFP.
"The Southern Front has liberated
Al-Thaala military airport and is carrying out mopping-up operations
against remaining forces," the alliance's spokesman Major Essam al-Rayes
told AFP.
The Syrian Observatory for Human rights monitor also
reported the rebel advance into the airport in the Druze-majority
southern province.
"They have control of parts of the airport,
which is used by the regime for aircraft that bomb Daraa and Damascus
provinces," said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.
But Syrian state television denied the claims, and interviewed the provincial governor, who accused media of spreading lies.
"There is no truth to claims that terrorist groups have occupied
Al-Thaala in Sweida province," state television said, citing its
reporter in the area.
"We're used to the criminal media and
their falsehoods, the information being reported is baseless and life
continues as normal in the province," governor Atef al-Nadaf said.
Rayes also said Southern Front forces had shot down a regime warplane
in the border region between Sweida and neighbouring Daraa province.
The Observatory reported the same, and Syrian state television
acknowledged that "a warplane went down in the southern region and an
investigation into the causes is underway."
The Southern Front
advance into Al-Thaala airport comes a day after the alliance, which
groups moderate and Islamist rebel forces, seized the 52nd Brigade base
in neighbouring Daraa province.
Abdel Rahman said many of the
regime forces who fled the 52nd Brigade as it was captured on Wednesday
had withdrawn to Al-Thaala, which lies some 10 kilometres (six miles)
away.
Sweida province has been spared much of the fighting in Syria, and remains almost entirely under regime control.
Most of its residents are Druze, followers of a secretive offshoot of
Shiite Islam, who made up around three percent of Syria's pre-war
population of 23 million people.
The community has been
somewhat divided during the country's uprising, with some members
fighting alongside the government while others expressing sympathy for
the opposition.
Mostly, the Druze have taken up arms only in defence of their areas, and have kept out of the fighting more broadly.
Last Update: Friday, 12 June 2015 KSA 23:17 - GMT 20:17
No comments:
Post a Comment