Areas under Assad control shrinking fast

BOWLED over by an increasingly daring rebellion, President Bashar Assad’s regime is reducing its territorial ambitions to focus on Damascus, central Syria and Alawite bastions, as it digs in for a long war, analysts said.
As opposition fighters make significant gains, especially in Syria’s northwest, the regime’s goal is to entrench in key positions, fight off further advances and hold out for an opportune time to negotiate, experts said.
“(The regime) is aware that it will never regain control of all the territory, it even knows that it will have to abandon Aleppo,” the northern commercial hub where fighting has raged since mid-July, said Thomas Pierret, a Syria expert at the University of Edinburgh’s Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies department. “I think the goal of the Assad clan is to hole up in Damascus and Homs,” Pierret said.
Nearly 20 months after the launch of the uprising against Assad and amid increasing violence, the regime has seen the territory it controls shrink away.
The north and parts of the east have largely fallen under rebel control, with only isolated military positions still in place.
“It has already given up on part of the country to concentrate on ‘useful Syria’,” said Joseph Bahout, a Syria expert at Sciences-Po in Paris. “It must at all costs hold on to the axis running from Damascus to Homs to Alawite territory.” Experts said these three areas are key for the regime’s future.
Holding on to Damascus is essential to the authorities maintaining any legitimacy, both at home and with the international community. The central province of Homs is Syria’s industrial heartland, vital to the economy.
And holding on to Alawite territory, which runs from the northwestern mountains to the coastal city of Latakia, is crucial for Assad and other key figures coming from this religious minority. Damascus, where rebels have for months failed to move in to the capital from strongholds in the suburbs, is of utmost importance, analysts said.
“The regime still sees Damascus as supremely important, which is why elite units continue to focus much of their firepower in the center and suburbs,” said Shashank Joshi, a research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. But even outside rebel-held areas in the northwest, the rest of the country is already breaking apart, experts said.
Northeastern Kurdish regions “are already completely autonomous,” regime control is “unraveling” in the eastern areas of Deir Ezzor and Albu Kamal near the Iraqi border and Deraa province in the south “is almost a no-man’s land with Jordan,” Bahout said.
The ease with which rebels on Sunday took the important but lightly guarded Al-Ward oil field in Deir Ezzor, near the Iraqi border, shows how little the regime can defend key areas, analysts said. The best the regime can hope for now, they said, is to keep control of vital strongholds and pray the international situation turns in its favor.
A war between Israel and Iran, political upheaval in other parts of the region, or an attack by Islamic extremists on the West — as Damascus insists it is facing a jihadist uprising — could all give the regime the leverage it needs to survive.
“The regime will fall back to a strong territorial position to negotiate a Yugoslavia-type exit from the crisis, by arguing that the fronts have stabilized and that continuing the war would lead to slaughter,” Bahout said.
“It will propose international action that will create sustainable demarcation lines, and from there negotiate a way out of the crisis.” Analysts said Assad has learned a cardinal lesson from his father, Hafez, who died in 2000 after holding on to power for three decades through a combination of ruthlessness, calculation and patience.
“The regime’s goal is to survive for the longest time possible in the hope of favorable regional developments. The quality and size of its forces in Damascus will allow it to hold on to the capital for a long time,” Pierret said. “It is no longer a matter of a putting in place a strategy, but of salvaging what can be salvaged for as long as possible,” Pierret said.