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Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army once again close to collapse
 [BREITBART] During 2015, we repeatedly reported that the army of Syria’s president Bashir al-Assad was near collapse, after al-Assad’s army suffered a number of significant major setbacks, and was being crippled by massive desertions. Don't count on it too heavily. Of course, that's what I usually say just before something happens, so flip a coin. Al-Assad was saved by the massive intervention by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. However, a hangover is the wrath of grapes... al-Assad’s government is rotten to the core, and the Russian military intervention appears to have save al-Assad only temporarily, as the army is once again showing signs of collapse. Mideast expert Scott Lucas, a professor at Birmingham University, described the situation in an interview on RFI. He said that the attack on Hama has forced al-Assad to split his forces between Hama and Aleppo (my transcription): What we’ve seen in the past week does raise the prospect he may lose Hama city, which is the 4th largest city in Syria. The majority of the local population is against the regime there, and it’s really in effect been an occupying force in Hama since early in the uprising. [The regime is] trying to get back into this artillery base in Aleppo, and they’re putting up wave after wave of attacks to be able to do this, and they may be able to claim this one victory, but the problem is that they’ve got to this on multiple fronts now. They not only have to be able to secure areas on the Aleppo front, they’ve got to be able to push the rebels back on the Hama front. We knew this a year ago. At the time when the rebels took the entire Idlib province up in the northwest, we knew that there were manpower problems, because president Assad came out and said it. He sort of warned his population almost in a sense that the military was on the point of collapse. What saved the regime at that point was this massive intervention by the Russians, in terms of the aerial operations, in combination with a sharp escalation of Iranian and Hezbollah support, including not only Iranian units, but Iranian-led foreign militias, especially the use of Iraqis and Afghan militias. ... We’re now looking at a de facto partitioning of the country. You’re going to have Kurdish areas of Syria up in the northeast, because the Kurds have pushed back the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... . The rebels who now of course have Turkish support will hold parts of the north and the northwest. The Assad regime, which can no longer hold a national government, will try to hold the line from the Mediterranean through Homs to Damascus, and president Assad will hope to continue to remain in power as president of not all of Syria but at least part of it. Other reports indicate a crashing economy with surging inflation, and growing infighting stemming from massive corruption. Posted by: Fred 2016-09-05 |
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