4. Dictatorship wasn’t buried along with Saddam Hussein
One of the overlooked features of Syria’s brutal civil war has been the remarkable resilience shown by President Bashar Al Assad to survive in power.
When anti-government protests erupted throughout the country in March 2011 as part of the Arab uprisings, very few observers believed Al Assad could survive.
Widely regarded as a weak man who had gained the presidency by default, the softly spoken occupant of the presidential palace in Damascus seemed set to suffer the same fate as the rest of the region’s secular dictators.
I remember attending an intelligence briefing on the internal political dimensions of the Assad regime right at the start of the conflict. The general consensus was that were it not for the die-hard support of the minority Alawite community and the more robust members of the Assad clan, regime change of some sort was inevitable.
During the early years of the conflict, that appeared to be very much the way it was going. Despite attempts by the president’s brother Maher Al Assad to mobilise loyalist sections of the armed forces, such as the predominantly Alawite Fourth Armoured Division, the momentum was clearly with the rebel groups who became better organised while attracting the support of regional benefactors.
The most graphic illustration that the tide of the conflict was moving in the rebels’ favour came in the summer of 2012 when a bomb destroyed the regime’s national security headquarters in Damascus, killing the defence minister and his deputy, as well as other high-ranking officials.
The growing effectiveness of the rebel groups, together with the gradual erosion of domestic support for Al Assad, meant that by the summer of 2015 it looked more a case of when he would be removed from power, not if. The diplomatic world was awash with rumours that he would be offered a safe haven in Russia in return for leaving office and bringing the conflict to an end.
The fact that Al Assad today seems more in control of his country than at any point in the conflict’s seven-year history, and is able to use chemical weapons against rebel groups in the Eastern Ghouta suburbs of Damascus with impunity, represents a major turnaround in the Syrian dictator’s fortunes that, in retrospect, can be attributed to several key factors.
One was the Obama administration’s decision to back down on its threat to launch military action against the Assad regime in 2013 over the use of chemical weapons. Mr Obama’s betrayal of the rebel cause was, in part, motivated by then British Prime Minister David Cameron’s failure to win parliamentary backing for British participation in such action.
This sent a clear signal to Al Assad that the outside world was not serious about intervening in the conflict, giving him free rein to maintain his assault on his own people.
Another key factor was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene on behalf of the regime in September 2015, which was a reaction to Mr Obama’s change of heart.
The Russians were persuaded to intervene after a visit to Moscow that summer by Qasem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, who persuaded Mr Putin that Russia would lose its prized military bases in Syria unless it acted to save Al Assad.
The ruse worked, and the mix of Russian air power and Iranian involvement in training pro-regime militias was central to turning the tide of the conflict in Al Assad’s favour.
As the conflict enters its eighth year, the Assad regime’s ultimate victory now appears all but assured.