Analysis // by Ben FrankelSyria: the end game
The willingness of the Assad regime in Syria to unleash a brutal suppression campaign against the anti-regime movement, and the reluctance of outside forces openly to intervene – as they did in Libya — to curb the regime’s ability to use its military superiority to suppress the insurgency, have led analysts to argue that the Assad government can outlast its opponents and emerge victorious, if bloodied, from the this latest challenge; the emergence of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) – especially if aided by Saudi Arabia – and the move by Turkey to assume a more active role in Syria, may well spell the end of the regime
The anti-regime agitation in Syria and the violent and brutal efforts by the regime of Bashar al-Assad to suppress it have been going on for nearly eight months now. The beginning was similar to what we saw in Tunisia and Egypt: civilians fed up with an autocratic regime began marching in the streets after Friday prayers, with the marches gathering momentum and drawing the attention of the international media.
Unlike what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, and in a manner similar to what happened in Libya, the regime, rather than folding, decided to make a stand and fight back. The trouble for Col. Qaddafi was that his reputation as an erratic and brutal ruler, and the wild threats he issued describing what he intended to do to the anti-government rebels, prompted NATO to offer air support to the anti-Qaddafi forces, leading, after six months of protracted war, to his downfall.
Bashar al Assad enjoyed a better reputation than Qaddafi. Assad portrayed himself, and was once regarded, as a reformer, and he had more friends in the region than Qaddafi. As a result, there has been no overt outside intervention in Syria, and the regime has been free to continue its campaign of suppression, which so far, according to UN figures, has claimed more than 3,500 civilian lives.
Even though there has been no overt intervention in Syria, there has been a covert one: Saudi Arabia has been funneling money and arms to the anti-Assad insurgents, and with the help of Jordan’s intelligence service, the Saudis have also dispatched small Sunni fundamentalist contingents from Iraq and Lebanon into Syria to help the opposition forces (the Saudis have been building up Sunni militias in Iraq and Lebanon to counter the rising power of the Shi’as in these countries).
Those who have closely followed the events in Syria these past few months have noticed that sometime in late summer, the Syrian government began to report a growing number of attacks on Syrian military and police, and the growing toll these attacks have inflicted on government forces. These attacks were not perpetrated by un-armed civilian demonstrators.
Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, is aware of what is going on, and the other day in Moscow, without naming any countries, he said: “There are more and more weapons that are being smuggled in from neighboring countries…. Today I saw a television report about some new so-called rebel Free Syrian Army organizing an
