(War on the Rocks) Tobias Schneider - Over the past three years, despite foreign military aid and support, the Assad regime has continued to atrophy at an ever-increasing pace. If these trends continue, the Syrian president will soon find himself little more than a symbolic common denominator around which a loose coalition of thieves and fiefdoms can rally. The great majority of forces in Syria today fight an increasingly localized war for the protection of their particular communities. For example, Latakia is being protected not by Assad's largely imaginary "4th Corps" of the Syrian Arab Army, but by Mohamed Jaber and his Desert Hawks. Syria's president has become not only perfectly expendable as guarantor of the state, but ought to be considered the last remaining obstacle to a peace process based on local ceasefires. The Syrian state is gone for good. At this point, a quick decapitation might be preferable to a drawn-out implosion.
2016-09-01 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive