The crisis in Syria-The tide begins to turn
Diplomacy is being overtaken by the armed struggle. But on both scores,
Syria's embattled president, Bashar Assad, is steadily losing ground
Jul 7th 2012 | BEIRUT AND CAIRO | from the print edition
SIXTEEN months into an uprising that has now left more than 15,000 Syrians
dead, the diplomatic and military pace of the conflict has become a lot
hotter. On all fronts President Bashar Assad is losing ground. No one knows
when a tipping point may occur. But even his dwindling band of friends seems
to recognise that he is on the way out.
On the diplomatic front, buttressed by his dogged old Russian allies, Mr
Assad is still refusing to give way. Even so, he may slowly be starting to
sense defeat. "A few months ago he was in denial," says a diplomat close to
the action. "But I think he should know by now that the end is near and that
he should have to go."
On June 30th in Geneva it was agreed at a conclave of foreign ministers from
nine countries, known as the "action group", that a "transitional governing
body" should be formed "by mutual consent". The gathering included the UN
Security Council's five permanent members plus Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and
Turkey but not Iran or Saudi Arabia, deemed so antagonistic as to cancel
each other out. The secretaries-general of the UN and the 22-country Arab
League also attended, along with the EU's foreign-affairs chief.
The Syrian opposition lamented the removal of a specific reference in the
Geneva text to Mr Assad's departure that had been in an earlier draft. But
Western diplomats insisted that even the Russians, despite their subsequent
blustering denials, implicitly accepted the principle of Mr Assad's early
exit, since it was inconceivable he could stay on in a transitional regime
if mutual consent were given. "They realise he'll have to go," says the
diplomat. "He needs some dignity. But he can't kill that many people and
remain legitimate."
Western governments, working closely with the Turks and Qataris and the Arab
League, still hope against hope that the stalled peace plan presented in
April by Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, will regain some
traction. "He's still the centre of gravity," says another diplomat. "He's
the best way we have."
The Syrian opposition is sceptical and impatient. To stress its
disappointment, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main group of armed rebel
factions, shunned a subsequent meeting of Mr Assad's opponents in Cairo on
July 1st. The Syrian Revolution General Commission, the leading network of
political activists inside Syria, left early in a huff. The biggest such
event to date, it was intended to forge a common blueprint for the wider
opposition and to give at least the impression of unity. But the factions
from within Syria suspected that exile groups were seeking to curry favour
with foreign diplomats and donors by endorsing the Geneva plan at the
expense of the revolution that they are battling to expand back home.
The Cairo meeting did not mention the Geneva document but instead issued a
vague set of constitutional principles, along with its own plan for a
transitional government. Moreover, the intended show of unity was marred by
rows over the composition of a joint committee to follow things up.
Representatives of the Kurds, who make up around 15% of Syrians, walked out
in protest against being termed an ethnic group rather than a people, and
some left-wingers and secularists reiterated charges against the Syrian
National Council, the largest exile group, that it was dominated by
Islamists (in particular, the Muslim Brotherhood) and beholden to such
foreign backers as Turkey, Qatar and the CIA.
For his part, Mr Assad had upped the ante on June 26th by announcing for the
first time that Syria was indeed "at war", decreeing new laws to punish his
opponents (all lumped together as "terrorists"). State television broadcast
a call for soldiers to seek "martyrdom" in service to the fatherland. His
government voiced tepid approval of the Geneva plan, but as with Mr Annan's
previous plan, which it formally accepted but largely ignored in practice,
suggested that its opponents should first drop their weapons.
This is not going to happen. The military pressure against Mr Assad is
mounting. Day by day, town by town, the balance of power seesaws between the
regime's forces and its loosely organised but increasingly better-armed
opponents. But the tide is running against Mr Assad. In the hilly
north-western province of Idleb, almost incessant shelling by government
forces has not prevented rebels from keeping de facto control over swathes
of territory, including parts of the border with Turkey which is 900km (560
miles) long.
The war is now everywhere
Fighters stroll across, ferrying in arms and medicine, and greeting refugees
and defectors passing the other way. It is reported that Syrian soldiers
patrolling the border have to be flown into some posts, since they are
unable to cross hostile territory by land. A UN expert reckons that 40% of
Syria's populated area is no longer fully under government control. The
rebels have begun to gain ground, especially in the north-west and the east.
In suburbs closer to the centres of power, the battle is also intensifying.
Mr Assad's forces have shown no mercy there. Deploying tanks, artillery and
air power, and now also routinely using spotter drones and helicopter
gunships, they have smashed parts of Douma, a Damascus suburb that has been
controlled by the opposition and is home to 300,000-plus people, most of
them Sunni Muslims increasingly disloyal to a regime dominated by the
minority Alawite sect, to which the Assad family belongs. In Zamalka,
another rebellious Damascus suburb, a bomb, widely said to have been planted
by security forces, recently killed scores of mourners at the funeral of a
rebel fighter.
Such firepower, along with thousands of arrests and the systematic use of
torture (chillingly documented in a detailed report issued on July 3rd by
Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby) has kept the centres of Damascus
and Aleppo, Syria's second city, broadly under regime control. Yet attacks
such as a recent bomb blast at a government ministry show that the rebels
can slip in. Even as state television showed street sweepers returning to a
"cleansed" (but also deserted) Douma, foreign journalists were being
escorted among scores of armed FSA fighters just a few miles away, casually
patrolling in full daylight.
The rebels are felling soldiers at an increasing rate, with clashes doubling
in number between March and June, the bloodiest month of the uprising so
far; in the last week of it, around 100 people were said to be dying every
day.
Many security men now move around in inconspicuous shabby cars, thanks to a
rash of assassinations, many of them in the capital. Higher-ranking
officers, including brigadiers and generals, are fleeing. Turkish officials
reported that on June 5th alone 85 military defectors crossed the border,
bringing their families along to spare them retribution.
The regime is loth to bring out of the barracks enough units to tackle all
rebellious places simultaneously, fearing defections of the Sunni bulk.
Instead, it relies increasingly on armed irregulars, many of them Alawites.
Known as shabiha, they often make up the first wave of raiders and looters
after bombardments by the army have subsided.
But though the regime's forces can take back territory at will, victories
against the rebels tend to be short-lived. FSA groups sprout again as soon
as the firefighting squads move on to bash the next rebellious town,
prolonging a game of whack-a-mole: as one insurgent pocket is squashed,
another pops up. "This is a war not for gains, but to exhaust the other
side," says Razan Zeitouneh, a lawyer in hiding in the capital, noting that
the eastern city of Deir ez-Zor, where a rebellion seemed to have been
suppressed a few months ago, is now aflame again.
Moreover, Mr Assad is also feeling the heat of a failing economy. Inflation
is running at 30% a year. The currency's value has slumped. Fuel is getting
scarce. A Western boycott of Syria's oil, 90% of which was exported to
Europe, is draining state coffers. Tourism is dead. The perception of Syria
as a pariah state is blighting international trade and commerce.
With the war spreading, the economy in trouble and diplomacy intensifying,
Mr Assad looks ever more isolated and vulnerable. Even the Russians' loyalty
may begin to wilt.
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