Despite the media spotlight on the refugees, the civil war rages on inside Syria. Here Kurdish fighters take on ISIS.
The position of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is getting weaker, analysts say.
His regime has been battling a rebellion that began in the spring of 2011, as unrest spread across the Arab world.
Assad came to power in 2000 as the heir-apparent to his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had seized power in a military coup in 1970, and had clung to power since by ruling with an “iron fist,” according to Amr al-Azm, professor of history at Shawnee State University in Ohio. Azm is also a supporter of the moderate Syrian opposition. “Essentially,” says Azm, “Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria in what we call a quasi-dynastic succession.”
Assad has survived to this point by rallying a coalition of minorities within his country, who feel threatened by a possible Sunni Muslim majority take-over, and by cajoling and co-opting some Sunnis. More importantly he has received help from international allies, Iran and Russia, together with Iran’s proxies: the Shiite Lebanese militia, Hezbollah.
Azm says another key reason is that “there has been no real international will to remove him.”
Assad’s enemies are also bitterly divided. There are few remnants left of the liberal idealists who first took to the streets in 2011. There are a few secular groups, and some significant local militias. But otherwise the military opposition to Assad is now dominated by a variety of radical Islamic groups. Most prominent are two: Jabhat al-Nusra, which is linked to al-Qaeda, and the infamous ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State.
Many of the opposition factions have fought each at different times, and ISIS is currently in conflict with most of them. So the civil war in Syria can currently be described as three-sided.
Despite these divisions, and despite US and allied bombing against ISIS, the opposition has been making gains since the beginning of 2015. Assad is essentially running out of men, says Azm.
As a result, Russia and Iran have stepped up their assistance. There have been reports over the past month of Soviet fighter-bombers and pilots being based in Syria, and larger facilities being developed at the key port city of Latakia. Military advisers and hardware have also been reported.
These reports led Secretary of State John Kerry to call his counterpart in Moscow to complain this past weekend. But Azm points out there isn’t much the US can do in practical terms.
“Putin has made very clear, since the beginning,” says Azm, “that he will not allow the Assad regime to fall.”
So for now, the war in Syria is set to continue. And so will the flow of refugees.