Syria’s fractious civil war is far from over. What began as protests and rebellion in 2011, soon bloomed into attempted revolution. That part of the story was nothing new. In the same year, the Arab Spring charted the same events throughout the region. Syria’s fate was to be markedly different. What began as a two-sided civil war between the forces of Assad’s army and rebels calling themselves the Free Syrian Army became increasingly complicated.
With the rampaging ISIS, the western-armed Kurdish Peshmerga, air strikes from various western and Arab nations, and now Turkey’s campaign against both the Kurdish PKK and ISIS, Syria is in meltdown. What seemed once seemed a foregone conclusion has mutated into something few would have predicted.
Before ISIS, Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad seemed to be wresting back full control of the country. On Sunday the 26th, Assad seemed to accept that this was no longer the case. In a televised speech, in which the embattled president accused the West of supporting terrorists, Assad attempted to explain his military’s recent failures. The speech came after the revelation that whole areas in the north of the country are not only no longer under government control, but have been abandoned. Though the Syrian Army relies on conscription this has not prevented it from halving to only 150,000. Death, defection, and people simply refusing to be drafted in, have let to its decimation. But Assad’s opponents cannot rejoice just yet.
The popular revolution spurred by the common man has not come to fruition, despite air support from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Violent militant groups have taken control of key Syrian areas, and with it, the narrative of revolution.
In recent years, the West was engaged in debate about how best to support Assad’s legitimate opposition force, the Syrian people. Since the rise of ISIS, this debate was been largely, if not completely, abandoned. Assad’s cries of terrorism and accusations that to support the opposition was to support terrorists began to ring true. Any democratically-inclined people’s revolution become endangered the minute ISIS entered the country and began to execute those they deemed heretical.
The main Syrian cities that Assad’s army has abandoned were both captured by terrorist groups. Al Nusra gained control of Idlib, and ISIS took Palmyra. Syria’s war has become a multi-faceted mess of armed groups, the end of which is nowhere in sight. Once news of the Syrian Army losing ground was seen quite simply as a positive. With ISIS and Al Nusra rampaging through the country, Assad’s failures are now a bitter sweet mixed blessing.
