During a Congressional hearing session dedicated for the discussion on Syria and the ISIS, some congressmen were surprised that the US military training program for the Syrian opposition will begin next spring and end a year later in the spring of 2016! “What are we supposed to do until then?” they deploringly asked. The promised program itself is only worthy of attention on the political level because it expresses an American stance in support of the opposition and the toppling of the Assad regime. It’s only a political stance that must not carry any further weight or interpretation, and it can be contradicted in the White House morning summary statements.
The number of Free Syrian Army members promised to undergo training is so small that it does not exceed a quarter of the number of ISIS fighters or one eighth of Assad’s troops. Five thousand FSA fighters are supposed to spend one year in American training camps and it will probably be two years before any of them can fire a bullet in the battlefield. This is due to bureaucracy and lack of urgency about the implementation of the promised task. Even when they become trained soldiers, what will they do in the face of jets dropping barrel bombs or cannons shelling from afar? Nothing, because they are deprived of defense weapons.
Despite that, Syrians will continue to fight whether they are trained or not, armed or not, because war is not a matter of choice today and it cannot be paused while Syrians wait for a political solution or until military training ends. There are nine million Syrians displaced inside and outside Syria and they cannot accept the simple provision of blankets and bread and continue to sleep in the open every winter. This is why war did not stop and will not stop. Many Syrians are fighting dressed in rags and using simple weapons. Even those who are tired of this cannot go home except through force. This is their only hope. The next two years may pass with the regime staying in Damascus while still depending on the support from Tehran. However, the war will not stop without marking the end of the regime whether by war or through a political solution.
We all know that if the moderate opposition possessed advanced weapons, the regime wouldn’t have lasted and the losses of the regime’s allies would’ve exceeded their capability to continue in this bloodbath until today. There is no shortage of Syrians willing to fight the Assad regime. Their number, in the south alone, is more than 30,000 although they are poorly equipped and their arms are limited to simple weapons.
This is why we tell international mediators and western delegates that they must understand the new reality which doesn’t harmonize with theoretical solutions that they come up with every time in a different language. The secret lies in the nine million displaced persons mostly found inside Syria itself. It’s because of them that the war will continue as the Assad regime views them as rivals and won’t allow them to return to their cities and neighborhoods out of fear of handing them over to the opposition or them fighting with the opposition as well. At the same time, we cannot expect them to remain neutral at a time when they’re expelled from their homes. This is exactly why the war will go on until change is achieved. What we cannot know in the near future is how power will be established amongst the refugees and how their situation will be. Will more of these lost Syrian youths join extremist organizations like the ISIS and Al-Nusrah Front? Or will they join the moderate FSA? It’s difficult to speculate what’s happening inside the communities of refugees and those displaced from afar. All one can say is that they are a huge and angry human reservoir.
